Letters to Jenny (4 page)

Are you bored yet? No? Then why are you snoring? Oh—it’s the Bed Monster snoring. Yes, he does that. He’s not interested in music or pictures, just ankles. Okay, I’m running out of time, so I’ll tell you about one more thing. It’s a secret, so don’t tell your folks, because they might get the wrong idea about Xanth. Or, worse, the right idea! One of the things in
Heaven Cent
is when Prince Dolph watches a mer-woman change her fishtail into legs. They can do that, you know; they make legs when they need to walk on land. Dolph is worried, because his mother Irene was very strict about boys not being allowed to see girls' panties. I mean, wouldn’t you die of embarrassment if you were walking along, and a gust of wind blew up your skirt, and some stupid boy saw your panties? But then Dolph relaxes, because he realizes he isn’t seeing any panties—because the mer-woman isn’t wearing any. He won’t be in trouble after all! That’s the part you mustn’t let your folks know about, because they might not think it is funny. But Dolph is incorrigible; he keeps trying to see someone’s panties, and he does get in trouble for it, as boys do. We tackle this issue head-on in Xanth #15, which is to be titled
The Color of Her Panties
. That’s the mer-woman’s panties, of course. You see in #14,
Question Quest
, the Good Magician Humfrey searches for the one question he can’t answer, and that question turns out to be “What is the color of the mer-woman’s panties?” He can’t answer because she doesn’t wear any. It’s a real problem. But remember, don’t tell anyone about all this; I don’t want to get in trouble. Anyway, I still have to write #13 and figure out what Jenny Elf is doing there.

Keep getting better, Jenny; you’re making everyone very happy. Except maybe King Fracto Cumulo Nimbus, the evil cloud, who hates to see anyone being happy.

Marsh 26, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

I have a whole lot of news this time, so you won’t have to sleep through this letter. I wrote you a three page letter a week ago, and it probably bored you, but this one will be more interesting.

You see, I have just finished writing the first draft of the first chapter of
Isle of View
, and have just introduced Jenny Elf—and the second chapter will be all about her. But before I tell you about that, I have to tell you some other things. Yes, I know I promised this wouldn’t be boring, but such a promise is almost impossible for an adult to keep. I was delayed for several days because I had to proofread the galleys for another one of my novels,
And Eternity
, which will be published early next year. If I don’t read the galleys carefully—they are an early printout of the novel—and catch the errors, it will be published all wrong. But at least I had figured out the chapters for
View
. They are all alliterative—that is, the first letters match—and they sort of hint at what’s going on. Here, I have printed out a copy for you. The first chapter is “Chex’s Challenge.” Do you remember Chex from
Vale of the Vole
? The winged centaur filly? She got married in the next novel, and now she has a foal, Che, and someone has kidnapped him. So her challenge is to find him before anything bad happens to him. She’s pretty desperate, the way mothers are. At the end of the chapter she encounters an elf girl with a cat.

I paused here to phone the Cumbersome Hospital and inquire how you were doing. (I had to wait until my daughter Cheryl got off the phone; she’s home from college, and she’s my Elfquest expert. Yes, I know I have written a story for Elfquest—it’s in
Blood of Ten Chiefs
—but my daughter is the elf freak in this family.) The lady took a while to answer, because she was with you. I didn’t mean to interrupt that! She said you had a good day and were smiling a lot, and that you sat in the sunshine for a while. That’s nice. I told her to tell you I’d called. You do remember who I am? Don’t give me that perplexed look! I see that smirk hiding. You’re trying to pretend you don’t remember, and it won’t work. Not this time. I think.

Where was I? Oh, yes—the elf girl and her cat. That’s Jenny Elf, and her cat can find anything—except home. So she has to chase after him (maybe it’s a her—your mother described your eleven cats and one rabbit to me, but didn’t say which one of them finds things, so I don’t have a name or description yet. When you hear this letter, you can let me know exactly which cat it is) so she can bring him back home when he gets lost. This time he was looking for a centaur feather, and he found it, but by the time he did, he was lost and so was Jenny Elf.
Really
lost. Because, you see, she’s not from Xanth. Xanth elves are associated with Elf Elms, and the farther from the elms they get, the weaker they are. Jenny is from the World of Two Moons, and she doesn’t know anything about elms or centaurs. That’s right—she’s an Elfquest elf, and oh, boy is she lost! She was so busy chasing after the cat, just trying to keep him in sight, that she paid no attention to the route they took, and made a journey no one else ever made before, from Elfquest to Xanth. The second chapter will be all about her. See, it’s titled “Jenny’s Journey.” Now I’ll have to bore you with some technical stuff again. You see, I can’t just take an Elfquest elf without asking. But as it happens, I know Richard Pini, who publishes Elfquest; his wife Wendy draws the pictures. So I’ll make sure it’s okay with him. I’m sure it will be. Some day they may make Xanth into one of their comics, so we have to get along. When we met, Cheryl just about freaked out, meeting someone that famous. She was trying to drink a milkshake, as I recall, and each time she took a mouthful he would say something funny so that she had to laugh. We have a picture of her trying not to laugh in the middle of a mouthful; her cheeks are bulging and she looks desperate. I’m the only other one I know who is mean enough to do that to a fan. Anyway, it should be all right, and this will be something unique: Elfquest in Xanth. If folk hate it, it’s all your fault.

Okay, you can wake up now, the boring part is over. Chex mentions that she’s looking for Che, and Jenny’s cat takes off, and Jenny runs after him because she knows she’ll never find him if she doesn’t keep him in sight. He’s not running away from her, understand; he just gets so excited with the chase after something that he forgets. He really does want to come home, once he finds what he’s after. Chex tries to follow, but they disappear into the thick jungle where she can’t follow and are lost. That’s why the second chapter is from Jenny’s view. The cat finds Che—but the goblins have him. That’s bad, and Jenny knows she has to do something to get him away. She does, but then the goblins chase her too. She finds a raft and takes Che on it on the With-a-Cookee river where they can’t go. (Oddest coincidence: near here we have the Withlacoochee River that flows the same way.)

Well, there’s a whole lot of adventure I won’t bore you with, because I haven’t figured it out yet. But near the end they learn why the goblins grabbed Che: the grand-daughter of their chief is a very nice girl—goblin men are all ugly and mean, but their girls are pretty and nice—but she’s lame and just can’t get around very well. So they wanted to get a good steed for her, so she can ride places. Of course Che is too young to ride, let alone fly, but the goblins didn’t know that. The goblin girl is Gwendolyn, Gwenny for short, and Jenny likes her a lot. It’s really too bad she can’t have a centaur to ride. No need to spoil the ending for you—what? But—well, if you feel that way, okay, I’ll spoil it. They finally take Gwenny to live with the centaurs, and Jenny stays with them too, because no one knows how to get back to the World of Two Moons. Not in this novel, anyway.

There’s more to the novel, about Dolph and which of his two betrothees he chooses, but you have the idea about Jenny Elf. She wraps up in Chapter 14, and then we go to Dolph and the girls for what turns out to be a really difficult decision. I wonder if the Elfquest folk will want to take Jenny back to their world and have her in a comic? You never can tell what will happen. Anyway, you now know more about it than anyone else does, and I hope you’re satisfied. You aren’t? You what? Oh, yes, Jenny Elf does look a bit like you, in her elfin way. I thought you understood about that.

Odds & ends: remember when you smiled for the first time, and your mother was so excited she wrote me a four page letter? Well, then you laughed, and she wrote six pages. You had better slow down, because you don’t want her to write even more! I managed to make her laugh, when I told her on the phone about the key I have on my computer; when I touch it, it flashes DON’T TOUCH THIS KEY AGAIN!. Another says HELP! I’M BEING HELD CAPTIVE IN THIS COMPUTER. It’s a strange thing: your mother started smiling and laughing again just about the time you did. Isn’t that a coincidence? Or maybe it was magic.

I meant to explain about something that happened way back at the beginning of time, when you listened to my first letter. (When folk are my age, it can be easier to remember the distant past than what happened five minutes ago.) Your mother asked you whether you’d like to have a Jenny Elf or a Jenny Ogress in the novel, and you indicated that you wanted the elf. She asked you again, and you indicated the elf again. She asked you the same question yet again, and you began to get a bit impatient, because you’d already answered it twice, and wondered why she wasn’t paying attention. Then she asked still another time, and you got sort of frustrated. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET YOUR ATTENTION—HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH A TANGLE TREE?! I SAID ELF! At which point she began to get overexcited, and had to leave for a while. Well, I wanted to explain her side of it. At first she could hardly believe that you had answered, because the truth is, you hadn’t answered many questions before. So she asked you again. Then she was afraid it was just chance; maybe your eyes were moving around randomly and she was just seeing what she so much wanted to see. So she asked again, and you answered again. Then she thought, suppose she tells the nurses, and they say impossible, that child’s in a coma, you imagined it, so she might bring them in to see for themselves—and you’d be in a coma, not answering anything. So she asked again; she didn’t mean to upset you. It can be very difficult to function smoothly when someone you love is in trouble, and it’s very exciting when things start to get better. I guess you figured that out, because when she got hold of herself and brought a nurse in, you showed them that yes, you did know what you were doing, and the one who maybe thought it was impossible had to eat her thought. Now you know the whole story. Don’t tell your mother I told.

Each time, I learn something new. In your mother’s last letter she mentioned that you and she are vegetarians, because you love animals too much to hurt them by eating them. Would you believe, I am a vegetarian for the same reason. Well, there were other reasons too, but once I left high school back in 1952 I sorted things out in my mind and decided not to eat any more meat. So for 37 years it’s been that way. My wife is a vegetarian because I am, and my daughters are too, though I told them they should make up their own minds about a thing as important as that. None of us like to hurt animals. My older daughter Penny has pet mice, because someone at college got a white mouse to feed to his snake, and when the snake wasn’t hungry he let the mouse go outside his door in the hall. Penny was appalled; she knew that a tame white mouse couldn’t survive in the wild, let alone the college dormitory hall. So she took it in and got another mouse as a companion for it, because mice don’t like to be alone any more than people do. The oddest thing was that the mouse she saved wasn’t grateful; it tried to bite her finger every time she fed it. We helped her buy a three story mouse cage for them. Penny has parakeets, too, adopted from folk who didn’t want them. One was for sale at a flea market, and the poor thing was so downtrodden that it just hunched on the floor of the cage. But once it had company of its own kind, and decent care, it perked up and used the perches. We like to have a cage big enough so the birds can fly, you see. I think she has about five birds now, and they all look happy.

Are you asleep yet? Not quite yet? Okay, a little more. We have little spiders around our house, because we don’t like to hurt them either, and they mostly mind their own business. We figure that if they can find enough bugs to eat, they must be doing us a favor. Sometimes one will come across my keyboard when I’m typing, and I wait and watch it till it’s clear. Meanwhile we’ve had a minor adventure with a cow. Our neighbors have cows they raise for—well, we don’t like to think about that. This is a brown cow who somehow got out of their pasture and into our forest, this past week. Last night she even found her way from our drive into our pasture, but she must have left again, because I spent twenty minutes looking for her this morning but all I found was some footprints, cowflops, and the white skull of a goat. Hm. Well, if that cow comes back, she’s welcome to some of our hay, and the company of our horses. I wouldn’t mind if the owner never got around to fetching her back. I’m calling her Elsie, the Bored Cow.

Keep getting better, Jenny; you’re doing great.

April 1989