Letters to Jenny (33 page)

Meanwhile, what else is new? Well, the fanzine I write to published an edited-down version of my Convention Report, cutting out some of the detail about traveling and such, which makes sense. So now those readers know what it’s like to meet you. Unfortunately, it may be the last thing I send them, because I just can’t abide this business of censorship. I told them how I felt, and others have too—another writer even called me last month to tell me how emphatically he agreed with me, and that he was writing a strong letter to them—but no such letter has been published, and in the latest issue they published a snide remark by someone they favor—the one I implied was a sociopath, for taking pride in squishing spiders—about my being “testy” and taking my marbles home because of not having my way. In short, someone who will practice censorship is not about to admit that it’s wrong. So I will indeed take my marbles home, and I may not be the only one. They can ponder that at leisure. I don’t know whether you consider it an honor to be featured in my last report to a magazine, but I assure you that many of their more decent readers will be glad to know about you. I may write up the matter in the Author’s Note for
Virtual Mode
, as it is my custom to comment on what happens to me while I’m writing particular novels. Meanwhile, with a certain irony, the one who set this off, the prisoner on death row, feels very guilty about causing such mischief. He didn’t cause it; I caused it, by having him participate in what was supposedly a forum open to all. He asked what I thought of what he did to get sentenced to death, and I have written to tell him in unmincing words: he had no more business killing that girl than the fanzine had censoring him. I don’t like what he did any better than I like what that reckless driver did to you. But what I like and what I do may be different things, because what I do relates to principle, not pleasure.

All of which is pretty heavy discussion to hit you with, at this season. And I still haven’t tackled those heavy subjects that got squeezed out last week. Well let’s tackle one of them: the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. I know, I know, you couldn’t think of a more boring topic if you concentrated for a week, and your daddy’s rolling his eyes as he reads this letter to you, wondering if maybe I didn’t just take my marbles home, I lost them entirely. Well, shut up and listen, girl, and if you’re still bored at the end, okay, you win. You see, a scientist recently said that the two most significant things to happen in the past decade or so in paleontology—that’s the science of the earth’s history, which includes dinosaurs—were the discovery of the periodicity of extinctions and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. The extinctions of dinosaurs and other creatures turns out to follow a pattern of about twenty six million years; every time that period passes, boom! more extinctions. Because, it seems, severe meteor showers hit the earth, blasting things to smithereens. That’s how come the dinosaurs departed, so we mammals could take over the world; you owe your existence to a meteorite from space. So okay, you understand about that, but what’s this business about stupid shale? Well, the Burgess Shale was a fossil-bearing section in Canada about a city block in size and ten feet thick. It’s in the Canadian Rockies, 8,000 feet up. But the fossils are of sea creatures, so you know something strange must have happened. The fact is, back about 530 million years ago that region was under the sea; since then the mountains have formed and lifted it up. Remember in “Tappy” the bit about how history lives in the decline of the mountains? Well, it lives in their uplifting, too. Our earth is dynamic, and if you could watch fastmotion pictures of it, one frame every hundred thousand years or so, you would see how it wrinkles and the continents slide about. But that’s not the point.

You see, there’s a lot of life in our world, and much of it is in the ocean. But there is a greater diversification of life forms in that one little sample of the Burgess Shale than in all today’s oceans. And it’s different. There are creatures there never seen before or since. And this makes no sense, according to the conventional theory of evolution. It’s supposed to be that simple forms evolve into more complicated forms, and split off into new species, so that the more time passes, the more species there are. But here at the beginning there were more species than there are now. What happened? Can evolution be wrong? Well, not exactly; we aren’t about to return to the Biblical version, saying that God created everything in one week. But it does suggest that everything existed a lot sooner than we thought, in that “Cambrian explosion,” and that the pattern since has not been one of increasing diversity of species, but of the elimination of most of the original species. Maybe by those meteor blasts every twenty six million years. We’re just lucky that it was our branch of life that survived; had one of those meteors hit a bit to the side, it might have abolished our ancestor and spared something else, and today’s life would be quite different. Instead of you in Cumbersome Hospital, it would be an invertebrate with a squintillion legs. You don’t find that interesting? Well, I do, and I think maybe I’ll use such a world as the setting for Mode #3,
Chaos Mode
, and we’ll just see what Colene, my suicidal protagonist, thinks of it. She’s into that sort of thing—extinctions. Forty years ago, when the Shale was discovered, they tried to classify it conventionally, and it just didn’t work; now they have done the job over, and scientists' jaws have been dropping. So admit it, Jenny—don’t you find the reclassification of the Burgess Shale a bit interesting after all?

Okay, I hope you have been having a harpy Christmas. This letter should arrive about two days after Christmas, when you’re sinking into Post-Holiday Depression, and really weight you down. Don’t be mad at me for making you think when you wanted to laugh; you were the one who made me tell you all about Colene in
Virtual Mode
last week, so that I had to postpone the Shale. Christmas doesn’t mean a lot to me; I just keep plowing on with my work and my thoughts. Christmas day my family will drag me away for a couple of hours for opening presents and having a big dinner and such, but I think I’d be about as happy celebrating with the Grinch. Do you ever find holidays depressing? Some folk do, I just find them sort of neutral.

Speaking of depressing: I had to exercise on the cycle today with it raining (it’s on the pool enclosure, outside but under cover) and the temperature mucking about between 39° and 41°. I wore a shirt and warm body vest and got through okay, cycling just over ten miles in half an hour, but I’d rather have it warmer. Tonight it’s supposed to get colder, and tomorrow colder yet. We worry about our plants, that may suffer freeze damage, and our dogs, who are not young any more. It’s not supposed to get this cold in Florida!

Well, have a good holiday, Jenny. I’m sorry I didn’t have things to make you laugh this time, but maybe you can enjoy thinking instead.

Dismember 29, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

So I started out doing eleven fan letters, bringing my total for the month to 145, with about 15 more in my “unrush” pile. Then came the mail: 18 more. No, I won’t have to answer them all; several can be done with just Ogre Cards. But I’m just barely holding even. Well, I’ll catch up on some more on Sunday, after I write to my family; that Family letter now goes out to ten members of the wider family, and some of those ten recirculate their copies to others. Your mother knows exactly how it is done. Today, ironically, my parents, both of whom have one or more PhD’s, are known less for their credits than for mine. “Oh, you’re related to
him
?!” You will have some of that experience, Jenny, when
Isle of View
is published next year and your relatives start being known through you. “You’re related to
that
Jenny? I don’t believe it!” Some will recognize you from the graphic edition the Elfquest folk will publish. “That’s Jenny Elf!” So brace yourself; you have some interesting times coming, in due course.

No, I didn’t send you any gift for Christmas. My mind works in obscure ways. Neither Christmas nor gifts mean a lot to me; what counts is personal contact and understanding. I have been receiving gifts from fans, and it’s awkward, because I don’t send any in return. I want to discourage it. For one thing, they tend to be from female admirers, which makes it awkward at the outset. Three more arrived today. One from a female admirer, another from her husband. I think he caught on that (A) I was giving her a polite no time of day, and (B) I’m a useful contact for a hopeful writer. And he’s a hopeful writer. Now I have to explain to him how I do superior dialogue, when the truth is, I’m not sure how I do it. Critics think my dialogue is bad. Sigh.

So how did you say you were doing? Eating more pudding? Speaking more words? Somewhere in the pile is a letter from Sue Berres, who gives an unpronounceable term for how you have to learn to speak again. No wonder you have trouble! Think how much easier it would be, if they had an easy term for it. Well, keep plugging away at it.

So how am I doing? I’ve got a nuisance cold. Oh, you could tell? By my attitude? Usually I stave off colds with vitamin C, and I don’t care how many doctors say it doesn’t work; I am right and they are wrong. No, I don’t think vitamin C will make you recover faster, though I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. But this cold snuck up on me while I was on a long phone call with my agent, getting ready to market
Tatham Mound
. I went into the sneezes, and thought it was an allergy to something in the air. Hours later I realized it was a cold, but by then it was late. You have to use vitamin C right away, or it can’t do much. So I’m feeling generally about the way your mother feels after the dentist has entertained himself fishing for another elusive bone fragment (wouldn’t be sporting to catch them all at once!) and blowing out my sore nose every ten or fifteen minutes. No, the commercial pills don’t seem to work on me; my daughter got me a couple of kinds, and my nose laughed at them. Well, “laugh” isn’t quite the proper term; “snot” is. Finally yesterday I tore up tissue and stuffed it into my nose so it couldn’t drip on the keyboard; that gave me an hour to work in peace.

Oh, we had a decent Christmas, and I trust you did. My daughters came home from all over; one had been visiting in Michigan, and our roads got frozen over and closed, so we weren’t sure we could get her back. She was visiting the family of a Jewish friend. But she made it back, bringing her friend, so he had the privilege of participating in our Christmas. I think he paid more attention to it than I did. But I did receive a Sony Walkman “Outback” radio/cassette player, so that I can listen to music in stereo while exercising. It looks like a little waffle iron when opened for the cassette. A daughter dragged me out to shop the day before Christmas, and among other things I got my wife a box of chocolates. In 33 years of marriage I have learned something, after all. But overall I’m exactly as klutzy about such things as the average man. That’s why God made women, after all.

We had a cold wave. Oh, you had it too? But we aren’t used to such things in Florida. We’re on a kind of wooded peninsula in Lake Tsoda Popka, and our temperature doesn’t go to the extremes it does elsewhere; even so it hit 16°F and all our decorative poinsettias and such were wiped out. We had snow flurries, the first I’ve seen in thirty years in Florida. Cheryl went to Michigan to see snow—and during her absence it snowed on her car, here. We had hundreds of icicles on the eaves. When it warmed, they fell one by one, crashing; it was several hours before I figured out where the crashes were coming from. I hate cold weather!

Toni-Kay Dye sent cookies in many shapes; a number are dinosaurs, including a Xanthasauras. You remember her; she painted “Cats in a Window” for you. I sent her a copy of my Sci-Con report. And no, you can’t have one of those cookies; wait till you can chew better.

What’s that? You say you’re getting tired of this depressive letter? Sigh. Sometimes it’s as hard for me to be bright and cheery as it is for you to goose someone left-handed. It’s not that you don’t want to, just that—well, never mind. Let me tell you about one of the newspaper clippings I’m enclosing: here in Florida they raised the taxes and the tolls on a bridge, and drivers got mad. So they “shot toll machines, hurled plums at toll collectors and filled toll baskets with cherry bombs, razor blades, liquid soap, guns, bras, panties, shrimp and chicken dinner leftovers.” Ha! You laughed! I heard you. You know it isn’t funny; that’s what makes it so funny. So admit it: depressive humor can be fun too.

Meanwhile I have now written 28,500 words of the 30,000 I hoped to do this month on
Virtual Mode
, and will write the rest tomorrow. After Colene won the key by freaking out the thug who had it—you know, that bleeding contest—she gave it to Darius, who is from the fantasy realm. But two things happened: she just couldn’t believe him, and thought he was deluded, and he learned that she was suicidal. He needed a woman full of joy to be with him, because where he lives emotions can be transferred directly from one to the other. A woman full of depression would wipe them both out. So he used the key and disappeared—at which point she realized that he
wasn’t
crazy and she had just missed out on what could have been the best thing of her life. And he, too late, realized that his effort to save them both was in vain; she would die anyway, alone. He should have taken her with him and loved her even if he couldn’t marry her. Thus is set the stage for the main adventure of this novel: how they get together again. Soon she will be meeting a friend along the way: Seqiro, the telepathic horse. Stay tuned.

Naturally other things piled in to take my time from my writing. I had to judge the winner of the story contest Morrow/Avon had at a New York book fair. I wrote the beginning, about an ambitious female reporter who wants an important assignment but is put on an adoption story instead. Then she discovers that all the babies though of different races and sexes, are practically carbon copies of each other. What can account for this? The contestants, ages 15–17, had to finish the story. I got to see the four finalists. One was unfinished, another was full of blood and guts and alien monsters, one was close but not quite, and one was in proper proportion, and I declared that the winner. Yes, it was by a girl; they seem to have better taste in this area. So she’ll win the $50 prize. Yes, of course I used up more than $50 worth of my time judging the entries; that’s not the point. Yes, you can enter such a contest some year, if you get to handle the computer well enough to write. Or maybe an art contest.