With a Tangled Skein (49 page)

The Shepherd's Song, in various guises and titles, has its own story: "Come live with me and be my love ..." In the course of Izaak Walton's The Complete Angler (sometimes rendered "Compleat"), which dates from 1653, there are two songs presented, and these are the two used here. Actually, the first one originated with Christopher Marlowe in the sixteenth century. As poems they may not seem like much, but with the music it is another matter. Seldom, I suspect, has a love song had a more enduring appeal-or a snappier rejoinder.

There is a more recent story on another song. The Wetlands Waltz. I have an interest in nature, especially the wilderness environment, as also shows throughout my work, and in this case it overlapped my interest in music. A couple of years ago one of my daughter Penny's forestcamp counselors stopped by to say hello and meet Penny's horse. Blue, who also appears in various guises in my fantasy. The counselor's name was Jill Jarboe. This winter she sent Penny a cassette tape: Songs from the Water World.

It seems that Jill Jarboe had formed a group with four of the boys in the summer camp, called it The Ecotones, and produced this collection of ecologically oriented songs. It's an integrated group; Jill Jarboe is white, while Mike Carey, Mike Kinsey, Shaun Martinez, and Andrew Rock are black. (I support integration, as may also be evident in this novel.) This group is not a high-powered, big-promotion thing; it's just an attempt, I think, to popularize the worthy cause of ecological awareness. Penny more or less put the earphones on my head one morning as I was eating breakfast and reading the newspaper, and turned on the cassette recorder, and there it was. I was impressed; they were nice songs, not your Top-Fortytype popular stuff, but pleasant and quite to the point for those who value Nature as I do.

So I used one of those songs here in Skein, with permission, and anyone who is interested in obtaining the original cassette should write to Jill Jarboe at the address listed in the credit behind the title page of this novel. My reference to The Wetlands Waltz is actually anachronistic, as the song did not exist in 1915 where this novel places it-but of course Chronos could have heard it and carried it back. This is, after all, fantasy; we are not much concerned with anachronism.

Meanwhile, as I worked on the several stages of my writing. Fate stirred her fickle finger in the ongoing minor maelstrom of my daily existence in sundry ways. Life does, after all, go on, and mine is packed with tokens of my interests and orneriness. I bought another Songs from the Water World cassette and sent it to an environmental organization of which I am a life-member, suggesting that they might review it in their national publication for other members who liked a positive approach to ecological awareness. They never responded. I might as well have dropped the cassette into the Void. Then they sent me three separate form-solicitations for contributions. But I had seen how they answered their mail, and the Golden Rule came to my mind, and I did not respond.

I bought some of those sonic bug-repelling devices you see advertised all over, as I don't like hurting bugs if they aren't actually biting me, but don't like roaches in my food or fleas on my dogs-then had a months-long hassle to get a refund, finally involving a visit to a lawyer and a stiff note to the balky local Better Business council, because the devices simply didn't work as represented. queried the "Troubleshooter" column of the newspaper: is there any objective evidence that any of these sonic devices work? So far, none has turned up.

Our Basenji dog, who we adopted eleven years ago after he was run over and the owner never came to claim him or pay the vet's bill for rebuilding the bone of his leg with wire, died of complications of age in the quarter-hour that I received the hardbacked poster for Dragon on a Pedestal used at the American Booksellers' Association convention in Dallas: an unfortunate juxtaposition. Now that poster graces the wall near the dread spot. That was not my favorite dog, but death disturbs me with an intensity that others do not seem to understand. I know that someday I will have to deal with the death of someone a lot more important to me than that dog, and I don't know how I'm going to make it.

I went out on my usual three-mile run, and returned to a different address; the Post Orifice had swallowed our science-fictiony "Star Route" and disgorged "Pineleaf Lane"-fortunately we had gotten to name our own street-sending us into a tailspin of address-change notifications, because our daily mail can amount to as much as ten pounds at a time, We received the notice in March 1984, advising us to notify all correspondents by the end of December 1983. The P.O. expects a lot of an anachronistic fantasy writer.

I got into second-draft typing of Skein and hit a record rate for me-65,000 words in five days, despite a cold snap into the thirties that forced me to bundle up as if in the arctic, and a jamming tab on my manual typewriter. Seems there are only about two writers in the genre who still use a manual machine, and I'm one of them-I think Harlan Ellison is the other-but they don't make manual Olympias anymore, and this one is ten years and ten million words old, so I may yet have to vault to the computer word-processing age, getting custom equipment so I can

retain my special keyboard. You know, word-processing is hailed as a great boon to writers, but I do more actual writing in pencil and on the manual typewriter than anyone I know who is in word-processing; technology does not substitute for imagination and a Dvorak keyboard.

Anyway, after those five days I had to take three days off to catch up on forty more letters. Happened again next month in the final five days typing of the submission draft; in one day forty-seven items of mail arrived, ranging from packages of books to fan letters, including one from a hopeful writer asking whether I would read his 800-page novel and give advice how to get it published, one from a publisher asking for a favorable comment on its enclosed advance proof of a novel, and one from another publisher who sent complimentary copies of a novel I read and blurbed in December. It's a funny thing, seeing my name printed on the cover of someone else's novel; too bad they didn't bother to make the corrections of errors I called out.

I may have noted before the irony that when I had time to read everything in the genre, I lacked the money to buy the stuff; now that I can afford it, I lack the time even to keep up with what I am sent free. I suppose that's parallel to the cake problem I face as a diabetic. And a note from an eight-year-old girl: my youngest fan so far, the same age as Xanth. I answered that one immediately; after all, I was once that age myself. The other twenty-nine fan letters from that day I'll tackle right after I finish typing this Note and my summaries of the final two novels in this series.

I pinched the nerve in my back three times in succession, trying too hard on my exercises, and had to call a ten-day halt while the sciatica abated; now I am easing up on those exercises, and that's a significant private turning point. Every year at my birthday I note the levels I do, and at my forty-ninth birthday I broke all my birthday records, but at my fiftieth I'll break none. I'm two-thirds of the way through my life, and the tide has turned during this novel.

You know. Skein just might turn out to be my fiftieth book to see print. The writing of it was punctuated several times by calls from my agent, setting up the sale of eight of my back books in a package; those fans who bug me about where to find my out-of-print material may soon have an answer.

During that sciatica-that's a shooting pain in the leg where there is no injury; the pinch is actually in the spine, but the body thinks it's in the leg-I glanced at the published comment I had made a year before on Gordon Dickson's Dorsai series (actually it's the Childe Cycle, but I don't know any better), and saw my reference to "Eileen?" therein. Suddenly I had a pain in my mind to match that in my leg, for several days. In Dickson's novel Soldier, Ask Not we see the death of an innocent young man, drafted to fight a war he does not understand on a far planet. He revives from his lethal injury long enough to speak the name of his wife, Eileen, as if trusting her to come and make the hurt go away. That tore me up; I have a deep feeling for those who are taken far from what they have known and loved, and who plaintively wish for return that is impossible.

But on: we bought a videotape recorder, a great boon to my daughters, who have more time for TV than I do. Now they watch the weirdest stuff, some of it unsuitable for the fathers of teenaged girls. Sigh. We also got a cordless remote phone extension, so that I no longer have to dash from the study to the house just in time to catch the dial tone after the last ring; that does simplify my life. My daughter Penny finally got her driver's license; whew! One down, one to go. My other daughter Cheryl took second place in a verbal presentation of her paper on the conservation of soil and water. That was a fitting topic, during this novel; I had taken time to help drill her on it, and suspect she really took first place but that the judges were closet sexists. Of course I may not be completely objective.

I saw a bright triangle of stars in the morning sky, so I ferreted it out in the star books and discovered it was the constellation Libra-the scales. Yes, I was writing the coin-weighing scene along about then. Libra is Penny's sign, because she reads a lot-you know, the Library. I finally got a line on a mysterious, lovely melody I'd heard in fragments for years; I think it is titled Twin Sons of Different Mothers. Reminds me of this novel again, with virtually twin girls, daughters of different mothers. I quest for melodies as I do for story notions; I am haunted by those that flash a few tantalizing notes and disappear, leaving me longing.

I also continued my quest for the Perfect Ping-Pong Paddle-and believe I have found it. It's made of graphite, very light and fast, and the backside has a "long pips" surface that sends the opponent's spin right back at him, messing him up instead of me. Lovely! I used it to defend the honor of Fantasy at my first SF convention, NECRONOMI-CON, in Tampa, in Oct-ogre 1983, the month that three of my novels were published. Of course I took my daughters with me; they loved it, and now they're con-crazy. One of my correspondents attended, and when she introduced herself I didn't make the connection. I wish I were better at spot memory of names!

Phone call from Bowker, publisher of Fiction 18761983, in response to my curt note about the way they listed some of my novels under Anthony and some under Piers, omitted my first New York Times bestseller Ogre, Ogre, and listed my mundane name nine times in succession. I had suggested that they hire a proofreader, since this volume costs $100 and is supposed to be comprehensive. They were apologetic, but noncommittal about the proofreader. Call from a Colorado fan who wished to visit me; he would be traveling with a school group of about twenty people and needed advice where they could stay cheaply. My wife phoned about and finally arranged free camping for them at a local park, and we went out to talk to the park people and clarify that we had the camping permit for them . . . and then the group changed its mind and went elsewhere. But the fan did come to visit me, and I chatted with him for a couple of hours. He wrote later that it was the high point of his life. He was generous; I'm a pretty ordinary character in person, really not worth that sort of effort.

My wife spied a sale on some nice enclosed bookshelves; now we are in the process of dismantling my rickety prior shelving and setting up the beautiful new ones. At last my file copies of my own books are getting proper treatment! I keep one file copy of every edition of every book I have published, hardcover, paperback, British, German, French, Japanese and so on; at present that makes about 150 volumes, and it's growing.

In the spring came the mundane political primaries, and I had to watch the best man in the field, former Governor Reuben Askew of Florida, bite the dust in New Hampshire. Once again the political process wends its inevitable way to mediocrity. And I heard about a recent survey; 96 percent of Americans believe in God, 90 percent of those also believe in Heaven and Hell (it's hypocritical to believe in one without the other); only 4 percent expect to go to Hell. Oh, yeah? Well, I have news for someone. . . .

Thus my mundane life, proceeding in its petty pace from day to day. You can see that when the fantastic is removed from my life, not much of interest remains. If you fell asleep during the last paragraph, I understand. Now it is time to separate from this novel, too, and I do it with a certain muddled mixture of emotions. In one sense I am satisfied, for I believe Skein to be a decent novel. I feel nostalgia for the experience of it that is now passing behind me. I am concerned as I anticipate its coming course through the gauntlet of the publication process and the cynosure of the great readership beyond. I feel advance resentment for the scoffing some reviewers will do about its merits and demerits and the inevitable sneer at this Note. A recent survey shows that the more ignorant a reviewer is, the more critical he is; any professional writer could have told you that twenty years ago. In fact Alexander Pope told us two and a half centuries ago:

Tis hard to say if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill

But he had the answer:

Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely, who have written well.

I am also apprehensive about the flood of mail this Note may generate when the novel sees paperback publication. Oh, yes, I get mail on my Notes; sometimes the reader doesn't bother with the novel at all, just the Note. I had one letter from a person who fished my novel out of a trashcan, read only the Note, wrote me a fan letter, and (I suspect) threw the book back in the can. But he really liked the Note. Well, I daresay he got his money's worth.