Letters to Jenny

by Piers Anthony

  I remembered another one of those trick math-type riddles. Get your fingers out of your ears—I’ll give you the answer too. (How come you’re so ornery?) If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three hens lay in five days? Now here’s how you tackle it: first you simplify it. If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a given period, then one hen would lay one egg in that time. Doesn’t that make sense? So it’s one hen, one egg, in that day and a half. That means two thirds of an egg in a day. Okay so far? Now it’s just a matter of multiplication. Three hens, each laying two thirds of an egg in a day, would lay six thirds, or two full eggs in a day. So we have a production of two eggs a day. In five days it would be ten eggs. That’s your answer. Now you can adapt it: if a girl and a half eats a chocolate pudding and a half in a day and a half, how many puddings will Jenny and Cathy and a therapist eat in five days?

  Sigh. I don’t eat many puddings, because they have too much sugar, and I stay clear of extra sugar. This week I read an article in SCIENCE NEWS about a syndrome related to diabetes they have discovered, and it seems to be what I’ve got. You see, most diabetics are fat, but I’m not. Sure I watch what I eat, and I exercise, but I never did put on weight even when it was otherwise. Well, now they call it Syndrome X, which is obviously an abbreviation of Xanth: thin diabetics. It seems we have high blood sugar, but also high levels of insulin in the blood, because our body cells just don’t use insulin very well and it piles up. Now they think we are at risk for heart attacks, because that extra insulin causes trouble in the blood vessels. Then they clog, and blood pressure rises, leading to—Oops, I don’t like that! But don’t worry; not only am I thin, I have low blood pressure. I think my exercise keeps my blood vessels clear, so I shouldn’t have any problem. But it was a disturbing article, and I think I’ll continue to stay clear of sugar and to exercise vigorously, if it’s all the same to you.

  Today when my wife came back from town she reported half a dozen baby water turtles trying to cross our drive. They hatch out, and are supposed to find their own way to water, but sometimes they do get lost, and of course evolution never prepared them for fences and asphalt roads. So we went out to help them, but found only two: one alive, one dead. Apparently the ones my wife helped across the road had gone on toward the lake. I took the one down to the lake, and it was plowing through the thick weeds toward the water when I left. It’s nice living in the wilderness, and we plan to keep it this way forever.

  I received my first copy of Xanth #12, Man From Mundania. The next one is yours, Isle of View, in a year. Can you keep a secret? Okay, don’t tell anyone: Richard Pini of Elfquest is considering whether to make View into a graphic novel. You see, he has expertise exactly where it is needed: in the elf aspect. We hope to get together one of these months and work it out, and if it seems feasible, we’ll sign contracts and things and get the project rolling. What’s that? You want to be there when we work it out? Now look, Jenny, it isn’t that easy to—I mean, it’s really pretty dull stuff, deciding whether to do small black/white comics first, or jump immediately into a massive expensive color edition, and what artist to use, and what it will cost, and my agent Kirby McCauley, who by coincidence is also Richard Pini’s agent, would have to figure out what terms are appropriate, you know, who gets what when the thing goes on sale and the money starts coming in, so it’s all pretty technical, and—I mean, you want us all to pile into your hospital room and lay out charts and things across your bed? It would never work; your room’s too small. So—will you stop that? I just explained how impractical it is. Just because it’s Jenny Elf we’re talking about, you don’t have to—Sigh, okay, I’ll see what I can do. No promises, though. (You can be as bad as your mother, when you get set on something unreasonable, you know that?)

  Remember when we had to replace our pump, after the lightning strike? The new one has more power, though it’s supposed to be the same one-horsepower. Now when I turn on the water full force to refill the horse water tub, it arcs right over the tub and splashes on the ground. Stop laughing! I have to choke it down and fill the tub slower. Yes, the big spider is still out there, and there’s a little brown toad, too. I found it in the barn a couple of times and thought it was lost, and guided it outside, but it kept reappearing inside. I don’t know how it got in, but if it finds flies there, okay.

  I read a novel, She Who Remembers, that my wife picked up in town. It’s historical, set in southwest North America before its discovery by the white man. I read it for comparison with my Tatham Mound, which I have now completed in first draft, 180,000 words (that’s big) and am about to spend a month editing. She Who etc. turns out to be a romance, with men forever yearning for women and women yearning for men, but it does move along well and is more interesting to read than some historicals. My novel is quite different, though it is mostly pre-white American Indian and in the same general genre, and told from the Indians' point of view, as is She etc.

  Oh—when we came home yesterday, and went to turn off our alarm system, it alarmed instead. It malfunctioned, which annoys us; we’ll have to have it checked. And one of the things we picked up at the other house was a small collection of candles, which are useful when there is a power failure. Two of them are scented: they smell of raspberry jam and apple butter. I like them; they have personality.

  Today I spent some time reading an eight page missive from a woman with a daughter named Jenny. No, it’s not your mother; this is Toni-Kay. She’s five feet tall and likes to paint—you saw a picture of one of her cat paintings—and every so often she sends me a nice original painting, and I can’t pay for a gift though I hate to have her use her money to buy the canvas when she has to scrimp just to survive. She wants to buy my novel Balook when it comes out, though it will probably cost $30 in hardcover. She saved the money, then saw a big book on cats for sale at that price and got that instead. You can see how foolish some folk would call her, but you know why I don’t see it that way. Well, when Balook is finally published, I’ll send her a gift copy; that much I can do. She tells how she had a strange dream-vision of a man stabbing a woman of her general description to death, and the next day there it was in the newspaper: a grisly stabbing murder of a woman that a girl of twelve discovered. It’s eerie, and it reminds me how desperate the lives of others can be. What joy of life she has is achieved through her painting. Jenny, do you happen to know where the wand is, that I can take and wave and fix everything that is wrong with the world? So you can just get up and walk out of the hospital, and Toni-Kay can walk away from her situation? I need that wand.

  SapTimber 29, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  You know, I hadn’t heard from your mother in a couple of weeks, and I was getting worried, so I called her. She had just arrived back from the torture chamber dentist, who had been ripping out working on her jaw, and she felt horrible. But I made her laugh, because she mentioned needing kneading dough, and I told how my sister used to form it into the shape of someone’s bare bottom and spank it. Who said it can’t be fun to make bread? Anyway, the dentist seems determined to keep your mother from visiting you or writing to me, but I think she will outlast him and finally tell him to get out of her face. It was a relief to learn she was only in physical pain; I was afraid she was mad at me.

  So how’s my week been? Maybe like yours. Every time I run now, I get spiderwebs plastered across my face and sandspurs in my socks and biting flies all over; they bang into my face and even fly into my mouth as I run. I have to plow through dog fennel that reach across my path from either side, and avoid thorny blackberry vines. Sometimes it’s wet and I have to avoid puddles. Sometimes it’s dry and the sand skids under my feet. In short, running is getting to be a real challenge. Last Monday I went out again to chop out sandspurs—have you ever been stuck by one of them? They are little balls of hooked spikes, so they hurt when they stick you and hurt when you pull them out—and there were so many that I saw it was hopeless; I’d have to spend as muc
h time keeping them out of the path as I do running on it. Now it galls me something awful to give up my running path and let the confounded sandspurs and biting flies be victorious, but I just can’t afford the time. So I came back and told Cam (my wife—she was Carol Ann Marble before she married me, so her initials were CAM) to order exercising machines, and I’d try exercising inside the house. She can’t exercise outside at all, because she’s allergic to those fly bites. So she ordered an exercycle and a treadmill.

  Now you see what I’m getting at. I don’t know what those therapists make you do, but if they could they’d put you on machines like these, so it’s probably somewhat like your workouts. Naturally the treadmill was back-ordered until next month—someone at Sears always knows what you want, and takes it out of stock so you can’t have it soon—but we did get the cycle. It’s pretty good: you pedal, but it also has hand-bars that move with the pedals, so you can push-pull with your arms at the same time and exercise them too. You can do it all with the pedals or all with the hands, or anywhere in between. It keeps track of how many miles you go, and how long you do it, and your pulse rate and all. So I tried it for twenty five minutes and went six miles, which is twice what I’d do running, so now I know: divide the mileage by two to get a comparable level. My pulse rate varied from 140 to 160, which is slower than when I run, but I don’t have all the muscles for this type of exercise yet. So if you ever get so you can pedal and pull, you’ll probably be on a device like this, traveling miles without getting anywhere. Maybe we’ll buy some of those video tapes that show you riding through the Yellowstone Park or somewhere while you exercise. In a year or two I’ll be writing a novel, Killobyte, about a man who is paralyzed and depends on a computer for his life-support, and watches a program, and discovers too late that it’s a suicide program, intended to kill him when he loses the game. I signed the contract for that earlier this year, but haven’t had time to write it yet. No, don’t worry; it can’t happen to you; you’re not on life support. The travel-programs business reminded me of that, is all. So if your therapists ask you whether you get bored during therapy, tell them you’d like to watch one of those programs, but don’t ask for Killobyte!

  Speaking of cycling: this week I got on my bicycle to ride out to pick up the newspapers—it’s a mile and a half round trip—and the rear tire was almost flat. Sigh. It was a sandspur. That’s right, they even make tires hurt! I went to patch it—and our full tube of rubber cement turned out to be empty. It had all evaporated away in the tube. Growr! We had to buy a whole new kit to get more cement, because of the conspiracy of the manufacturers. I normally have low blood-pressure, but that sort of thing surely raises it. Why can’t they make tubes that are tight, and why not sell you only what you need? Because they can make more money this way. Tell your mother to curse them for me.

  But I did see something interesting out there. A pine tree. What do you mean, so what? I know we have thirty acres of pine trees here. I know it’s a tree farm. But this is one we hadn’t planted, and it’s different. It’s not a slash pine or a longleaf pine; it may be a sand pine, which means it seeded in naturally, on the other side of our drive. That makes it special. It’s a baby pine, about waist high. Yes, we’ll keep an eye on it. No, you can’t have a pine cone from it; it’s too young to make pine cones. Make them give you an ice cream cone instead. Do they have pine flavored ice cream? Ah, well; don’t pine.

  Another thing that depressed me this week, almost as much as the notion that your mother might be mad at me, was a fanzine. A fanzine is an amateur magazine about science fiction and fantasy. I write each month to one where I can interact with fans and other professional writers. No it’s not always polite; it can get mean at times. I am politically liberal, and most of the folk there are politically conservative, and I delight in making them look like asses when they try to argue their ridiculous views. But they really annoyed me this time. You see, I had that death-row prisoner write in to them, because I thought the interaction would do everyone good. He stated what he had done, and went on to other things that interest him, such as flying saucers. No, not the kind that fly when your mother gets mad! I mean the ones with little green men from Mars in them. But some folk approached the editors at the World Science Fiction Convention recently and asked them to cut him out, and the editors have now censored him out of the magazine, though the majority of the letter-writers said he should be allowed to have his say. He is a murderer, true, and his crime was detestable, but to censor him out because of anonymous complaints—that is just plain wrong, and it disturbs me so much that I may stop writing to them. Just so you know my attitude, so you can copy it if you like it: in a society of laws and decency, even murderers have certain rights. You don’t censor those you don’t like, you just avoid them. That’s not because of their standards, but because of yours.

  Doctor Edell on the radio just now: a girl called in with a sore tongue, and he said “Hold the phone up to your face and say ‘Ah.’ “

  I am now editing Tatham Mound, and it keeps nudging up longer as I keep adding in things. I wasted time trying to find out what the pattern was on Pasco Plain pottery, because the little girl named Wren was making her first clay pot. Know what I finally learned: there isn’t any design on it. That’s why it’s called “plain.” Yes, I realize that was obvious. I just wish I’d realized it before I wasted that research time. Now the novel is 185,000 words long, and by the time I finish it should be over 190,000 words. That will be about 500 pages in published form. It’s an emotional experience, because whenever I get done with a novel, I feel as if I am losing part of my life. Also, there is so much tragedy in this one. Remember, my protagonist marries two wives among the Cherokee—they called themselves the Principal People—who were later killed by smallpox. He returned home to Florida and married again—and smallpox wiped out his family again. It was one of the diseases the white man brought to America. I get all choked up when I read about it, even though I wrote it. So why didn’t I write a happier story? Because the bones of his second family are buried in Tatham Mound. That’s where the novel started; I knew it would be a tragedy at the outset, because I was animating those who were buried there. But it still hurts. Your mother is threatening to read that novel; fortunately it should be 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, before it is published. Maybe by then she will have forgotten about it. I haven’t even sold it yet. Yes, I hope to make a lot of money from it. No, I didn’t write it for money; it was just something I had to do. You know, like therapy. But I’d like to make money from it too. What do you mean, how much? What business is it of yours? Oh, stop looking like that! Ask again after my agent has sold it, and maybe then I’ll tell you.

  Today I received a package from Richard Pini: several comic books, ranging from small black and white to a 180 page full color amended edition of ELFQUEST 1. It has some pages the original didn’t; I compared it to my daughter Cheryl’s copy. Another is an elegant slick comic version of a BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode. Stop drooling; these are mine, not yours! I have to go over these and come to a conclusion what type of treatment I would like for the Xanth comic version. Remember, we are pondering doing Jenny Elf, who will surely look a bit like you. It would be fast to do a small comic, and slow to do a big fancy one. But I like the big fancy one! Sigh. It can be hard to form a conclusion. I also received four martial arts novels from a writer named Steve Perry, who would like to collaborate with me on the reworking of my out-of-print martial arts novels and on a new one. The trouble is that my time is so valuable and my reading rate so slow that the value of the time it would take just to read them would be more than I would be paid for them. No joke. So how fast do you read, Jenny? That fast? Well, I don’t. So what do I do? I want those old novels back into print, as they are the only ones of mine out of print, but I don’t want to use that time. I mean, I could be writing another Xanth novel instead! Well, let me know if you have any advice, Jenny.

  I have some different enclosure
s for you this time. One is a little page of stickers to put on credit cards; I thought you could stick them to plates, armrests, your wheelchair—are you in it yet?—books and whatever else amuses you. If it doesn’t amuse you, throw away the labels; they are just junk mail. No, don’t stick one to Cathy! There’s a clipping about a kid supposedly stolen at Disney World; that wasn’t you, was it? An article titled “How To Get Out Of Your Own Way” whose first statement is “My life seems to be out of my control.” Do you ever feel that way? One about dinosaur stamps; they claim a brontosaur isn’t a brontosaur. That’s like saying “There ain’t no such word as ain’t!” A plan for a private little garden; I think your mother is already setting that up for you. One about hand-feeding a pet praying-mantis named Claws. A Brain Boggler puzzle from DISCOVER magazine, along with the answer, so you don’t have to sweat it. I had another of those, but can’t find it now. Curtis. Alligator Express. I understand you use these enclosures to delay therapy; well, these should delay it right out of existence!

  Well, keep skidding along, Jenny; I have confidence that your life will get more interesting soon, and I’m hardly ever wrong.