Jenny’s father drove me to the airport, and this time it really was a ten-minute drive. Everything was going suspiciously well. Could my curse of traveling be giving out? After he left, they canceled my flight. Why I don’t like to travel—sigh. They don’t do that sort of thing when my wife is along, which is why I hate traveling alone even worse. I wound up on a plane bound north to Baltimore. I was just in time; I think I was the last person to board, and got the last seat available, and it took off right after. Jenny’s rose, pinned to my carried jacket, was taking a beating as I bundled in. I know it’s artificial; that still bothered me. It was as if Jenny herself was getting battered. I heard that three of us were being routed that way to Tampa. I heard the girl in the seat ahead of me mention Tampa, so I inquired whether she was one of the others. No; she turned out to be a stewardess. Ouch; I found such an innocent confusion acutely embarrassing. Then at Baltimore I inquired and found the gate for the plane to Tampa. They were in the throes of rerouting passengers for a canceled flight to Albany. USAir seemed to be canceling flights all over! I phoned Cam, and after several attempts with the newfangled computer-screened phone managed to get my collect call through to her. Phones don’t like me. I caught her about forty-five minutes before she was due to start out to meet the plane I wasn’t on. I don’t know how we would have connected otherwise. In short, this was normal traveling, for me. I’d rather stay home.
I read during the flights and delays, and managed to finish the Conan novel, and look at two fanzines I had been given along the way. One was The Knarley Knews, a small personal production, and the other was Anvil, its fiftieth issue, put out by Charlotte Proctor. That’s a solid production, but it runs the addresses of those who write it letters, so I won’t.
The new plane served a good meal for me. The flight started on time and arrived early. I had an aisle seat near the front; I got out fast and spied Cam studying the schedule to spot my plane, not realizing that it was already in. We hurried to the car and skimmed through the beginning of rush hour; that surely saved us a good chunk of time. That’s why I don’t check any baggage; not only would they lose it, because of my curse, I would suffer critical delay. As it was, we were an hour late feeding the horses; fortunately they were nice about it. Cam had during my absence put a new picture up in the family room, and set up and filled four new filing cabinets with my year’s correspondence. Twenty letters had piled up, and ten more came in the next day, and a dozen more the following day. It was evident that I would get little if any paying work done this week. Sigh; I was back in Mundania.
NoRemember 17, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Well, here I am safely back at home. Your folks probably told you how USAir canceled my plane flight after your daddy left me at the airport. That’s why I don’t like to travel. They wouldn’t do that to my wife, or to your folks, but there I was alone, so they did it. I had to go home by way of Baltimore: that is, I flew north, and then south. I was an hour late feeding the horses. Sigh. But I don’t need to go into all that here; I have written up a report on everything that I will send to my family at the end of the month. Yes, you get a copy. I just like to get things written down, before I forget the details. So if you want to know about the convention from my point of view, tell your daddy to read it to you. No, you don’t have to! I know you were there! Oh—that’s not it? I don’t know how to read your finger-signs. Do them again slowly. DOES IT INCLUDE—oh, yes, it includes what I said to you when we met. That’s a separate report, more private, titled “Let Me Hold Your Hand.” But why should you care about that? You already know what I said. Oh—you want to make sure I wrote it down right. It really doesn’t read as I said it; things that were important just look like dull words, and more time is taken on the trivia than on the essentials. But here’s a copy.
Yes, that’s what I meant: a copy. I printed one copy on the laser printer, and then took it down to the copy machine we bought yesterday. It’s a Mita DC 1205; I think the number means that it makes 12 copies a minute, or five seconds per copy. It does; I timed it. We realized that we have to do a lot of copying, and it’s a pain to go into town and feed money into the machine, so we shopped for a copier we could use at home, and this is it. It’s so simple to operate that even I feel at ease with it. So your Convention Report is a copy which looks just like the original. Sure, I could have run off more copies on the laser printer, but this is twice as fast, and anyway, I wanted to make sure it worked. The same day we got it, I received a letter from Philip José Farmer asking for a copy of his Chapter 2, which he no longer has; now I’ll be able to make it for him. That’s the second chapter of our collaborative novel; I read the first chapter to you and Kathy, remember? You don’t? When I visited you at the hospital, and accidentally called you Kathy—yes, that time. And you are never going to let me hear the end of it, are you! Farmer will now do the fourth chapter, because I’ve already done the third, and we’ll give it to my agent to sell to a publisher. My agent is Kirby McCauley, whom you also met; yes, I know you don’t remember, because it was only a few seconds, but he was there. So you see, you are involved, one way or another, in more than one of my projects. When we finish that novel I’ll send you a copy, so you can see how it turns out, if you’re interested.
Meanwhile, my nose is fauceting; another allergenic front came through, and antiallergy pills for me are like anti-motion-sickness pills for you: they make me sleepy without stopping the allergy. Sigh. Tomorrow McCauley and a man named Wil Nelson will be here, so I can see the five minute sample of the first Xanth video movie and decide whether it’s good enough to proceed with. No, that’s not the graphic version of Isle of View, silly; that’s what Richard Pini is doing. This is A Spell For Chameleon on video tape. If we do it. If things fall into place. And I’ll have a sore nose. This is what my life is like. Yes, I realize that it’s not your nose that’s sore! It’s still a nuisance and a pain.
Let’s see: you told me not to write two Xanth novels next year. Was that because you’re tired of Xanth? Oh—because you figured I’d be working too hard. Jenny, it’s not like that. I’m a workaholic; I’m always working. If I don’t do another Xanth novel, I’ll be working on something harder, like my novel about the sociopaths. You know, folk like the one who ran you down with his car. It would be more pleasant to be in Xanth. So I may do it, if the publisher really wants it.
Meanwhile, I have some accumulated clippings for you: comics and such. I’ll dump them in with the Convention Report. It’s not that I’m trying to get rid of you, Jenny, but my dripping nose is making my face hurt, and I just have to lie down somewhere and read something. Otherwise I have to wipe my nose constantly, or it will drip into the computer keyboard, and that’s really not best.
Have a good week, and let me know how you liked the convention. What do you mean, what convention? The one that came into existence just for you, Jenny, so you could be princess for a day.
NoRemember 24, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Harpy Thanksgiving! Yes, I know it’s over for you, but we’re in the throes of it here as I write this. No we didn’t eat any turkey! We didn’t eat any harpy either. We’re a family that serves the stuffing without the bird. My two daughters came home from their separate colleges, and we ordered new computers for each of them, and today the man brought them and set them up and the girls are figuring them out. You see, we wanted to get them, aligned with us, so they can do homework when they visit home, and so the computers have to be compatible. We got them nice printers, too: they are dot matrix with 24 pins (that’s good—ask your mother) that can print regular or script so well it doesn’t look like dots at all. Penny grumped because it wasn’t a laser printer. Sorry; I don’t trust something that expensive in a college situation. All we need is someone spilling iced tea into it. Meanwhile, Cheryl is using my stereo system to transcribe music from her CD disk to her cassette tape, because she has a tape player but no CD player. And I showed the girls how to set underlined words on the scr
een in blink. Now I’ve set my own “Bold” in highlighted blink mode. See? BOLD Well, I know my screen isn’t there; you can just imagine it. Innocent fun. Anyway, we’ve been busy; how has it been with you?
Your mother was asking for Kelly Freas' address, having thrown it away before. Okay, I’ll tell you, and you tell her. If she loses it again, tell her again.
Speaking of your mother: she was naughty. I gave your daddy a copy of Pornucopia, which is my Super Adult Conspiracy XXX-rated close-your-eyes-while-reading Not For Women And Children censored novel—and she read it! Naturally her brain now looks like rotten eggs on drugs. So if she visits you, and she seems to have swallowed all her teeth and suffered a foul-smelling jawbone infection, that’s why. What’s that? NO, YOU MAYN’T READ IT TOO!! Haven’t you been paying attention, girl? Stick to Xanth, where stuff like this is banned.
It was nice getting to see you and Kathy at the hospital. I understand you have a new roommate now, named—wait, that’s your name! You mean she’s Jenny too? How will you tell each other apart?
I forgot to give you the two magnolia seeds I brought along. I saved those from way back, when they kept getting crushed in the Post Orifice, so finally I had to bring them myself. That’s why I came, after all. I remembered them Monday morning, so I gave them to your daddy. You mean he forgot too? Well, demand them; he has them somewhere. If they sprout in his shirt pocket he’ll look like a walking magnolia tree.
Some tag-ends about that hospital visit: I thought of the quartz crystals I gave you and Kathy because they are in Tatham Mound. The Indians believed they had healing properties, and could be used to tell the future. So if you recover more of your powers, you’ll know why. I hope Kathy liked hers; she didn’t want to put it on, but maybe she was just too shy. I wonder if she really didn’t receive that letter I sent her over a month ago. I have it on the computer; I can send it again if I need to. And about that song I sang you: “The Eddystone Light”: it’s a funny song about the sea, and I thought it would make you laugh, but it didn’t. Sigh. These things don’t always work out. Actually it wasn’t easy to get much of a reaction from you on anything. I worried that you were falling asleep when I read “Tappy.” Kathy was awake, but you were getting uncomfortable. And I never got to meet that boy you mentioned—I can’t remember his name now, which is par for the course; I can’t remember any names without rehearsing them. Oh, well; the way we picture things is seldom the way they happen. It’s a nice hospital, and I’m glad to be able to picture you there.
Which means you’ll be moving soon, so my picture won’t count. This is in the nature of things.
Meanwhile we have progress on that project to make a video tape from the first Xanth novel. The man who is working on it came to visit me last week and showed us his five minute sample. It’s okay but not phenomenal; he said it costs $9000 a second to make such animations, and he doesn’t have that kind of money, so had to fill in with still pictures. Yes, nine thousand dollars a second! That’s more money than your mother makes, even when her teeth aren’t bothering her. But it seems like a good project, and we’ll probably go ahead with it.
Did you hear the news about Kimberly Mays? She’s the girl who turned out to have been baby-swapped in the hospital ten years ago. The Mays family got her, and the Twiggs family got the other girl, and only now have genetic tests confirmed it. So Kimberly was in effect adopted. No one knew, except whoever swapped the babies, way back when. Imagine what it would be like if you turned out to have been swapped: then someone else could be in the hospital and you could go home to strangers. I don’t know; that might not be that much fun. I understand Kimberly is upset about it. Strange things happen on occasion!
Well, Jenny, say hello to Jenny for me. I only have one enclosure for you this time: “Curtis.” Yes, you may show it to Jenny too. Have a harpy week!
NoRemember 30, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Friday is my Jenny-letter day, but I’m doing this on Thursday, because I’m wrapping up much of my correspondence for the month now and want to keep the first of next month free for paying work. If I can get in four more good days, I can finish Ore’s Opal except for the editing, and be just about on schedule for the next novel, Virtual Mode, which features the suicidal fourteen year old girl. What would happen to the world if you turned fourteen and I didn’t have that novel done, so I couldn’t read you a chapter from it? (Would you believe: I typed control-O instead of control U to underline Orc, and it jumped me to the top of the paragraph, inserted a ruler, and started typing there. Apparently control O followed by O does that; it’s part of the “O” roster of commands which Sprint has but doesn’t list; they are there to emulate one of the other stupid word processors that do things in peculiar ways. Remember what I told you about how computers are always out to get you? Believe it!) Mode should be published in 1991, and maybe catch your Last Days of Fourteen. See, there is order in the universe. You’ll like Colene; she’s not at all like Tappy, but she’s all girl. You might get the notion from all this that I like girls. Right; I’ve been tuned in to girls ever since my first surviving daughter was born, and maybe even a bit before then. A correspondent recently wrote me to tell me that she had just had a son (she appeared in Xanth as Emjay, who married the Ass who helped her compile the Lexicon of Xanth). I wrote back that she should keep trying, and maybe next time she’d have a daughter.
Meanwhile, what’s doing here? Well, on Tuesday we had our thickest fog yet. It made the morning forest quiet, a wonderland of only close things, no distant ones. It’s probably easiest to reach Xanth from here on such mornings, because the magic trails have proper concealment. I think it was such a morning that Jenny Elf crossed over into Xanth from the World of Two Moons, starting a complication that the Muses still haven’t quite resolved. Which reminds me: I tell them not to do it, but I have had experience with my fans, and they’ll do it anyway. They will write letters to you, sending them to me through the publisher. I’ll have to send them on to your mother, who will have to read them to you, and then you’ll have to answer them. So be prepared for your fan mail, Jenny, after Isle of View is published. Because I know you will intrigue the readers the way Ligeia did.
Which somehow has led to my next subject: much as I’d like to see you recover the full use of your body, and become a marathon gymnast, and live happily ever after, I have this nagging little suspicion that you will have to settle for something less. But I feel that the computer can bring you a great deal of joy, once you get around its out-to-get-you syndrome. All you need is a way to input it, and it doesn’t really matter whether you use a finger or your head or your big toe. (No joke; if you have good control over that toe, they can set you up with a toe button to operate it.) Then you can have sentences programmed, such as “Thank you for writing to me. I still can’t walk or type, but with the help of this computer I can answer you. I’m sorry to learn that you also got hit by a car. Doom to all careless drivers!” You can have a signature block made up, even. Your mother could program that sort of thing, I’m sure. Did I ever show you my Xanth stamp? No? Okay, here is one; don’t try to use it in Mundania, though.
So you see, much can be done with the computer, and not just sentences. You’ll have a ball with a drawing program. First get a good way to direct the machine—maybe a little “Thinking Cap” that is attuned to the small motions of your head—then enter the wonderful world of increasingly proficient control. It really is like a magic realm. I was dragged kicking and screaming into computers; I wouldn’t have changed over from pencil and manual typewriter if they hadn’t stopped making good manual typewriters. But once I really got into the computer it was wonderful, and I really wouldn’t trade it. Those little talk-box computers you and Kathy have are fine, but I’m thinking of the heavy stuff, that has the potential to tune you in to the larger world so well that others would not know your situation unless you told them.
Say, maybe we can make a Jenny stamp! Let’s try it:
Anyway, I no
w have a nice mental picture of you at the hospital, though I guess you won’t be there much longer. I also have one of you in your fancy go-to-the-ball gown, with your matching shoes. Actually, I thought your little bare feet were cute, too. I have your rose by my computer; I see it sitting there and I think of you, between paragraphs.
Meanwhile, back here, we had another visit by the cows. They were suddenly grazing right by our house: Elsie Bored, How Now Brown, Bossie, and one whose name I didn’t catch. We phoned the sheriff, and that afternoon he came and shooed them back onto his property and patched his fence. Air-boaters on the lake keep breaking it down, and then the cows get out. I guess those boaters don’t know whose fence they are so cavalierly violating. One of these days they may find out the hard way. Which reminds me: we have deer on our property, and there’s another deer who joins the sheriff’s horses, grazing in the field right in sight of passing hunters, leading a charmed life, because everyone knows whose horses they are and how he feels about his horses' friends. I wrote that into Firefly: a true story folk will think is fiction. But that deer hasn’t been seen for a couple of months. We hope some hunter didn’t—or some reckless driver. Maybe that deer got to know our deer, and is with them now. But we’re worried. Deer are so innocent, and hunters are such || CENSORED BY ADULT CONSPIRACY ||!
Letters to Jenny Page 22