Letters to Jenny (36 page)

I hope your mother is able to get help for you and her. Maybe the folk at Cumbersome Hospital figured she could take over and do everything that the 24 hour shifts of assorted personnel did, in addition to earning her living. I may be wrong, but I’m not quite sure that’s the case. If the right person could come in and help, it could be very good. I remember how good the Nanny was in England, when I was young; if I had had a choice, I would have stayed with her and not bothered with my family. Of course they don’t have such folk in America; closest we come here is the movie with Mary Poppins. Ah, well.

Meanwhile I had a letter from the Bird Maiden. Did I tell you about her? Yes, my Computer Find says I did, a couple of letters ago. Well, she sent a whole package of Christmas cards and letters to her mother in America, for remailing at local rates—25¢ instead of 90¢ overseas from Germany—and they ran it through one of their Patented Post Orifice Cruncher machines and burst it apart and most of the letters were lost. But I got mine, with 90¢ postage-due from Germany, and then another letter from her explaining what had happened, thinking her letter had not arrived. Mundane mails are like that; they have no respect even for bird maidens. (Come to think of it, the way you use that finger, I should call
you
the Bird Maiden!) Anyway, she told me how her cute 18 month old daughter Alessandra did a Cute Thing: locking her mother outside the glass door on the upper-story balcony in Dismember while she was washing it. It was an automatic latching door, sort of. So there was mother outside in temperature in the 30° range in her housecoat, and there was cute daughter inside alone, with the apartment locked. The neighbors below had to toss up an overcoat and shoes, and Bird Maiden had to keep Daughter entertained and occupied for an hour so she wouldn’t do something like turning on the oven and climbing in for a snooze. So they played pantomime games through the glass, while the locksmiths came and drilled out the lock and opened the door so they could rescue Bird Maiden before she froze. And you thought that only
your
mother had adventures like that!

And how is my dull life doing, you inquire? Well, after a year and a half they finally got our gate buzzer done. Sort of. Had to build a tower to get the radio signal over the trees, and at this point it has cost us over $3,500—just to be able to open our front gate from the house. Yes, yes, I know—your mother encounters such problems on an hourly basis. But she’s used to it. So we tested it, and it worked. And next day it didn’t. So my wife and I took the gate buzzer and she drove out to the gate—it’s three quarters of a mile by the road, remember—and signaled me to buzz it open, and I tried it in all different parts of the house.

The buzzer buzzes the radio unit in the attic, which in turn buzzes the gate to open. But the hand buzzer turned out to work only in the parts of the house closest to the attic unit. Sigh. So we finally mounted buzzers on the walls, upstairs and downstairs, where we know they work, and we run to buzz them when someone pushes the button at the gate. It worked when the lady editors from Putnam and Berkley came to see me yesterday, anyway.

Oh, what were they here for? Just visiting. They were at a sales meeting in Orlando, and they’re reading
Tatham Mound
, and
Unicorn Point
is on the New York Times best-seller list, so they came over. We went to eat at a restaurant where they have a fine what-do-you-call-it, where you take plates and serve yourself to whatever you want in the way of anything, all you can eat. There was even an ice cream vending machine, which the ladies delighted in using, then pouring on chocolate syrup and nuts and all. I stuffed myself with onions and mashed potato and three kinds of pudding. You’d have loved it. No, you would not have to take onions! I still feel stuffed, a day later.

So keep struggling through, Jenny. People do care about you. You should already be receiving fan mail; two readers asked for your address. So if you get letters “care of Jenny Elf” you’ll know.

February 1990

A symmetry is achieved. A story continues.

FeBlueberry 1, 1990

Dear Jenny,

I’m starting this letter a day early. It is my 30th letter of the month, after 160 last month. What happened was that yesterday 39 letters arrived in the mail, 31 of them in a package from DEL REY BOOKS, about a dozen of them dating back to Apull 1989. Right, not long after I started writing to you. Someone must have cleaned out the cobwebby recesses of his desk. If your mother had sent her letter through that publisher, and it had taken nine months for it to be forwarded—well, if I said what needs to be said about those bloatbottomed noodlebrained functionaries at publishing houses, my mouth would catch fire. You see enough of that with your mother already. I think her teeth had nuclear meltdowns. So anyway, I have now answered all those letters, doing them at the rate of up to seven letters per hour cold—that is, from first reading to proofreading—starting last night, and as long as I’m doing letters, it’s your turn. So if this arrives a day early, don’t worry; it won’t happen again. The Post Orifice would never allow it.

What’s that? You want to know how I answered letters so fast, when it takes me five minutes just to type the address and ten minutes to read the letter? Well, I made up an apologetic paragraph for the glossary, and invoked that at the beginning of each letter. That gave me about half the letter right off. Then I touched on personal points, answering questions and such. I have some other standard paragraphs in the glossary, such as for the question “What’s the next Xanth novel, when’s it due, and what’s it about?” which help.

Oh, you want to see one of those paragraphs? Why? To make sure it isn’t the same as the first paragraph of
this
letter? Jenny, have I mentioned your suspicious mind?! Okay, here it is; I just type the word “late” and then CTRL-F4, and it magically transforms it to this:

I received your letter on Jamboree 31, along with 30 others in a package from DEL REY BOOKS, some dating back nine months. I feel mixed pain and anger with this inordinate delay, and only hope at this point that you have not long since given up reading my books in disgust. It seems pointless to answer you in any great detail, since I can not even be sure your address remains valid. My apology for the long non-response, and if you write again directly to this address, you will receive a faster answer. Which is not to say that I’m trying to encourage more mail; far from it. But ordinarily you should have had a reply within a month or so.

Okay, satisfied? It isn’t quite the same as the lead-off for this letter. So now let’s get on to—what? I can’t quite make that out, Jenny; you know I can’t read those hand signals as fast as you can make them. In fact I can’t read them at all. Just the “Thank You” signal, and these definitely aren’t that. XANTH—you want the Xanth stamp? Ouch! No need to make a curse-face at me! Oh, you mean the next Xanth novel glossary paragraph? Sigh. Okay.

Xanth #14,
Isle of View
, should be published in OctOgre. It’s about Prince Dolph’s choice of which girl to marry, and also about Jenny Elf from the Elfquest graphic novel realm, who is visiting Xanth and finds it odd. There will be a graphic (comics) edition as well, from the Elfquest folk.

Now are you satisfied? You thought Jenny Elf would not be in there? O Ye of Little Faith!

I’m enclosing Curtis, with Calvin/Hobbes on the back—I’m rather pleased with the way I work that—and a special Hagar the Horrible sent me by another correspondent. She modified it a bit, see, to make it fit me. Yes, I thought you’d like it. I get the darndest things from my fans. I have a dancing flower, and an hourglass that has green bloblets in clear liquid instead of sand, and a letter opener in the form of a thirteen inch Samurai sword. Another thing a reader sent me just a few days ago was a thirty page History of Xanth with dates from the time man arrived there right up through the present, complete with charts and genealogies. It’s amazing, and just in time for the writing of
Question Quest
, about the long life of Good Magician Humfrey. Now I won’t have to guess about things; I’ll use that as my reference. I’ll try to get it published as an appendix, with due credit to the reader who made it. He seems to have worked independently of the Lexicon and
Visual Guide
, because he doesn’t have their errors. What a nice surprise!

What’s that? No, Jenny Elf isn’t in it, because he hasn’t seen that novel yet. But yes, I told him about her.

Meanwhile, how are things here? Our poor dead bushes remain dead; we hope they will sprout new growth from the stems, but so far those stems are shriveling. Maybe from the roots. We hope. The grass is sending up new shoots, at least. We now have a big yellow Gerber Daisy flowering in the last two days; it looks almost like a sunflower. And the azaleas—remember how I said they are supposed to flower only in early spring, but kept it up through summer and fall, until the DisMember Freeze? Well, they lost some leaves, but now are back flowering again, managing not to miss a month. So there is some joy in Florida.

What else? Well, no more visitors. Chapter 4 of
Tappy
(working title) arrived from Phil Farmer, and yesterday I was going to make a note for Chapter 5—and suddenly had a thousand words, summarizing the whole chapter. Just before every old letter in the world landed on me. So tomorrow I’ll start in writing that chapter. I had Jack and Tappy fleeing in a small aircraft, but others were pursuing and gaining. Farmer got them out of that, then they were headed into a strange glowing cloud that kills the minions of the Gaol empire, but Tappy blithely forges ahead while Jack is about to pass out—which is where Farmer turned it back to me. But he did tell me how to get into the phase-traveling ship in that cloud. I’m going to have them do futuristic medicine on Tappy and fix it so she can see and talk again—except that she doesn’t. It’s as if she doesn’t want to. So Jack has to work with her, and try to get her to—while the Empire forces are closing in. Because Tappy is the Imago, the one power that can stop the Empire, if only—what do you mean, you’ve read that before?

Meanwhile I’m progressing on
Virtual Mode
too, in which Colene and Seqiro, the telepathic horse, reach the region of the evil Ddwng of the DoOon—you’ve read that too? Jenny, you’re impossible!

Well, keep going, Jenny. I understand you’ll be going to school, too, with folk who know how to do it. Harpy learning!

FeBlueberry 9, 1990

Dear Jenny,

Let’s start with the Book Report—what’s that? The comics? You want to start with the comics? I really can’t understand why, Jenny.

Okay, this time I’m enclosing a whole week of Curtis. This is because I just couldn’t risk having you miss it. Your mother might be having an attack of the purple grue and not read it to you. You see this is about Curtis' vegetarian friend Gunk, the comic strip’s token white, who is running away with the action. It is frog dissection time at school, and I remember when we hit that at college. They were going to dissect a live worm. I made a cutting (uh, no pun) remark about how I hadn’t gone to college to participate in vivisection, and other students began to get uneasy, and finally the instructor backed down. “Well, if I
had
cut open this worm, you would have seen thus and so,” he said, and went on with the class. I’m sure you can picture the scene well enough. So now you know what to expect from Gunk. Did you notice what happens to the teacher’s skirt in the third comic? Then he puts the curse on her, and—say, Jenny, why don’t we go visit Flyspeck Island some time? I think we’d like it.

I’m also enclosing a picture of your mother eating an apple with her new false teeth. The local newspaper ran it. You probably didn’t realize how widely known she is.

Okay, now that Book Report. I’ll—what? Pictures? You want to talk about the pictures first? Well, okay. This week I received a big bunch of pictures from Toni-Kay Dye. She’s the lady who painted “Cats in a Window” for you, with the purple wrapping that matched your Cinderella Gown. Do you watch junk TV? She reminds me of the policewoman in
Hunter
. No, not in personality. She took pictures at Sci-Con 11, and you were in many of them, Jenny. These give me a solid evocative memory of the occasion. She’ll be sending pictures to you and your mother too, if she hasn’t already, so you can see what I mean. One of them I didn’t keep; instead I sent it on to Richard Pini. I told him it was coming, on the phone, and now he’s teasing his wife about this incriminating picture of him kissing another woman. Yes, that’s you, Jenny. Aren’t you ashamed? How come you don’t look ashamed?