Letters to Jenny

by Piers Anthony

  Meanwhile our blooming dogwoods are—let me rephrase that; our dogwoods are blooming. Bunnies are showing up on the drive again, when I go out to fetch the newspapers on the bike and sneak a peak at the sunrise. So things are normal. Have a decent week, Jenny.

  FeBlueberry 23, 1990

  Dear Jenny,

  Ouch! It’s after 7 P.M.! Where did the day go? Well, I typed 16 letters, and my wife’s brother and his family visited for five hours, and I had a call from my British agent. She called with the news that there is a Spanish offer for Pornucopia. They made the offer, then made a better one before the agent could respond. Apparently another publisher was getting interested. I told my agent not to read it; she sent it to the publisher still sealed in its plastic wrapping. You know how that book boiled your mother’s brain. She’s hardly had a good night’s sleep since. So yes, I suppose you could say that my letter to you was delayed by a dirty book. So maybe it does entitle you to give me a dirty look. If you feel that way. But if you do, I won’t tell you about the next paragraph.

  You see, this is sort of an anniversary. My first letter to you was written FeBlueberry 27, 1989, and this is the 23rd. Maybe I should have waited four more days on this one, so—no? Ah, well. In that letter I told you how I had heard about you from your mother, and how we had just had our tree farm mowed between the rows of pine trees, and I went out there and regretted the cutting down of the blueberry bushes and thought of you, also cut down. I mentioned Robert Kornwise, who was killed by another reckless driver, whose novel I completed; your mother has a copy of that. I told you to pet the Monster under the Bed, who had gotten lonely without you and come to join you at the hospital. And I told you how I would put a Jenny character in Isle of View, an elf or an ogre girl, and you chose the ogre.

  What’s that? Oh—I was just checking to make sure you were listening. You chose the elf, and after that one thing led to another, and in a few more months you’ll see Jenny Elf in person in the graphic edition. After that you won’t dare show your face on the street, because someone might recognize you. Then the regular novel will appear, with its Author’s Note, and you’ll start getting letters. I don’t know how many, but there could be a dozen or so at first, and then the pace would slow down. Do they have Show and Tell at your school? You can take a pile of letters in.

  So a lot has happened in the intervening year. You went to a convention—what do you mean, what convention?! Sci-Con 11, where—ha! I heard that peep. You just couldn’t hold in that laugh any longer, could you! Then you came home, and now you’re going to school, and who knows what you’ll be up to tomorrow. Your mother phoned last night and reported that you were doing very well, and that you have a little signature stamp with a unicorn so you can answer letters. She said you got the Salad Bar Botanist of the Week Award. What were you doing—throwing salad around? And that you went to the circus. How come you get to do all these things when I can’t? But that you still get tummy pains in the night. Well, maybe if they stop feeding you beans—

  So how come you’re glaring at me? How can I finish a paragraph when you act like that?

  Meanwhile, how are things here? Well, yesterday we saw rain approaching on the radar: a big patch of it, all sparkling with color to show where it was most intense, looking like a double fried egg or an interior configuration of the Mandelbrot Set. Have you seen Nothing But Zooms yet? You haven’t? Well, get on it, girl! And I have finished the first draft of Virtual Mode, all but the Author’s Note. Yes, you get mentioned there, in a paragraph, but it’s mostly about the Ligeia girls, because of Colene, the suicidal protagonist. You’ll learn more about her when you’re her age, fourteen.

  Meanwhile some enclosures. Remember when Penny was here with her adopted cat? Well, here’s a picture of him pretending he’s Sammy, snoozing on the VCR. And here’s Curtis, and Mother Goose & Grimm, because, well, see for yourself. And The Far Side, because I just don’t get it, and thought maybe you could figure it out. And a horse card drawn by another correspondent. Folk think that the pencil isn’t an artistic medium, but they’re wrong, as this card shows. And finally an article for your mother, from a British newsmagazine: they are learning how to make the nerves of the brain and spinal cord grow back. This may be a number of years away for human beings, but it could be very significant for you one day, if it works. And a current biblio for your mother.

  So keep perking along, Jenny, and we’ll see what the next year has in store.

  Author’s Note

  It was an arbitrary decision, cutting this collection off at the end of one year, but there was too much for one volume. I continued to write to Jenny every week, about a thousand words a letter, so that as this is published there is another volume’s worth of material, continuing to grow. I did not write to Jenny with the intention of publishing it; that was a later thought. Perhaps I would have been more circumspect about certain matters, had I realized. This was essentially a closed correspondence, one on one, though of course there were always others in the circuit. Part of the humor of it is in my cautioning “Don’t tell your mother,” when it might be her mother reading Jenny the letter. Fortunately Jenny’s mother was happy to be teased, if it made Jenny smile. Now there will be thousands of others reading these letters. Well, all of you can help keep our secrets. At this writing I do not know whether more of these letters will be published; that may depend on the nature of the response.

  No letters from Jenny are included here. This is because there really weren’t any. Jenny simply could not write well, even with her good hand. Now, as she is computerized, she can do better, but her energy is taken up with school work and therapy and the hassle of simply surviving with her paralysis. So this is really a one-way correspondence, with a phantom Jenny reacting as I go along. However, her mother does call periodically, updating me on Jenny events and letting me know how she reacts. My guess is that she responds in much the way I suggest she does in the letters, laughing, being mad, getting bored, and in general enjoying it. That is after all the point: to see that she continues to make progress toward life and satisfaction.

  Jenny’s progress continues. Every so often she returns to Cumbersome Hospital for more therapy; she goes there not because of problems but to improve her performance. Thus hospitalization is good news, not bad news. She had further surgery on her jaw to facilitate speech, though her verbal vocabulary remains quite limited, and surgery on her legs to enable her to stand and even walk, with a walker. Once a young man lifted her so she could actually dance with him. But such events are exceptional; she still has miles to go. She is getting better using her right hand, but her left side lags. So she is bed-and wheelchair-bound, and largely dependent on the help of others, though she is doing more for herself, such as taking her own showers.

  Meanwhile, the drunken driver who hit her paid no meaningful penalty I know of, not even remorse. He was given a suspended sentence in criminal court, and the state of Virginia has a “one per cent” rule that effectively prevents a civil settlement unless the victim can prove she was not even one per cent at fault—something virtually impossible to do. Fortunately Jenny’s family has excellent insurance, so that it was possible for her to survive and recover to what extent the fates decree. I have a harsh opinion of the leniency with which drunken drivers are treated, and of the way the system seems designed to protect them at the expense of their victims.

  When I ran Jenny’s address in Isle of View the mail poured in. Her mother lost count after reporting about two thousand letters. There was no promise to answer them, but they did try, and many did get answered. Certainly that tremendous outpouring of support—as far as I know, there were no negative letters—buoyed Jenny, showing her how much how many of you cared. Some led to remarkable things, such as the naming of an Iris after Jenny Elf. Some were touching; one woman reported that she laughed through the novel, and cried through the Author’s Note. We have heard from some who had similar experience to Jenny’s, even to the impunity of the reckless drivers.


  Now I am running her address again, not to solicit more mail, but because I’ve had a good deal of experience with fan letters, these days answering about a hundred and fifty a month myself, and I know that if folk can’t reach Jenny directly, they will simply write to her in care of me, requiring me to forward them. So I remind you that neither Jenny nor I guarantee to answer letters, though we do read them, and if you wish to reach Jenny, her address is JENNY ELF, PO BOX 8152, HAMPTON VA 23666–8152. The easiest way to reach me is to call my “troll-free” hotline, 1–800 HI PIERS. This is a marketing service for all my titles and my personal newsletter, and they will forward letters to me, though this can take time. But I encourage you simply to appreciate this book in your fashion and go on to the next; you have no obligation to write.

  Jenny Elf continues as a character in Xanth, appearing in Isle of View, The Color of Her Panties, Demons Don’t Dream, and perhaps future novels. Her likeness is in the graphic adaptation of Isle of View, “Return To Centaur,” which had difficulties with distribution so is hard to find, but remains available via HI PIERS. She also appears in a Xanth calendar, but this series too had distribution problems, and the one with her has not yet been published. And—oh, yes—Jenny and I share the cover of this book. Jenny, we have to stop meeting this way!

  I had to make an ethical decision about this volume. Most of it I wrote, and normally it is the writer who gets the royalties from published books. I could have written a book in the time I diverted to write to Jenny; indeed, this book is the proof of it. But the letters would not have been written without Jenny’s misfortune, and would not have been published without the agreement of her family. It did not seem right to keep all the money myself, but neither did I want to establish a principle of giving away what I earn. So I pondered, and compromised: I take most of it, but some goes to Jenny. I’m tithing it: sending one tenth to Jenny, just as the publisher is tithing the cover price of the book for my royalty. So for each dollar you pay for the book, a penny will go to my literary agent, a penny to Jenny, and eight cents to me. The rest goes to the booksellers, distributors, publishers, printers and so on: the complicated machine that is Parnassus. Should the book be wildly successful, those could become significant figures. But that was never the point. I simply did what I had to do, and that was to follow up and make sure that the life I helped recover was worthwhile. As I said when I met Jenny at the convention, a person who saves the life of another may thereafter be responsible for that other. Perhaps this falls under the heading of “Compassion.”

  This is an unusual book, even for me. It tells somewhat more about me than I ordinarily prefer to let my readers know, because I thought it was just between Jenny and me. Parts of it may prove to be embarrassing, and parts may anger some readers. But it is as it had to be.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Piers Anthony Jacob

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-5765-6

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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