And Eternity (46 page)

Well, the house wasn’t finished early. We had to go and struggle with the cutting up of a huge fallen tree whose main trunk arched over the forest floor: a real challenge. Yes, I succeeded in binding the saw several times, but finally got the job done, and we loaded wood into our car and hauled it to the house. Why didn’t I use the wheelbarrow? Because the tree was about 3/16 of a mile distant—naturally, it had fallen on our farthest piece of property—and downhill from our house. A couple of wheelbarrow loads convinced me that there had to be a better way. So we had wood for the winter, and the time was lost; my writing slowed accordingly.

The house was not complete in Jamboree. When would it be done? In FeBlueberry, Lou assured us. But it wasn’t done then either. The completion date receded like the horizon, always about two weeks distant. Marsh, Apull, Mayhem, while I worked on this novel, expecting to break off momentarily for the move and never quite doing so. What was the problem? Well, a contractor does not do it all himself; he subcontracts the various parts of the job, and coordinates the whole. Again and again one crew or another would be scheduled for a job, and wouldn’t show—and so other crews were delayed, because they could not do their jobs until the first was done. Or something would be done wrong, so that corrections entailed more delay. The choice seemed to be between quality and speed, and Lou opted for quality. There seems to be a failure in the work ethic; many people just do not seem to be much interested in working, or in doing their jobs promptly and correctly. I wonder to what extent this represents the effects of the so-called drug culture. The availability of increasingly potent drugs like cocaine (but not Spelled H, yet) has cost me more than one associate and made direct and indirect mischief of more than incidental nature. I stay clear of such things, avoiding even nicotine and caffeine; I resist taking aspirin or the equivalent unless I have a rare bad headache. I want no baffle between me and reality, so I am usually in possession of my natural faculties. I suspect that many others are not.

You know, I am not the greatest writer in the world, but I am one of the most successful. Perhaps this offers a hint why: I always do my job, promptly and well. I am amazed at the number of others who don’t. I have pride in my work, which will cause me to leave a good publisher, at great inconvenience, rather than allow a novel to be unduly compromised. I will speak out in protest when I see wrong done. Not only does this attitude seem to be atypical, it has brought me the reputation of a troublemaker—in fact, of an Ogre. As I watched my new house being built, I couldn’t help wishing that there were more ogres on the crews. I’ll go into more positive detail about the house further along, but first let me change subjects.

There is another huge tax on my working time: the mail. It takes me about half an hour to answer the average letter, so the hours lost can be calculated by dividing the number of letters

by two. I decided to get a secretary, so that I could still answer personally but not lose as much time. But we had no room for such a person. Our new house, twice the size of our old one, would have room; I could put her in a corner with my backup computer system and let her do the letters. (I say her, but a male secretary would do as well, or a very smart robot.) I figured on hiring maybe a retired teacher, so that I wouldn’t have to teach her basic English, and educating her in the type of response I normally did, so that I wouldn’t have to dictate each letter verbatim. I receive quite a number of “Dear Mr. Anthony, I am eleven years old and this is my first fan letter. Here are ten puns for Xanth. When is the next Xanth novel coming out, and what’s it about?” missives, and a fairly standard answer would do for these, with whatever individual touches were appropriate. So, once we moved, I could look for such a secretary.

And then we kept not moving. Had we moved in OctOgre, and set up secretarily then—well, I answered 99 letters that month, which was about standard. If a secretary cut my average answering time in half, that would be about 25 hours saved. Right—one winter’s worth of wood! In NoRemember the pace increased, to 132 letters. This was because I had several novels published in the fall season, and the mail follows the sales figures. Readers keep asking why I don’t have my address published in my novels, so that more folk could write to me. I hope I don’t need to answer that. In DisMember there were 166 letters, bringing the total for the year to 1393. Understand, that’s just the ones I answered; I don’t answer them all, though I do the best I can. But when I could move in Jamboree…

By this time Fate had discovered mat I had no ready way to handle letters, because I couldn’t get a secretary because I couldn’t move. I was tied down. So the Jamboree total was 221, a record. That meant that my approximate 180-hour working month (actually, I’m working all the time, but I don’t count meals, chores, reading [unless it is direct research], exercise, family demands and such, so it nets 40 to 45 hours a week) lost about 110 hours to the mail. Between that and wood chopping, guess how fast my paying work was moving then! I had to do something. I had already resolved to avoid conventions and similar distractions for the year, to recover time, but it was draining away as fast as I could save it.

FeBlueberry is a short month. I answered only 163 letters. That meant that just over half my working time was available for my writing. But somehow I wasn’t satisfied; I wanted more. I was working on Xanth #12,
Man from Mundania,
and it was moving well yet taking an extra month because I put so little time in on it. Xanth is relatively easy and fun to do. What would happen when I came to Incarnations #7, a more significant challenge?
When the #$%&*!! would that house get finished?

Then in mid-Marsh we saw an article about a local lady who was setting up a business called “My Private Secretary.” She would supply secretarial skills for small businesses of the area for $15 an hour. Since she had her own office and was self-employed, no special paperwork was needed. So I called her, and next day my wife and I went to see her. We decided to try it. I scribbled notes for my answers on the backs of the envelopes, and she typed them up into coherent letters. Then I reviewed the letters, signed them, and mailed them.

It worked. She handled most of my fan mail, while I continued to handle my business mail and those fan letters requiring special handling—suicidal teenagers, for example. I timed some batches, and concluded that it was now taking me just under fifteen minutes per secretarial letter, average. Half my letter time was being saved! As a result, this novel, started at the same time as the secretary, moved better than the last one had, despite being more difficult. I was devoting more time to it. It was a wonderful feeling, putting about three quarters of my working time into my novel instead of only half my time. And we hadn’t even moved yet! The secretary was not conversant with my work and had to check with her husband, who knew the genre. He assured her that I was a legitimate writer. I gave her a box of my books, and paid her the going rate per hour for reading them, because she has a better idea how to answer a letter when she knows what the fan is talking about. Thus when I scribble “Not end; Evil out 11-88,” she can type “No,
Being a Green Mother
is not the conclusion of the series, despite what it says on the cover. The next one,
For Love of Evil,
concerning Satan, will be published in hardcover in NoRemember 1988. I hope you like it as much as you did the prior novels in the series.” Sometimes she adds: “My secretary likes this series best.”

Still, a lot of my time still goes to the mail. About half of it is new letters, and the rest is repeat letters. Some fans just keep writing back. I try to answer all the first-timers, but don’t feel obliged to keep up perpetually with the repeaters. But it isn’t necessarily easy to cut off a correspondence. Let me make an example of an extreme case: this was a boy who had written to me a dozen times, and had a dozen responses, and asked how often it was all right to keep writing. I explained gently that it was difficult for me to keep up, so less was better. Hurt, he signed off with one last letter. Then he continued to write, about once a month. Finally, when the total was about 18 letters, which had used up more than a thousand dollars worth of my writing time, I got more pointed. I told him that I hoped he would understand when I didn’t answer his next.

In due course he responded with his “last and final” letter. In it he informed me that he had arranged to go to Florida, where he had traced down my address and taken one drive past my house. He expressed extreme disappointment. “You had made yourself seem so important and so wonderful…. such a humanitarian, such a busy man, with no time to do everything you want to… but I saw the dead ugly trees in your yard, and the waist-high weeds, and the dismal house you call home…. I really don’t mind if you write about this letter in your future author’s notes. Maybe the others will know the real Piers Anthony. It is my hope that they do.” He added that he took pictures to show to his friends, who couldn’t believe it, and that I should remember that it was my fans who put food on my table and let me get my books even
PUBLISHED
. He thanked me for his rude but wonderful awakening; at last his eyes were open to the reality behind the facade. He signed his name with the subtitle “ex-Anthony fan.”

As I said, this was an extreme case, but it illustrates the type. None of this revelation came to him until I cut him off after he refused to take a hint. Most others have taken the hint, but are nevertheless hurt, and I do get some hate mail. It is apparent that there is no way short of this to protect my time from those who are determined to take it. This letter arrived in FeBlueberry, but isn’t one of the 163 because I didn’t answer it. I have left a small trail of disillusioned ex-Anthony fans, and I don’t like doing it, but the alternative is to allow my working time to become monopolized by just such folk. One of my reasons for getting a secretary was to make my answers less personal, so that those who craved a large collection of personal Anthony notes would be dissuaded without coming to emotional violence. In this sense, ironically, I can sympathize with God: how do I get on with my business when those who idolize me insist on my complete attention? How could God function, with billions of personal demands being made on Hun?

But, having taken this ex-fan up on his challenge to publish his expose, let me address the points he raises. I make no money from fans like him; I answer them at a financial loss, and would very soon be broke if every one of my readers were like this, It is my business to write novels; I answer correspondence only as a courtesy, sometimes receiving little in return. The ones who put food on my table are the great majority who buy, read, and enjoy my novels, and who do not seek to correspond with me. I also do not attempt to make myself out as “important and wonderful”; in fact these same Author’s Notes strike reviewers as “boring and offensive.” I simply display my thoughts and activities, positive and negative, for the period during which I write one of these novels. I would call them feisty rather than either wonderful or offensive, but each reader is free to interpret as he chooses. Most seem to consider the Notes to be personal letters to my readers, and that seems close enough.

This fan thought he could make a judgment on my competence as a writer and my character—by driving by my house. This illustrates the problem with critics in general, who make what amount to similar judgments. Nevertheless, there are indications. A person’s residence can tell a lot about him, if the one who looks at it has the wit to understand. You see, this fan did give an accurate description of my house. The roof is dull metal, the siding weathered, the yard overgrown, and there are half-a-dozen dead trees standing in it. (Make that four; two blew down later.) There is little evidence that any of it has been touched in years. But this is not neglect. The roof is terne-coated stainless steel, which a builder will tell you is the finest it is possible to make; it will last without repair just a shade short of eternity. The siding is red cedar shakes which are supposed to weather to their own shade, never needing paint. They look old after a year in the sun, but they are great no-maintenance protection. The “weeds” are dog fennel, this region’s natural ground cover. We don’t mow them down because they are harmless—and because it is our philosophy to do as little damage to the natural forest and field as possible. Others move to the country and promptly extinguish the natural flora and fauna, rendering their lots into manicured suburbia. We left our forest as we found it, deliberately. No mower has touched our yard, other than horses; no tree has been cut unless it threatened the house. We sought not to drive out the creatures of the forest, but to share with them. We love to see the big burrowing box turtles locally called “gophers” and the occasional armadillo. There are mounds of dirt left by the tunneling pocket gopher—the “vole” of Xanth—and by the dung beetles, who sanitize the pasture by burying clods of dung. Wrens and squirrels nest in our eaves, to our delight; we have come to know families of them. Wild rabbits play hide and seek with our dogs. (Yes, on occasion a dog does catch a bunny. We hate that, and try to warn the bunnies before letting the dogs out.) Those “dead ugly trees” are what is called standing deadwood, and it, too, contributes to the way of the forest. Woodpeckers peck in it, and nest in it. We have a family of the rare, spectacular, crow-sized Pileated woodpeckers which call on our dead-wood; we can watch them right from the house. The national forest service once took out deadwood, but discovered that this despoiled the habitat for woodpeckers, and now lets it stand. Nature does know best. Only after it falls by itself do I saw it up for the stove.

So this disaffected fan did see my house—but how little he understood it or me! It does represent the real Piers Anthony, whose values are not for appearances, and I shall be glad if my readers know it. We did, as I said, move—but our philosophy is unchanged, and the new house is even deeper in the forest than the old. I don’t give much of a curse about the opinion of strangers, so my house may look as dull as I do—but it is sound. The same goes for my philosophy. I do what I feel is right, and if a fan can idolize me yet have no idea of my values, then I think the fault is not where he supposes. I really do care about my work, and would much prefer to stay with it than to put effort into a conventional yard or into attendance at conventions.