With a Tangled Skien

  Anyway, I suspect that special element in my fiction is the personal touch. I am not content to follow the standard rules of plotting, characterization, and style, though these are good rules; I want my fiction also to live. When I succeed, it does live for me, and I hope for my readers, too. I do feel what my characters feel and I can cry, literally, when they hurt. I can suffer pangs of parturition when I finish with a novel; of course the words remain, but I am no longer in it; it has ceased to be an ongoing aspect of my life and has become part of the record of my achievement. Its thread has been cut, and I must proceed to the spinning and measuring of the next one. But while I'm in, I am involved.

  Sometimes I dream about my characters. I love Niobe, I love Cedric, I love Luna and Orb; they live in my fancy much as living people do. Is it foolish to care for nonexistent folk? Then leave me to my foolishness! There is too much insensitivity and isolation in this world; there should be no shame in caring, even if only for constructs of the imagination. Indeed, in certain respects, I prefer imagination to reality and shall explain why. But this entails some baring of the nerves and is uncomfortable for some folk, including some writers. I happen to be more introspective and expressive than most, so I do get personal in these Notes. Bear with me I was born in Oxford, England, where both my parents had their degrees. Ours was a Quaker family, and my father worked with the British Friends Service Committee in Spain, supervising their relief program there during the Spanish Civil War. As I understand it, this was largely concerned with the feeding of hungry children, who had the worst of it during the ravages of combat. Generals like to speak of conquering territory and reducing the enemy's combative ability, but this is rough on the children whose territory it is; their houses are destroyed arid their families killed and their food disappears. That is the real meaning of war, after the generals have played their games and moved on to new challenges. I will have a good deal more to say on the subject of the suffering of innocents in war in the next novel in this series. Wielding a Red Sword; too often it is the blood of children that accounts for the color.

  This war in Spain went from 1936 to 1939 and presaged World War II; the Nazi regime used it as a kind of testing ground for new weapons, then turned that experience into something that caused the rest of the world to take note. Many people were affected by the war in Spain, including such literary figures as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and science fiction writer Ted Cogswell... and me.

  My father was arrested by the victorious Franco government; he disappeared, in the manner that has more recently been popularized in Latin America, but was fortunate enough to manage to smuggle out a note. It reached my mother, and, armed with that proof, she was able to get the authorities to admit that my father was in custody; they had, of course, denied it. Truth is the first casualty in war and in its aftermath. They agreed to release him conditionally: that he depart the country. That way the dictatorship did not have to admit to making a mistake— dictatorships just don't make mistakes—and got to take over the stores of food intended for children. I doubt that much of it reached those children thereafter. Thus it was that we came to America. It is entirely possible that had this false arrest and eviction not occurred, I would be living today in Spain, perhaps trying to write fantasy in Spanish.

  I was not aware of such details at the time, but I felt their impact. I was not in Spain during the actual war; I remained in England with my sister, cared for by "Nana," a British girl hired for the purpose, as has been the custom there for perhaps a longer time than America has been colonized. Thus it is not surprising that some of my earliest and fondest memories are of Nana, whose actual name I never knew. Even my memory may be skewed; it was probably "Nanny." Then the time came for my sister and me to go to Spain. I learned to my chagrin that Nana, who I thought was my mother or equivalent, was not going. We were to be in the charge of two other people, who were in fact my parents. They had spared me the possible anguish of separation from them, before, by distancing themselves; they overlooked the discomfort of this separation.

  I don't want to make more of this than it was, but my awareness of that separation has remained with me throughout my life. The echo of it is apparent in the separation of Niobe from her son; the things of my life do make their way into my fiction, though not in ways that any critic comprehends. I suspect the same is true for other writers.

  In Spain I adapted gradually to the culture and the language; at age five I was beginning to speak Spanish. My sister had a pretty, lacy Spanish dress. I would wake in the mornings and see the moving shadows of palm fronds cast against my wall; I viewed this as an adventure, trying to guess which frond would dive farthest in the wind. I saw my first movie there. The Three Little Pigs. My memories of Spain are more populous and clear than those of England, though not as fond. But then, abruptly, we left. Oh, it was an adventure; we traveled to Portugal, to Lisbon—I remember the hotel room there—to board the ship Excalibur. No, as far as I know, that name has no connection to my later taste in fantasy, but perhaps it was a signal. As it happened, the Duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII of England—was taking that same ship to the New World to be Governor of the Bahamas; I remember seeing his car hoisted out of the hold at Bermuda. The Nazis had hatched a plot to kidnap or convert them to their cause, but that had been botched and he crossed the Atlantic unmolested.

  Again, my memories of the time are more personal than historic; I was seasick, vomiting over the rail into the ocean—the Atlantic remains polluted to this day—and I had my sixth birthday at sea on August 6, 1940. The chef lacked sugar, because of the War, and so I was presented with a cake made of sawdust, nicely covered with icing and candles. It was a surprise when we cut that open! I was somewhat put out at the time. Today, ironically, when I can afford a genuine cake, I can't have it, because of my mild diabetes. I think my daughters are jealous; they've had many real cakes, but never a sawdust cake. For a present I received a harmonica, which I played ceaselessly thereafter; I trust the Duke appreciated the music. I have always liked harmonica music since then; it, too, appears in my fiction, most notably in the Adept series.

  But this was my second uprooting, though not my last, as my family slowly fragmented and my parents eventually divorced. Gardeners will tell you that root-pruning doesn't hurt; I hesitate to agree. I did not understand the problem, though in retrospect I do. I had no continuing security of situation; both the people and the places closest to me kept changing. By day I got along, but darkness brought nightmare. I would lie awake at night, staring at the wan lamp that was my only security from nocturnal monsters.

  If I were to personify my closest acquaintance of these years, it would be Fear; I have known it longer and better than anyone else would believe. I began to wet my bed at night, and this persisted, despite the efforts of others to shame, cure, or punish me, until I was ten years old; living folk simply lacked the leverage my nightmares had. I remember being in boarding school in first grade, when one of the bigger boys took off the sheet to expose me in my soaking nakedness. It didn't matter; what does one humiliation matter, when one is already in Hell?

  My family moved again, and again, and I attended five different schools in the course of my three years in first grade. I learned how to fight, because I had to; I just couldn't learn how to read and I wasn't strong in math, either. That may explain why I was later to be a math instructor in the U.S. Army and an English teacher and professional writer in civilian life. In the throes of this childhood I developed nervous twitches of head and hands, and I counted things compulsively. I suspect early tests showed me to be of subnormal intellect. My physical growth slowed, then stopped; I became the smallest in my class, male or female. I suffered daily stomachaches, and every few months there would be a real gut-tearer that would incapacitate me all day. Not until I had a kidney stone at the age of forty-seven did I experience worse abdominal pain.

  The only thing worse than being with other people, who picked on me physically and emotionall
y, was being alone. I would imagine that it was all one interminable bad dream and that eventually I would wake up and be back in England, the land of happiness. But it never happened, and in time I accepted the fact that I was in America to stay. There is a direct adaptation of this in my three-volume novel Tarot: a day in the life of an eight-year-old boy. It is literal. I retain an interest in Hell, as is evident in this novel, Skein. When I was wet and shivering in my bed in New England, my feet so cold they felt hot, I decided that if Hell was hot, I had no fear of going there.

  There is no need to detail all of it, though there is a great deal more. I have, I trust, presented enough to show that my early life was not perfect, and that the realm of imagination seemed to have more to offer me than did reality. In this, I believe, was the root of my later passion for writing. How much better to organize my worlds of imagination so as to make them meet my needs more completely! To come to terms with the monsters that first pursued me and discover the joys that lay beyond. A popular song played on the radio while I worked on this novel, one line going, "My dream is real; reality is wrong." Oh, yes.

  I finally discovered reading, progressing in a bound from exclusion to complete inclusion in the world of print. Suddenly I was in The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, a novel of the Middle Ages written in 1869, about three hundred thousand words long. It took me months to get through it, but I read every word faithfully, and I lived in that world, and was desolate when it ended. Later I got into reading fantasy and science fiction, and there were worlds galore for me to romp in. I read slowly but deeply—to this day I am a slow reader—and tuned out all the world around me in favor of the universe perceived through the window of the printed page, sometimes to the annoyance of others who thought I was being perverse. But I needed that other universe; in a certain respect I owe my sanity to it, for it helped me to survive the rigors of the real world. I had no solid emotional place to stand in reality; the fantastic genre provided me with my anchorage. And so it was perhaps inevitable that I become a creature of that genre, as I am today. Piers Anthony is my strength; it is a pseudonym, but more of my reality is associated with it now than with my mundane identity. I was always a nonentity in Mundania, and remain so, but in fantasy I am a figure of consequence.

  Perhaps ironically, my mundane existence has improved steadily since my teenage years and is a good one today by any standard. I have been married more than a quarter-century, have two bright and healthy daughters, and a pleasant lifestyle. Of course, much of this is runoff from my success in fantasy, for it is mundane money I receive for my fantastic efforts. But even the course of an improving life does not necessarily flow smoothly. I have shown the foundation of my need to write; of course it also helps to have some reasonable intelligence and creativity and perseverance and luck, and these have helped me. But I feel in one major respect I came at my career via the monkey's paw.

  "The Monkey's Paw" is a famous story by W. W. Jacobs in which a couple is granted three wishes on a monkey's paw, but each wish is granted in a manner that makes it horrible. They wish for money—and their son is killed, so that the benefit comes to them. They wish him alive again, and the corpse reanimates and approaches. At last they wish him dead again, and are left with nothing.

  Well, the mundane world gave me a wife, but I wanted more; I wanted to be a successful writer. It was an unrealistic ambition; only one in a hundred who make the effort ever breaks into professional print. But for eight years I kept trying. Our first child miscarried at four months add was stillborn; that was not only a personal loss, it eliminated my exemption from the military draft, so that, before my first year of marriage was done, I was in the U.S. Army. Our second baby was stillborn at five months, at the time when I declined to sign up for the U.S. Savings Bond program (as I recall, they then paid 2.5 percent interest) and was therefore removed as instructor and set to weed-pulling and similar duties, as well as being denied promotion beyond PFC. It was also the time when I was naturalized as an American citizen; in the final courtroom ceremony there were forty-nine Army wives and me. That event made the local TV news in Oklahoma; you don't see too many PPCs in uniform getting naturalized. I also had my first science fiction story accepted, by a magazine edited by Damon Knight—which folded before payment or publication, washing me out.

  Back in civilian life, our third baby was born prematurely at six months, lived one hour, and died the day I lost my good job at an electronics company and had a doctor advise me that the mysterious fatigue I suffered was all in my head. One day in May 1962, and much of my mundane world was lost, again. It looked as if we would never be able to have a child of our own, my ability to earn a living was shot, and I was in serious doubt about my health, for I knew that my physical condition was not imaginary. It actually was ten years before it was diagnosed as diabetes; in the interim I was ridered on insurance for all mental diseases. No joke—and it wasn't funny at the time. One company tried to jack up my premium to almost double in addition to the rider; now I once sold insurance, so I know that was blatantly unethical, if not illegal.

  So we lost three babies, and each loss was associated with dramatic and generally negative changes in our married life. But after that Day in May we gradually reorganized. My wife went to work, so as to earn our living while I made a more serious effort to become a writer— by putting my full time into it, instead of writing on the side. In that year I succeeded; I sold my first two stories. I was on my way at last—but I never would have had the chance, had any of those first three babies lived. There was the monkey's paw. My wife had to be free to work, and our expenses had to be low; a child would have nullified that. I would never have sacrificed my babies, had I known, had I had any way to save them—yet their loss enabled me to achieve my ambition. Thus it was that I became a writer, by the devious and often unkind machination of Fate. Motive had at last been joined by opportunity. That sort of thing, too, is reflected in this novel.

  So I had become a writer. Even then, the devious route had problems and surprises. I couldn't earn a living on stories; the word-rates were too low and editors too fickle. So I moved into novels, and it was a struggle, because short fiction was my natural length. It wasn't until I sold my fifth novel, Macroscope—actually the ninth I had written, and it had been rejected by five publishers, for book editors are fickle too—that I felt comfortable in that length. Then I liked it well, and I gave up on stories; today I have had more novels published than stories, which is unusual for a story writer.

  But by then I had trouble in Parnassus: a publisher was taking in money for subsidiary rights but neither reporting them on the statements nor paying me my share. I protested in a private letter—and got summarily blacklisted. I protested privately to a writers' organization—which tunneled my letter on to the publisher and advised me that I had acted rashly and might be guilty of libel.

  There were other complications, but the upshot was that I got a lawyer, got most of my money, lost several publishers because of blacklisting, and departed in deep disgust from that writers' organization, which was evidently operating under false pretenses. I damn well did have the right of the case and detest such dishonesty. After that, times were lean for me, as a writer; my success fell behind that of others who had come into the picture when I did, and I piled up a total of eight unpublished novels even as my name was deleted from contention for awards. Parnassus is no kinder than the U.S. Army to those who stand on their rights, and Satan smiles.

  But I had not lost all my publishers. I survived, though my income from writing was not great. My wife continued to work. Another writer showed me how to sell novels from summaries, rather than writing them complete; that meant that instead of selling part of what I wrote, I wrote only what sold. That one change in marketing caused my income to triple. Meanwhile editors were shifting about, publishers were buying each other out, and most of those who blacklisted me went elsewhere. Markets reopened. I can't say this was because the establishment had any change of h
eart; Parnassus, like dictators, doesn't admit error. Mainly it was that I never gave up and I now had an agent to help fight the war. It's harder for a publisher to blacklist an agent, because he represents a number of writers, some of whom are important enough to have clout. My leverage had improved.

  Two of the editors I had worked with on stories moved into books: Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey. They remained interested in my work. But there was a problem; I was writing my science fiction for Avon, who had always treated me well, and Avon had the option. That is, in the vernacular, they had first dibs on my next novel in the genre. So—I expanded into a "new" genre, one I had had little success with before: fantasy. It was a purely tactical move, to take advantage of a new market. Avon was generous enough to agree to this, with the understanding that if Del Rey (technically that imprint didn't exist then, but let's not quibble) did not like my fantasy, Avon would have the next crack at it. But Lester did like it, and thus I came to write A Spell for Chameleon. It wasn't perfect, either in summary or in manuscript, but I had the fortune to encounter in Lester an editor who knew what he was doing. That, unfortunately, is rare in Parnassus. I revised the novel per his advice, and it was published.

  I had the additional fortune to encounter in Judy-Lynn an executive who knew what she was doing; that, too, is rare, but it manifests in the type of presentation, promotion, and sales push novels get, and this can make an enormous difference. Spell took off like magic. It won the August Derleth Fantasy Award in England, where they evidently hadn't gotten word about my bad reputation. A leading American genre newspaper got sudden amnesia and failed to list the August Derleth awards that year, and of course Spell took no American awards. But it became one of my most commercial novels, and the Xanth series it commenced has about as many fans as any.

  In this manner I discovered that I liked fantasy. Oh, I had always liked it as a reader; it just hadn't scored for me before as a writer. Now I found that it was easy and fun to write, and the readers liked it too. There was then developing a high tide in fantasy, fostered in significant part by Del Rey, and I just happened to get into it in time to surf my way to the top—through no initial effort of strategy or timing of my own. Chance put me into it—or, if you prefer. Fate. Once I was in, of course, I was quick enough to capitalize on my situation. Thus by this devious and seemingly coincidental route my serious career in fantasy proceeded. My income tripled again... and again. I now have a better career in fantasy than I had dreamed of as a writer; reality has surpassed imagination. One series led to another. And that, roughly, is how I came to write this present novel. Skein. It is not the path I would have chosen, but it got me here. For those who tell me they would like to be just like me and write fantasy the way I do, I pose this question: do you really? Then go fetch your monkey's paw.