Where was I? Oh, the clippings. Why do you let me wander off the subject like that? There’s one on a big maze called the Wooz (Zoom spelled upside down) that folk can wander through. Let’s you and I walk through that one, some day. There’s Curtis, with cheese flavored bubble gum. (Mozzarella is a cheese: we call it Monster-ella, just as Muenster is Monster cheese.) And my British mother sent a sheet for you: goofs English children made. “Noah’s wife was called Joan of Arc.” That sort of thing. So why isn’t your mother laughing? Oh, those teef; I forgot. And a chain letter I received a year ago, and ignored; as a matter of principle I never forward chain letters. Don’t send this one on to anyone; I just thought you’d like to see it. It claims you get good luck. Chain letters, in general, are a crock of—er, nitrogen; they are not legitimate. Many of them pretend to be thousands of years old, when they can’t be, and to bring you money, which they won’t. Any one involving money is illegal anyway. But let’s pretend this one will bring you good luck, though we both know this is nonsense.
Jewel-Lye 21, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Wow! It’s almost five, and I’m just starting this letter. I had hoped to have it finished by this time. My day has been—in fact my week has been—WILL YOU PAY ATTENTION, YOU DIFFICULT GIRL!? That’s better. I’ve had piles of stuff to read, and piles of complicated letters to—nuh-uh, keep that tongue out of sight!—so it’s just been a hassle, and I’ve gotten very little paying writing done since last week’s letter.
I’ve been hearing from you folk! I have two letters from your mother—I’ll get to them in a moment—and one from Sue Berres (before I thought it was Benes, but now those letters look like R’s), and two from you. The first was a Birthday Card—um, I’d better discuss that. I offered to exchange information about birthdays with you, because I wanted to discover yours, so we could catch you in time with the Jenny/Xanth cushion. I figured we could just forget about mine, after that. The truth is, birthdays aren’t nearly as much fun at my age as they are at your age, and I didn’t want you to feel obliged to send anything. But since you have already sent a card, okay, I’ll tell you. I’ll be 55 on AwGhost 6. So thanks for the card, and I’ll remember it when the ill-fated day finally strikes. The other was an Anniversary Card. I guess I mentioned our [power failure here—Ha! I had just Saved, so I didn’t lose anything] 33rd anniversary because it fell on a Jenny-letter day. Otherwise I would not have bothered you. But thanks for that card too. I understand it’s a real job for you to sign your name to these things. (That would seem like sarcasm, if we didn’t know your situation. Folk outside don’t realize—well, never mind.)
Now let me get a bit more serious. Last time I teased your mother about her supposed problem speaking. Then her letters arrived describing the progress of her jaw problem, and I wished I hadn’t. Teasing is supposed to be a fun thing, and this isn’t fun. I mean, if she had two days of discomfort, then was better than new, okay. But she’s in real distress, and for all I know that complaint could have her in the hospital by the time you hear this letter. The chances of her being there to read it to you are next to nil. Since your mother has been my main inspiration for fun insults—well, this just isn’t the time for that sort of thing. But I did want to say that even from this distance, I can see that her misery is composed of three parts. First, the actual discomfort of her mouth, which is physical and horrendous. Second, the inconvenience this malady causes, inhibiting her activity so she can’t do all the things she wants to do. You know better than anybody what that’s like. Third, it stops her from visiting you. I think that’s the worst. She wants so much to be with you, Jenny, and everything keeps getting in the way so she can’t have you home yet, and now she can’t even get over there for visits. This tears her up. I guess you’re not too pleased about this either, but I think at the moment that it’s bothering her more than you.
So she is feeling worse than she might because of you, and you are feeling worse because of her. This does neither of you much good. Of course you can’t just say “I don’t care!” and not worry about each other, or not be concerned about your separation. But I hope some understanding helps. Send her an “Okay, I love you” through your daddy, and it will make her feel better. She might even send you one back. Meanwhile, in case she has to spend some time in bed and can’t reach her computer, I’m sending her a bound galley that just arrived of my collaborative novel Through the Ice. That’s the one I wrote with Robert Kornwise, who died in an auto accident just one year before your accident, with no more justice. It is as though I am fated to encounter one such tragedy a year, and his was the one for 1988. So this isn’t a joyful association, but it’s one you folk will understand rather better than most. When your mother gets better, maybe she’ll read bits of it to you, as there is time. I hope there’s not another case like this next year; there’s already been twice as much misery as there should have been, for Robert Kornwise’s family and yours.
Meanwhile, keep up with your dull mundane exercises. I know progress is slow, but it’s possible to be slow and still get where you’re going. I’ve always been slow—slow to speak, slow to read, slow to discover what girls were (stop sniggering!), and slow to make it as a writer. Remember the tortoise and the hare. One writer, younger than I, had already written and sold forty novels by the time I had sold my first, but today I think I have done more than he has, and certainly more successfully. So speed is not the essence; steady accomplishment is. You don’t have to do everything in a month, or a year; you could take eight years, as I did to make my first story sale, and still go pretty far thereafter, as I did. Just don’t quit trying.
On to incidental things: Today my wife may have seen a hummingbird. They flit by so fast it’s hard to be sure. And on my run (yes, the little magnolia is fine), I saw tiny tadpoles in the tub we use for horse water in the pasture. We should have a whole flock of frogs! (Flock? Well, what is it called?) And yesterday I found a canoe. Well, not exactly. I was writing a chapter of Tatham Mound, and the southern Indians use dugout canoes, and my hero was traveling up to Tennessee, where the Cherokees lived, and I thought wouldn’t it be nice if he could get a birchbark canoe there. But white birch trees don’t grow in the south. I knew them up north, with their paperlike bark that you can actually write on. But maybe up high in the mountains—so I researched, and discovered that there is one variant of paper birch that grows in the south: high in the mountains of North Carolina. That’s exactly where my hero is! So he can have a birchbark canoe, which is a great comfort to him, as well as a novelty, because he has one bad arm and paddling is hard. A light canoe makes all the difference. So that was a nice discovery, and now I have him and a friend in their birchbark canoe traveling down the Tennessee river, in the year 1516.
We had three power failures in a row, trying to wipe out this letter, so I had to quit for a while, and couldn’t finish it today. Okay, hang on; I’ll finish it tomorrow morning and still catch the mail, or else. Have a good night’s sleep, Jenny. You too, Cathy.
Jewel-Lye 22, 1989—Okay, it’s next morning. I was going to finish this quickly, so as to catch the mail, but I had to check on two things—and wouldn’t you know it, that took me a #$%&*f!! hour. So now—what? No, those other items wouldn’t interest you. So now I’ll get on to the enclosures, which—what? No, those other things which delayed me are very dull, really; you don’t want to know about them. So I have the Sunday Curtis, which Sue Berres tells me is the first thing you read in my letters; now I know what you like about my letters, the comics! And an item on cats, and one on big Florida mosquitoes, and—what? Will you get off that other business;, girl? It’s not interesting! You know something, you can be the stubbornest darn thing—now don’t look that way, you know I don’t like it—oh, all right, I’ll tell you. Briefly. I had ten letters yesterday from fans, and I managed to pencil answers to nine of them yesterday during the power failures that were making this letter late. I scribble my answers on the backs of the envelopes, see, and every week the
secretary types them up for me. You demand to know why you don’t rate a secretarial letter? Because those take about an extra ten days, and—ah, now you understand. So this morning I tackled the last one, and the guy apologized for what he’d said in his last letter, and asked for my opinion of his marriage, so I thought I’d better reread his last letter, which I did not remember. One thing I’ll say about you, Jenny: you don’t ask my opinion about your marriage. Yes I know, you’ll get to that a decade hence, when—let’s get back to the subject, shall we? So I checked my correspondence, and couldn’t find his last letter. Time wasted. So I turned on the computer and did a computer search of my letter record. Found it—for last OctOgre. Last week I filed all last year’s letters in the attic. Sigh. So I unlocked it and headed off into the heat to delve through the voluminous files—what? Oh, “voluminous” means the way your mother’s jaw is feeling these days. All blown up out of proportion, so that she looks like a—now stop that! You know I promised not to tease her about that. So finally I found the letter—and it bore no relation to anything the current letter said. Oh: different first name, different address. It wasn’t the same person, after all. I could find no letter by the same person, and his present letter came through the publisher, so he didn’t have my address. I don’t think he wrote to me before. So why did he say he did? Beats me. Do you know? You’re not much help, you know that? And keep that tongue in your mouth! And stop blinking at me. I’m on to all your tricks. No, don’t you dare do your thing with the finger! And don’t call me Nitrogen Face either! If you do, I’ll tell Ray what you really called him, instead of the expurgated version. Ha—that finally got to you, didn’t it! So the other thing was a letter from the fanzine I write to, where I mentioned you, and the folk there send their good wishes to you. But this letter was about John Brewer, the prisoner I mentioned: the fanzine called the TV station near Brewer’s prison, and the folk there say the man’s not on death row but serving life imprisonment. Now the fanzine is upset, because I said he was on death row. Well, I sure thought he was. So I had to check his first letter to me, way back last AwGhost—right, in the attic files!—and when I ran it down, it said nothing about anything like that. So I went through more letters, and finally found it in his third letter to me: how he killed his fiancee and was sentenced to death for it. I’ll quote that to the fanzine, so at least I won’t be in trouble with them. You see, I had Brewer write to them, stating his case, and if you want to know what happens when you drop a nitrogen bomb into an outhouse—well, these folk can get righteous about law enforcement, so I thought I’d acquaint them with the reality and maybe jolt them out of their ivory towers. Your daddy will tell you what an ivory tower is. They aren’t too pleased. You see, Brewer is trying to get them to execute him, because he says he’s guilty and deserves to die. I suspect he’s right. I only wish that drunk driver who hit you was next in line after him. Anyway, that’s where my hour went, and I still have to write that letter—right after this one. Now aren’t you sorry you brought it up? Stop looking so smug!
Let me conclude with a couple of minor things. I discovered last week that on this computer when I mark a word for bold printing, I can set it to blink. More fun. So now my bolds are blinking. Here, I’ll show you: Bold. Isn’t that something? Blink, blink, blink! Oh, you can’t see it blink on the paper? Sigh. Well, take my word: it’s a blinking bold word. And I remembered a song that seems suitable: the “Worried Man Blues.” It starts out “It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song …” and I think your mother’s humming it now.
Keep smiling, Jenny. I know it’s not easy, now, but if we concentrate this week on getting your mother better, then we can concentrate on you in a week or two. It’s your turn to be strong.
Jewel-Lye 28, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Right—I’m on my upstairs system now. Alan, who is my daughter’s boyfriend, is working for me this summer, and one of the things he does is figure out computer programs for me, so I don’t have to use up my time for it. So he’s working on the downstairs system, which is the one I usually use for letters. Okay—so you get a laser-printed missive; you’ll survive. Oh—what program is he working on? Well, I needed a good mass file-handler, so I wouldn’t erase good files and save bad ones—your mother will tell you all about that when she’s back—and didn’t have one, so when PC COMPUTING magazine offered me a disk with file handling if I’d subscribe, I decided to try it. It took them a month to send the disk, by which time I’d discovered QDos, which does a nice job. But now that the other program, DirMagic, is here, I’m having Alan put it through its paces, so he can tell me how it compares. So I’m working up here, in my novel-writing study, which is fine.
Yesterday we had the farrier over to trim our horses' hooves. A farrier is a blacksmith who can make shoes and such for horses, but mostly he just trims, because we don’t ride our horses. It’s like trimming your fingernails. Now Blue has been with us eleven years and she’s okay, but Snowflake spooks at the sight of a halter. But we don’t care to leave the halters on them regularly, because they’re free in the forest, and a halter could get hung up on something. So we halter them only at need. So there was the farrier, and Blue got spooky, to my surprise; I did get the halter on her and let her go so I could do the same with Snowflake. Mistake! Blue headed into the forest, and the farrier couldn’t do her. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get Snowflake. Finally I did catch Blue, and Cam—that’s my wife, who made you the Xanth pillow—took her to the farrier. I discovered I’d been trying to put the wrong halter on Snowflake, so I went back to the barn and fetched the right one, with the lead rope. Snowflake came up to inquire what I was doing, so I put the halter on her. Just like that. We got them both done. Yes, I was three times as lucky as I deserved to be. Getting the horses' hooves trimmed always makes me nervous, because I do have to catch them first. Once the halter is on and I have hold of it, they are no trouble at all, and behave perfectly. So that was my little adventure yesterday. If you ever have a pony, you’ll have similar adventures. Monday we’ll go through the same thing with the vet.
Let’s see, I’m writing this letter in Jewel-Lye, but it will be two days into AwGhost before you hear it. So where is your mother? Well, it’s the two-th of the month, so she’s getting her tooths done. In fact she’s getting the things yanked out. In fact she’s so browned off about not being able to visit you that she looks like a baked potato. Especially in the face. She swears that she’ll see you later in the month, though hell should bar the way. So relax; when she visits, you can lend her your talk-board (I forget what it’s called) so she can wish you well despite not being able to open her mouth.
I have the usual enclosures, plus some oddments. There’s Nothing But Zooms, which you can watch when you get home: that’s the artistic animation of that formula I told you about, the Mandelbrot Set. It starts out looking like a bug, but the edges are amazingly complicated and beautiful, and the closer you look, the more intricate they are. So enjoy it when; this is your video. I’m also enclosing a block of 20 stamps for you or your mother; they were on a package I received, and I just couldn’t throw them out, so here they are, and if you hate them, you can throw them out. And a cartoon about fire ants. And one about Florida politics, with our Governor Martinez as a frog. He’s not a good governor, and this is becoming increasingly apparent. So there’s this princess, kissing the frog—and he just doesn’t turn into a prince. Right: she’s browned off; you can see how brown she is. And a funny excerpt from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten that you should really enjoy. And a cartoon about the rare baby turtles here—a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, one of the ten most endangered species and the rarest turtle known, laid her eggs on the St. Pete beach, so they’re watching to make sure the eggs hatch, and maybe missing something else. Harpy reading!
Movie-review time. Yes, I know you haven’t seen many original movies recently. But when you get home, you can watch video movies, and eventually everything will be available, so you
can see it. I’m just giving you a notion what to watch for. You see, I don’t see many movies myself; I’m too busy to get out. I hardly drive, in fact. The other day I had to move our microbus somewhere, and I’d never driven it before, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the windshield wipers or even how to get the key out. There’s a button you have to push, you see, but it just didn’t do it. Right: wrong button; the real one was hidden around the steering wheel. Sigh. But my daughter the journalist—that’s Cheryl, who is 19 now and in college, only she’s working at the local newspaper this summer—no, Alan is not her boyfriend, he belongs to Penny, who is 21 now—yes, it does get complicated keeping track, but somehow they manage it—she has to review movies for the paper. Now I only go out to see a movie about once a year, and the one I saw this year was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is how I know you’d like it. But Cheryl had to review Lethal Weapon II, so we made it a family occasion. I mean, on my own I won’t go out, but for a daughter I will. There’s something about daughters. So Cam and Cheryl and I went to see it. That’s one slam-bang violent motion picture! But it does have some plugs for the environment, and some humor, and one nice sex sequence—oops, Adult Conspiracy! Okay, don’t see that one.
Letters to Jenny Page 12