Bearing an Hourglass

  There is land. My career as a writer has become increasingly profitable, but I have never been foolish with money. I seek to invest any surplus in something that is inflation-proof, and that is land. We can graze horses on land, and burn the deadwood from it in our stove, and grow new trees on it; and if a daughter should choose later in life to settle here, we have the land. We are buying all the acreage around us that we can and, while Hourglass was in progress, we bought the five-acre lot to our west and are now fencing it for pasture. The local railroad track on our east was taken up and the R.R. right of way put up for sale, so we started negotiations for the purchase of some of that. They wanted an inordinate price. We pointed out that not only is this particular stretch inaccessible to anyone but us, the adjacent property owners, it is through the hill with such steep slopes that no vehicle can cross and no developer would build on it. Eventually we agreed on about half the original asking price. So that useless strip is on the way to becoming ours, and we expect to grow trees there and make it a refuge for local wildlife. But all this, however worthwhile, consumes— you guessed it!—time.

  One trifling detail I may have neglected to mention about that useless gash on our east: it has a fictive identity, because I used it, in somewhat exaggerated form, in a series of novels. It is called the Gap Chasm of Xanth.

  I'm not much for entertainment these days, because for me, writing is entertainment. But I do try to participate in things with my family. We're likely to watch television together; my daughters have learned to call my attention to the screen when a starlet in bursting bikini prances by. We'll go as a family to a movie; we went to Tootsie. Sometimes we can't all go, but we do what we can. I took my twelve-year-old daughter, Cheryl, to the Science Fiction Research Association annual meeting in Kansas, where she and I met the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Fred Pohl, James Gunn, Jack Williamson, Harry Harrison, Lee Killough, and a host of academics. It was the first time I'd left the state to indulge in a formal science fiction gathering in sixteen years, and it seemed about time. I'm not keen on traveling; I have a lot of work to do at home, and traveling consumes great gobs of time. But I owed Cheryl an experience like this, complete with airplane ride, hotel stay, and her chance to meet the author of The Stainless Steel Rat series she enjoyed. It is not every child who gets the chance to meet a Real, Live Author, after all. Fine; we both enjoyed it, and she had a ball with the swimming pool and restaurant meals and even meeting a Piers Anthony fan her age, Mark Miller.

  Then Cheryl spied the ping-pong—oops, I mean table tennis—tables and wanted to play. Now it happens that that game, by its misnomer ping-pong, was the one sport I was good at in my youth. I never went professional— I wasn't that good!—but I did play in scattered tournaments in college and the U.S. Army. After I left the Army in 1959, I regretfully gave up ping—uh, table tennis. But now, with my daughter interested—well, to condense things somewhat, we now have a ping-tennis table at home, and all of us play, at varying levels of skill. But if there is one thing it takes to get in shape in table-pong, it is time. Sigh.

  I discovered that there has been a revolution in the sport since my day. I used to use a light, cork-surfaced paddle—they now call them rackets or bats—but today cork is illegal, while sandwich rubber is in; that stuff didn't exist thirty years ago. No, it's not what they serve for lunch in cafeterias; sandwich rubber is a layered deal with sponge rubber inside, making the surface more bouncy and spinny. I was curious, so I started collecting paddles, questing for the Perfect Paddle. I shelled out sixty dollars for a championship-quality racket surfaced on one side with a designedly dead surface and on the other with a superlive surface called Tornado. (Tornado, as in spin.) The dead side makes spin drop dead so you aren't vulnerable to the superspin artists, while the Tornado is what those artists use to make you need the dead side. I discovered soon enough that I am predator, not prey; I had to use the live side, though in all candor I must say that none of this newfangled stuff matches the speed and effectiveness of an old-fashioned, two-dollar cork paddle. Maybe that's why cork was banned: too good, too cheap. I finally settled on a light, fast paddle with one live side and one superlive side, surfaced with the stuff the Chinese use to win world championships. No, having such a paddle does not make a person a world-class player, any more than having a good typewriter or a word processor makes a person a world-class writer. I am a world-class writer, but table tennis is just fun.

  And while I was testing Tornado, as you may have guessed, a real, live tornado took aim at us, in the way such things do in my fantasy. Its aim was bad and it missed us by five miles and struck Inverness, Florida, instead, twisting off trees, destroying buildings, hurling a car six hundred feet and killing three people in it, and doing half a million dollars' worth of damage. It carried away the sign of the realtor who is handling our Gap Chasm purchase and damaged Cheryl's Middle School. Sigh—I really should have stayed with cork! But now that I have changed to the Chinese surface, the ill winds should have blown over.

  Through all these distractions, I wrote and typed the novel. I had resolved to commence second-draft typing April first (no fooling!), because Hourglass was due at Del Rey June 1 and Mercenary at Avon August 1; at one month per draft, I could just make both deadlines. I prefer to run well ahead of deadlines, but now I was up against the wall, as it were.

  There was one small complication: I had not yet finished writing the first draft of Hourglass. Between the correspondence, my daughter's driving, the land, and the table tennis, I had gotten behind. Well, no matter; I had eighty or ninety thousand words done. I started second-draft typing on schedule, trusting myself to write the remainder in spare time while the typing progressed.

  Spare time? What spare time? Well, in the evenings I like to relax with inconsequentials such as supper, reading one of the squintillion publications we subscribe to, chatting with the girls, and watching TV. By cutting down on the reading and ignoring the TV, I could squeeze in some writing time. Unfortunately, I have another peculiarity: I get sleepy at night. Falling asleep while watching TV is harmless, but now I found myself trying to read and write with my eyes closed. I was coming up on the section of the novel involving relativity, for which I had to do some mind-stretching research, then integrate the material comprehensibly for the reader. So perhaps it is scarcely surprising that the writing was slow, and by April 16 I had typed ninety-eight thousand words and run out of the first draft—just as Norton's party came up against the giant termites, with the heavy intellectual material lurking just beyond. I was in as much trouble as Norton was! Do you have any idea what publishers do to authors who don't deliver on time? I'll give you a hint: I had already had a call from Del Rey Books, telling me to report with my family on June 3, 1983, to Dallas, where the American Booksellers Association was to have a convention. Yes, that's just two days after my delivery deadline, and yes, that's where President John Kennedy was shot twenty years before. I began to sweat. If I had no manuscript...

  But hope was not yet quite gone. All I needed to do was take three days to buzz out the concluding six to eight thousand words of the first draft, another day for a brief Author's Note, then crank out the remaining second draft and be ready for the submission draft by the first of May. I mean, it was theoretically possible, wasn't it? I settled down to work—and discovered a few letters had accumulated. They do that when I am not on guard. All right, I'd take one afternoon to clear them out, then move on my text.

  The first letter was to my agent, the man who sells my novels in New York. Beginning writers always want to know how to get a top agent and become an instant best-selling author. Forget it; an agent doesn't make you famous, he just gets better terms for you when you are famous. You have to get there on your own power. I sold eight novels before I took an agent; then my income commenced rising. This particular letter turned out to involve complex matters with four different publishers, plus a reorganization of the agency itself. One publisher had sent a statement of account that was so far of
f base that my wife and I were flabbergasted. It wasn't just that they were in error, to the author's disfavor by a healthy amount (it's always to the author's disfavor, for some obscure reason)—it was the way they had managed the error. Figuring it all out was like researching relativity, and I had to explain it to my agent in such a way that he could make it clear to the publisher, who naturally would not be eager to understand. That communication to my agent, with its multiple attachments, took me four hours to complete, and my afternoon was shot.

  Okay, I'd do the other letters the next morning, April 18, starting promptly at 9 A.M. But at 8:30 A.M. the phone rang; it was our building contractor. Oh, didn't I mention that? What with the table tennis and the boys my daughters fetched in to play Dungeons and Dragons and computer games, my wife decided we needed to expand our recreation space by enlarging and enclosing our porch, converting it to a heatable, coolable, silenceable playroom area. We had gotten an estimate—phew! who says inflation has been licked?!—and knew that work was to start in due course, after the property was surveyed (a red-tape requirement; of course it had been surveyed before, but now they wanted every cabin, pump, pole, and whatnot pinpointed, too). But this was so soon that we had not even signed the contract. Nevertheless, the crew was on its way to tear down our old porch, and we had to scramble to clear it: fifty-pound cans of horsefeed, chickenfeed, dogfood, an old trunk holding phonograph records dating from my college days, boxes of bric-a-brac, table tennis table, a heavy tool bench overloaded with ghod knows what, a refrigerator, and unclassified junk. I had to find a new shady location for my outdoor thermometer and humidity dial, used to keep track of daily highs and lows and conditions for my runs—I have run my three miles at temperatures as high as 102°F and as low as 39°F, and such extremes do affect my performance—and nowhere else was as good as the porch. These things could not be done carelessly, and we were still at it when the wrecking crew arrived. So while we were inside, signing the contract and forking over the $$$, they were bashing down the porch.

  But that porch abutted our tightly fenced back yard, wherein lurked three of our dogs, Lucky, Tipsy, and Bubbles. Tipsy and Bubbles, spayed females, we had adopted from our neighbor's mongrel litter, which was about to be shipped off to a puppy mill; Bubbles was supposed to belong to the neighbor's boy, so he named her. We had brought her in with her sibling so the two would have warmth and comfort, as we could not bring them inside, where the indoor dogs would kill them, literally; though we were ready to return Bubbles when she was older, the boy had lost interest and she became ours. Tipsy was for Cheryl, and she may be an unusual dog. You know the rule about white on dogs? It's always on the tip of a dog's tail, even if nowhere else. Well, Tipsy has white on the tipsies of her pawsies, but none on the tipsy of her tailsy. Maybe she's unique in caninedom; I don't know. But mainly, that yard contained an earlier adoption, the male, Lucky. He had been a ten-pound waif, the prettiest and weakest of the litter of nine, so that he kept winding up (down?) on the bottom of the pile and yipping piteously. Pups play rough, especially when fed from one dish, and we were honestly afraid he wouldn't survive. He had taken to sleeping alone, under our car, to avoid getting chomped by the others. I was that way myself at that age in human terms; I have empathy. So we took him in, fed him, gave him good vet treatment—and soon he became a seventy-five-pound bundle of muscle who took no guff from strangers or his former littermates. I understand that, too. According to Carl Sagan on the Cosmos TV series, time and death are the secrets of evolution, and I'm sure it is so; I am quite interested in these concepts and have even been known to write novels about them. Sagan is a good man; he's my age. But the secrets of good living are not tune and death, but care and love, even for the aggressive canine—or writer. Now we had to move our fence back before the porch came down, lest Lucky get at the workmen and take bites from unmentionable anatomy. So I got out with the post-hole digger and a roll of welded-wire fencing, working desperately. Just as the workmen reached the final wall, I completed the new fence. Robert Frost, in "Mending Wall," discourses on whether good fences make good neighbors; in this particular case they do. But my writing day was gone.

  Next morning the surveyors were at work; I put Lucky on the leash and took him for a walk in the pasture, and my wife did the same with Tipsy and Bubbles so the surveyors could enter the yard. I was a survey instructor in the Army, though probably in the intervening quarter century I have forgotten more than I ever knew about the subject. But I did understand why they had to run a traverse through the yard, though I could have done it by triangulation. Then we had to rush off, for I had to address the local Friends of the Library group, who were meeting in the City Hall. I don't charge for such things; I regard it as a public service. Libraries are well worth supporting, even though they aren't much on contemporary popular paperback fantasy. A local reporter was there, so he took notes, and next day he phoned me for an hour for an article. Finally, in the afternoon, I caught up on five more letters.

  On the following day the man with the tractor arrived, and a huge truckload of fill-sand to buttress the new construction. I saw that truck and had a notion. We had this huge mudhole where the school bus turns around, just off the county-maintained road. That hole interferes with my three-mile run; I hate having to maneuver around that mire when my stopwatch is going, and sometimes get my foot gunked with mud. I doubt the cars enjoy it much, either. Could we subcontract for a load of lime rock? Yes, we could. So we paid for a twenty-ton load of it dumped in the puddle, and the tractor dozed it smooth. Beautiful! We had just done the neighborhood a service, and maybe now the school bus wouldn't lose an axle in it. Three days later we had a five-and-a-half-inch drenchpour, and some unprintable drove his truck through while the lime rock was squishy, converting our delight to horrendous ruts that promptly solidified in place. We'll need another storm to soften them so we can undo the damage—and now we are in a drought. Such is fickle fate. Meanwhile, yet another writing day was gone, and the sand was trickling ominously through the Hourglass. I was getting nowhere! Writer's Block, where was now thy sting?

  Naturally, once our old porch was gone, it took two weeks for the construction crew to begin work, while the refrigerator remained jammed next to the stove and the table tennis table next to the TV set, waiting for space to move back out, and the cans of animal feeds were squeezed in with our furniture storage. We tripped over boxes trying to get around one another and stubbed our toes on solidities that didn't used to be there. Such is the nature of progress.

  But when I finally had time to write, I moved it right along, doing three and four thousand words a day. Then I typed it at six thousand words a day and got the novel finished by the end of April. Truly did T. S. Eliot say, in The Waste Land: "April is the cruellest month." But I had survived it.

  On May first I started the submission typing—and got hit by another bundle of twenty letters, and appearances at a bookstore for autographing copies—hardly anyone showed up—and at a role-playing convention at the University of South Florida. I'm not much into role playing, but a number of my fans are, so I felt it behooved me to learn something about it. It was interesting; they gave me a beautiful stained-glass picture of Neysa the Unicorn and set up what I suspect is an unusual kind of panel. There were fifteen to twenty knowledgeable role players on the panel, and an audience of one: me. I got to ask anything I wanted to about the subject. It turns out that there are many types of such games, of which Dungeons and Dragons is one, with many shades of difficulty and experience. Some people like direct personal experience, such as racing in cars, while others prefer vicarious experience, such as reading fantasy novels; role playing falls in between, providing a more active experience than reading without the risks of real auto-racing, warfare, or whatever. I discovered that these were my type of folk, with independent attitudes and wide-ranging interests, intelligent and motivated. I conclude that I'm more into role playing, in my writing, than I knew. But this, too, takes time. It didn't help that in May I
also had to proofread the galleys for my novels On a Pale Horse and Dragon on a Pedestal; I'm a slow reader, proofreading is exacting, and my blood pressure rises as I encounter editorial changes in my prose. But I managed to complete everything in time.

  I had one other interruption during this effort. My wife and I had to go for our six-month dental hygiene appointments. We take care of ourselves; I do eat carefully, exercise seriously, and keep up with the doctor, dentist, and oculist. But these things, too, take tune, and it comes out of my working day. In this instance I took along a book to read and pencil and paper, so as to be able to use any slack time available. Sure enough, the hygienist was running half an hour late, so I read a little of Asimov's Foundation's Edge, then used it as backing for my penciled notes. I noticed that others in the waiting room simply sat, some not even reading, merely waiting, as it were, in stasis. It is evident that others don't take time as seriously as I do; it doesn't really bother them to waste it. I am keenly aware that my duration in life is limited; am I unique in this? Even when I'm not writing, I am driven to make my time count. Call me a workaholic if you will, but to me, the indifference to the passage of time that most people evince seems like folly. To me, a life that is slack is a life being lived inefficiently. I don't like inefficiency.

  I looked around the waiting room, listening to the interminable, innocuous sound piped in to soothe the animals. I noted the pictures on the walls and the Bibles placed there by the Gideons, right under the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon mural. I am agnostic, not espousing any religion or pretending to know the actual will of God, but certainly there is much of value in the Bible, and I would read it rather than sit like a zombie doing nothing. I would read the Koran, too, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Tao Te Ching, the Chinese Way of Life. It is no bad thing to heed the significant thought of other ages and cultures, and to profit from their lessons. But no one was reading any of these here.