Letters to Jenny (10 page)

Your mother says she’s dyslexic too, and wonders whether it ties in with ambidexterity. That is, using either hand. I wonder too. As far as I know, I am not dyslexic, but it did take me three years to get out of first grade. The things I was taught to do, I do right handed; the things I taught myself, I do left handed. Some things I did both ways, just as a challenge. Today I write right handed (but I have written left-handed in the past; I quit because it’s harder pushing the pencil into the paper than pulling it across) and eat left handed. My father thinks my absolute idiocy with respect to foreign languages derives from that; I mastered only one language, English, but I got pretty good at that, eventually. So I keep wondering about right and left handedness, and problems in learning, and male and female. You see, the brains of women may be wired differently from those of men; they have a larger corpus col—oh, I can’t remember the term, but it’s the cable that connects the halves of the brain, like the cable between the computer and the printer. A bigger cable makes for a better connection, and women often can see more sides to a situation than men can. But I’m strange; in ways I think like a woman, and I think it helps my writing. Left-handers may have a bigger cable too, to compensate. So I think I have more access to the parts of my brain than does the average man, and I can relate well to women, though I feel like a man. But you know, it’s supposed to be mostly boys who are hyperactive and dyslexic, also they tend to be blond and blue-eyed. That’s Penny. So maybe she’s a girl who is wired in her brain like a boy. These crossovers are fascinating, but we really don’t know anything for sure. Still, when something threatens you, how does your mother react: man-fashion or woman-fashion? Man-fashion is to bash that threat into oblivion; woman-fashion is to be understanding. Yes, I know: she reacts both ways. In short, ambidextrously.

And your mother says she copies all my letters, so they can’t get lost. Now that’s flattering! But if one ever is lost, and you want it back, let me know; I keep copies of all my letters, and I can print one out again if necessary. Twelve letters—I’ve been writing to you pretty often, haven’t I! I hope you aren’t getting bored.

You know, I had some notes for this letter, and here I am over 1500 words into it, and I have used none of those notes. Sigh. Well, if you want to know what I would have said, had I stayed on track, tell me, and I’ll say it next time. What? No I don’t have room for it all this time; I’m already three pages along. STOP BLINKING AT ME! Okay, one item: back when you had the accident, I was working on
Total Recall
, a special project. A novelization. That is, they had the script for what will be a major science fiction adventure movie next year, and I turned it into a novel. So that novel will be published this SapTimber as a hardcover under my name, and then in paperback when the movie is released, starring muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger. So if you like science fiction violence, you can watch it, and think of me, though I really had nothing to do with the movie. I just wondered what I was doing when the horror that was going to have the single nice effect of bringing you into my life occurred, and that was it.

And one other item, from those notes: I don’t know whether you have gotten anyone to read
Heaven Cent
to you, but if you have the interest, I think you would like it. I had to check in it, because two major characters in
Isle of View
were introduced in that novel, and I saw things that I think would appeal to you and make you think. For one thing, twelve year old, freckled Electra. Now she’s an old woman of eighteen, but then she was a girl of your generation, who slept long.

Well, this has been a sort of a serious letter. It happens. Maybe I’ll get back to normal next time. Harpy thymes, Jenny!

PS (the morning after): I’m adding a clipping about a British vegetarian girl who entered Oxford University at age 11 and is a math whiz. Both my parents graduated from Oxford, my mother the top in her class, my father almost, except his marriage to my mother distracted him. Everyone in my family was smart, except me.

Mayhem 26, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Your mother didn’t write, and didn’t write, and I knew what had happened: the doctor had finally caught her out of bed once too often and locked her in the hospital, where she was fretting about everything and sundry. There she was stuck, until her ulcers went down and her blood count went up. I thought of calling, to make sure, but I knew that if I did, she would turn out to be at home and would tell me in 9.35 pages exactly what a sad sod I was to ever believe that any thumping quack of a doctor could ever catch
her
out. So I took the cowardly way, and waited. Finally she got tired of that game, and got her computer in gear again, and I got letters today and yesterday, not necessarily in that order. She had lost a day’s work by not saving her material, and naturally the computer had struck at the worst moment. Your mother is an idiot: tell her to get one of those programs that saves automatically every few seconds, so that her material can never again be lost. Every bloke but a Computer Systems Analyst knows that.

Just to get even, she says that you stuck your tongue out at me, because of that picture business. Oh you did, did you? Well, how would you like a pot of nitrogen on it? That’ll teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head. A smelly one, maybe, but civil.

Let’s see, where were we before we got into this quarrel? Your mother’s browned off letters. She says you approved the Jenny Elf story, and that she has no keyboard with the pound symbol. Horrors; I’ll lend her some of mine: £ £ £ £ £. It’s just a matter of pounding them out. She says you’re working on a letter to me. But I already have one from you, with your picture in Elven Armor, and about how your daddy fell out of his chair. And your signature, JNY. She also mentions your occupational therapy, where I gather you have arms and legs but not much middle. I wonder: would they ever let you try swimming? So the water would support you. It might be more comfortable exercise.

As of her last letter, you had not seen the Author’s Note. I’ve made the corrections she gave, but you will have to say about some things, such as whether to call you just Jenny. Tell her that when I went over that Note, this morning, I also added in a reference to Andrea Alton, who suggested putting Jenny (Elf) in, and her novel. And I told other fans not to deluge me with requests for
their
names as characters. “If you aren’t in a coma,” I said, “don’t ask.”

She also sent pictures of your reunion with Sammy, and your cat sweater. I’m glad you two could get together again; it’s been a long time. I see you have elven ears on, there, except that they aren’t pointed. Ah, well, the Elfquest folk will no doubt survive.

Okay, I’ll enclose some items for you. Gunk the vegetarian is back in the Curtis comic; he’s an animal rights activist, of course. In that connection, there’s a clipping about how they treat laboratory rats here in Florida: it’s horrible. What they want to find out is how to stop the muscles of folk like you from wasting away while you’re trying to get your head together, but the way they do it is sickening. However, we also have decent folk here, as the clipping about the veterinarian who takes in animals shows. I know you’d like him. I was raised on a goat farm, and little goats—those are the true kids—are the most wonderful pets. Little deer are a lot like that. We have families of deer living on our tree farm here; every blue moon or so we see them. Also possum, box turtles, snakes and whatnot; we value them all. The only thing we don’t like is hunters, so we keep them off. I’m also enclosing a picture in an ad. It’s not original with the ad; I first saw it over twenty years ago. Which face do you see: the young Jenny-girl, or your tired old mum? They are both there. No, keep looking; eventually you’ll see them both. It took me forever to see the old one, way back when.

Meanwhile, what’s new here? Well, remember that wren nest in my bicycle bag? The eggs hatched maybe a day after my last letter; I can see one of the chicks in there, though I don’t dare look too closely, because Lina Wren has an attitude like that of your mother: Leave My Baby Alone. But little Wrenny is in there, and maybe two more.

Yesterday two significant things happened. I finally heard from your mother, and I had a letter from a video producer who would like to turn Xanth into a series of videos, using live actors mixed with computer animation. He sent some sample video cassettes of what he had done, and it looked pretty good. Of course there’s a lot to check, yet; not everyone who wants to make a movie or video is capable of doing it right. But my agent is checking it out, and who knows: maybe some day there’ll be a series of Xanth movies, including
Isle of View
, with Jenny Elf and Sammy Cat.

So I guess that wraps it up, and—what? You say I still have most of a page left over. Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to fill it. No, don’t you dare stick your tongue out at me again! I’ll blow a stink horn at you. That’s the kind that makes a foul-smelling noise. So there. But okay, I’ll fill in with a note or so.

One’s about my Rapunzel doll. Yes, I do have one. STOP SNICKERING! Franklin Mint wanted to do some Xanth figurines, which they’ll be promoting any year now; I even used their mountain setting in
Man
From
Mundania
, and you can only get onto that mountain by passing the Frankinmint plant. Then they pondered doing some Xanth dolls, and I said oh, you mean like Rapunzel? So they sent me their Rapunzel doll. She’s about twenty inches tall, in a beautiful purple gown and robe, and her hair, oh, my, it reaches down below her feet. She’s an expensive doll, about two hundred dollars, I think, but they sent her free. That’s the advantage of being a successful writer. I have her standing on a file cabinet where I can see her as I type my novels. She reminds me of my daughter Penny; her face is similar.

Okay, now may I end this letter? I ran out of time last night (this is now the next morning), because I had an hourlong phone call from my agent in New York about a complicated contract. I could get a lot of things done, if it wasn’t for the phone! You say one more note? All right, but this is the last one.

I may have mentioned that I answer over a hundred letters a month. Most of them I route through a secretary. I write my answers in pencil on the back of the envelopes as I read the letters, and once a week my wife takes the package of 20 or 25 letters to the secretary, who’s about 10 miles away, and picks up the prior week’s bunch. Some letters I do directly, like the ones to you. I have correspondents who are suicidal, or women who find me fascinating (stifle that snigger!), prisoners, bereaved families—I finished the novel of a young man who was killed by a car a year before you were hit—collaborators, and so on. After this letter I have to write to a murderer on Death Row, who brutally killed his girlfriend and their unborn baby. The funny thing is that in other respects he is ordinary and sensitive; when he learned I was writing to you he inquired, because he doesn’t like crimes like that. He says “I know she/her family wouldn’t appreciate me writing, but tell her I’m thinking of her and hope she has a full recovery.”

A
uthor’s
N
ote:

W
HEN
I
REFERRED TO
J
ENNY BEING INJURED MAINLY IN THE HEAD,
I
WAS MISTAKEN.
J
ENNY WAS BASHED BADLY IN THE BODY TOO;
I
JUST DIDN’T KNOW THE FULL EXTENT OF IT.
I
UNDERSTAND THEY USE MAKEUP TO COVER HER FACIAL SCARS, SO THAT EVEN WHEN
I
MET HER, LATER,
I
DIDN’T REALIZE THE EXTENT OF HER INJURIES.

F
OR THOSE WHO LIKE ANSWERS TO THEIR MATH PROBLEMS:
T
HERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS TO FATHOM THIS RIDDLE, BUT PERHAPS THE SIMPLEST IS BY USING ONE UNKNOWN AND SOLVING IT ALGEBRAICALLY.
L
ET
X =
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEIR AGES.
M
ARY IS
24. S
O
M
ARY IS TWICE AS OLD AS
A
NN WAS, WHICH MUST HAVE BEEN
12,
WHEN
M
ARY WAS AS OLD AS
A
NN IS NOW.
M
ARY’S AGE MINUS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM HAS TO BE
A
NN’S AGE, AND
A
NN’S AGE PLUS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM HAS TO BE
M
ARY’S AGE.
S
O
24 - X
IS
A
NN’S AGE NOW, AND THAT’S THE SAME AS
M
ARY’S AGE THEN,
12 + X. S
O THE FORMULA IS
24 - X = 12 + X. S
IMPLIFY THAT BY MOVING
12
TO THE OTHER SIDE, AND
- X
TO THE OTHER SIDE, CHANGING THE SIGNS AS YOU DO.
T
HUS
24-12 = X + X. T
HEN
12 = 2X. D
IVIDE BY TWO, AND
X = 6. S
O IF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEIR AGES IS
6, A
NN MUST BE
18. H
OWEVER, WHEN
I
FIRST ENCOUNTERED THIS PROBLEM,
I
JUST PLAYED WITH IT IN MY HEAD, AND FIGURED THAT THE ANSWER WAS PROBABLY SOMEWHERE AROUND HALFWAY BETWEEN
24
AND
12,
AND THAT WORKED.
T
HEN
I
PROVED IT WITH THE ALGEBRA.
F
OR ME, THE SOLUTION ALWAYS WAS SIMPLER THAN THE MATH.
J
ENNY DID FIGURE OUT
A
NN’S AGE, PROBABLY THE SAME WAY
I
DID: BY JUDGMENT RATHER THAN MATH.
Y
OU MIGHT SAY THAT MATH IS A TOOL FOR THOSE WHO LACK JUDGMENT.

T
HE REFERENCE TO A BULLY COMES FROM AN INCIDENT THAT
J
ENNY’S MOTHER TOLD ME.
T
HE YEAR BEFORE,
J
ENNY, AGE ELEVEN, HAD MADE A COMPLAINT ABOUT A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BULLY, JUST STANDING HER GROUND.
T
HEREAFTER HE AMBUSHED HER, BEAT HER UP, CRUSHED HER GLASSES (SHE WAS ALMOST BLIND WITHOUT THEM, HAVING SEVERE VISION PROBLEMS), AND WAS STOPPED ONLY BY THE INTERCESSION OF A NEIGHBOR.
A
LL BECAUSE SHE HAD TRIED TO RESIST HIS BULLYING.
T
HIS IS A PROBLEM FOR WOMEN WORLDWIDE, IN THEIR DEALINGS WITH MEN.
A
PPARENTLY THIS SORT OF THING WILL NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS LONG AS MEN GOVERN THE WORLD
.