Free Letters to Jenny by Piers Anthony Page B

goblins for the rest of his life? So he hasn’t made up his mind.
    Jenny and Che and Gwenny get into a Tsoda fight, squirting bottles of the water of Lake Tsoda Popka at each other (we happen to live on Lake Tsala Apopka, here in Florida: another of those odd coincidences) and get drenched; it’s great fun. Godiva doesn’t quite approve of this, for some reason, but of course mothers don’t have to have reasons for their objection to fun. So the kids clean up (Che has to face away and close his eyes so as not to see any Panties) and Jenny tells a story instead. She has to adapt it to Xanth terms, which is tricky, and it doesn’t work perfectly, but the essence comes through. That’s the excerpt I printed out for you. At the end, their shared dream is shaken apart when the mountain trembles: Cheiron Centaur is commencing the siege, by having rocs drop stones. The battle has begun. Okay, now at last you can go to that scene. This is my first draft, so maybe there are typos, and I may change things later. If you see something that is fouled up, let me know and I’ll fix it before sending the novel to the publisher. I’ll also show a copy to the Elfquest folk.
    Um, it occurs to me that you may feel that Gwenny is a name too close to Jenny. Well, I pondered this, but it just does seem the best way to simplify Gwendolyn. One letter of a word can make a big difference; I don’t confuse you with my daughter Penny, for example. Penny is 21 now, in college, with a job, but she’s still my little girl. So I think the name’s all right.
    On to other business. I’m enclosing a Sunday Curtis comic you may have missed, and a cartoon about the space shuttle launch; if you look at it twice you’ll see what’s funny. And two clippings about girls you may like: one saved her friend’s mother’s life, and the other sued her boyfriend when he stood her up for a prom. These are your type of girl, right? Plus an envelope with Polish stamps— oh, these’ll never fit in the little envelope I typed! Well too bad, I’ll type a bigger one. What do you care about Polish stamps? Well, they have pretty pictures of horses, penguins and dragonflies. The letter was sent to my old address, but managed to reach me anyway.
    I understand you are using a computer now, to help communicate. I’m glad of that. Maybe they’ll set you up with a paintbrush program, so you can paint pictures on the screen. We have Microsoft Paintbrush, which uses a mouse; you can paint good pictures with it, if you have the patience, and save them or print them out. If they haven’t gotten something like that for you yet, blink your eyes and wiggle your toe until they do; I suspect you could have a lot of fun with the screen and that mouse control, and maybe turn out some great pictures.
    I also understand you are back in Elven Armor again, and casts on your arms. You put a good face on it, but I know that isn’t much fun. I’d tell you to look on the positive side, but I know it’s a pain, so might as well say so. One of the periodic debates I get into with those who believe in God is why God allows awful things to happen to folk who don’t deserve it. Don’t tell
me
you were a bad girl so you were punished by being almost killed. But of course I explain it all in my Incarnations series: Satan is doing it. Early next year the final novel,
And Eternity
, will tackle the matter of God and resolve it. You’ll probably like that one, when you get old enough to sneak it past the Adult Conspiracy censors. Anyway, I understand also that you are getting a blazing fast red wheelchair, and that the nurses in the halls will be set spinning when you zoom by too fast to see. “What was that?” one will ask, “A bird? A plane?” and another will reply: “No, that’s Spinning Jenny!” You know I joke about the doctors and nurses, and how they can get piled up ten deep, but I’ve actually had some experience with the real work that they do. I collaborated with a