Letters to Jenny Read Free Page B

doing, and she said you are improving. That’s the way! I guess it’s no secret that you have a long way to go. It’s like falling into a deep pit, and having to climb your way out inch by inch, and it’s hard, and your folks are sort of peeking over the edge, far above, and calling to you, but they can’t climb for you. You have to do it yourself, and maybe you get very tired, and maybe you slide back down sometimes, and that’s very frustrating. But you’re in a good place, the Acute section; you should see the ones at the A-ugly section! The point is to make a bit of progress when you can, no matter how slow it seems. Remember what I said: things take time, in Mundania, because there is hardly any magic there.
    The nurse said you hadn’t regained consciousness yet. That’s all she knows! She must think that if you don’t sit up and scream, you’re not awake. Actually, your mind is going at a mile a minute, but your body is stuck in slowsand and doesn’t respond. Nerves take a long time to heal; you just have to be maddeningly patient. Maybe that’s why they call the folk in hospitals “patients.” They’re really “impatients” because they want to get out of there fast.
    Well, you’re stuck there for a while. At least they can’t stop you from dreaming. You can dream about being in Xanth. I haven’t figured out yet what Jenny is doing in Xanth; I think she’s lost, at first. So is Che, the winged centaur foal. I think she has one of her cats with her, which is odd, because there aren’t many elf-cats in Xanth. Well, we’ll see.
    Remember, don’t let any night mares in. Only Mare Imbri, the day mare, with her sweet dreams. And smile for your mother; it makes her so happy. She wrote me a four page letter, when you smiled.
    Marsh 18, 1989
    Dear Jenny
,
    I think you had a better day than I did, today! This is Saturday, and I was trying to edit and print out a piece I wrote for a writer’s magazine. I mention you in that piece, though I don’t give your name; I just said that even funny fantasy can relate to serious life, and told how a twelve year old girl perked up when I wrote to her, after being pretty much out of it for months. You see, some folk think that fantasy is stupid and that writers should stick to serious things, like international politics, instead of wasting their time with puns and goblins and all. I get annoyed by that attitude, for some reason, and when I get annoyed I can become most expressive. So I wrote that article, and I suspect it will be published eventually. Anyway, everything went wrong. Do you know about computers? Not yet? Well, here is all you need to know: when you sit down at a computer, it is out to get you. It will pretend to behave, but the moment you aren’t watching, it will do something to you. You have to be paranoid to stay ahead of a computer. So when I went to print out my article, I thought things were fine. I have a nice laser printer whose print looks just like this: [tell the one who is reading this letter to you to hold it up for you]. See? Usually for letters I use the dot-matrix printer, while I save this one for my novels. So the first copy I printed had the wrong heading on it: it said ISLE OF VIEW, which is the title of the novel Jenny Elf will be in, any day now when I catch up with a pile of letters. All right, my fault; I forgot to tell it this was a separate article. So I typed in Anthony instead, and printed those 8 pages again. This time it didn’t have any page numbers. Somehow they had gotten erased when I changed the heading. So I remade it to get it right, and ran off a third copy, and this one had the “Anthony” and the page number—but it had changed it to justify on the right margin. That is, it made the words line up evenly on the right side, just as they do on the left side. Growl! I didn’t want that! So I remade the heading once more, and ran off the fourth copy, and it finally was right. My afternoon was gone, too. So you