She is Nona, Colene’s thought came. Hello, Nona. We are friends.
Darius hoped that was the case.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Now don’t get mad at me. This is the first novel of the Mode series, and there’s no concealing the fact that there is a whole lot more to go. This is a complete episode, introducing the concept of the Virtual Mode and the major characters. The next novel, Fractal Mode, will follow in about a year, featuring Colene, Darius, Provos, Seqiro, and Nona in a setting that is not exactly our own. Let’s face it: Colene and Darius hardly know each other, and it would be unrealistic to think that they could just get together and live happily forever after. There are real problems for them to work out, and their love is really infatuation. She has a score to settle with him about his sexual attitude, and he has one to settle with her about her lack of integrity. Promising relationships have been known to founder on just such issues. This process will not be simplified by the presence of another attractive young woman as an anchor figure. And what of those who made the Chips, and isolated the DoOon? With each novel, an anchor figure will be lost, and a new one gained, with the new Virtual Mode. If you object to this sort of complication, don’t buy the sequels; the series will languish without your support, and shut down in due course. Oh, it hurts to lose your favor!
I had three fantasy series going, and a collaborative fantasy series. Two are being shut down now, and a third in another year. Only Xanth will continue, and Mode will join it, inheriting aspects of the Adept and Incarnations series. It’s not that I don’t like fantasy, but that each series has its natural cycle, and the cycles of some are longer than others. You may wonder about my reference to fantasy, as there was little fantasy in Virtual Mode. Well, this is to be an anything-goes project, and Fractal Mode will have a good deal more magic. It all depends on the Mode, you see. So this may be referred to as a fantasy series, though that pinches its definition. It’s an imaginative series which does not shy away from realism, as you may have noticed.
It is also an Author’s Note series; readers of my Incarnations series will have a notion what to expect: that slice of my life occurring during the writing of this novel, complete with discussions of social issues and unfinished thoughts. Reaction to such Notes has been fairly neatly polarized, with the critics ranging from grudging acceptance to deep disgust, and the readers ranging from interested to enthusiastic. The most common comment is that the Notes make the author real for the reader. As one reader put it, approximately: I make my characters live; the Notes make me live.
So what happened in the three months of this writing? A slew of things, professional, personal, and in between. I started in mid-Dismember and finished in Marsh—and in this period I learned that the 1990 Xanth Calendar from which these months are borrowed sold well enough to leave me with a probable fifty per cent loss of the money I invested in it. Apparently the publisher underprinted, so that many stores never got it, and many sold out and could not get new stock. I even received a letter from a reader with a wonderful idea: why didn’t I do a Xanth Calendar? So much for getting the news spread! I did the Calendar for love rather than money, and feel the artists did a fine job, and there will be similar calendars following, but an ongoing losing proposition can not endure indefinitely. Sigh.
We had an extremely mild winter—possibly the warmest Jamboree and FeBlueberry since American records began, which is a bad sign considering the question of the global warming trend. But just before Christmas Florida was hit by one of its worst cold waves. We live in the middle of a tree farm on a peninsula in Lake Tsoda Popka, and our climate is moderate compared to that of the region, which is mild enough. But our thermometer dropped to 16°F, and we had a light snow flurry—the first I’ve seen personally in thirty years in the state—and most of our decorative plants died. We had been given a set of poinsettias by this publisher the year before, and we planted them and they grew very nicely and were just starting to turn their top leaves from green to red in the style of that plant, when the freeze destroyed them. Sigh.
And the mail. I answered 166 letters in Dismember, 160 in Jamboree, and 205 in FeBlueberry. I had tried using a secretary for a year and a half, but discovered that I wasn’t cut out for dictating letters; I’m a lot less intelligent and literate when I speak than I am when I write, perhaps because I can revise what I write when I see it on the screen. I hated seeing the stupid words I spoke go out. So finally I returned to typing them myself, and my wife did the filing. I found that I could take two days off a week and do up to 50 letters that way, and that sufficed. The other five days I had to write my novels, trying for 3,000 words of novel text a day, in addition to perhaps 2,000 words of related and unrelated notes. I use my “Bracket” system, you see: whenever the going gets difficult in the novel, which may be every few minutes, I go to my notes file and enter a dialogue with myself, exploring the problem and possible solutions, until I work it out. Many a week I didn’t make my target, because there is more to a writer’s life than text and correspondence—phone calls to/from agents, business associates, relatives, and fans also take time—and sometimes I try to sneak in a little leisure with my family. I feel properly guilty when I do that, but it happens. In this period I received a package of letters from one publisher dating back as far as nine months. I answered them immediately, but some did come back for want of a current address. I hate that.
I see a parallel between Darius’ situation as Cyng of Hlahtar and my own with respect to my readers: publishing my books multiplies the joy I bring to others, but fan mail depletes my resources. I can not keep answering indefinitely. One fan pointed out that I won’t be able to cut down on letters as long as I keep writing Author’s Notes, because the Notes make me seem like a person and a person can be written to.
But somehow I don’t want to feel less like a person. So I struggle along, my responses getting later and briefer, knowing that this, like the Xanth Calendar, is probably doomed to extinction in due course.
There are limits, however. On FeBlueberry 26 I received three separate solicitations for fund-raising auctions. Each wanted me to contribute an autographed book of mine, or some other item they might sell to raise money for their worthy purposes. Now at first glance this seems reasonable, but I have been on the receiving end of so many such solicitations that my perception has shifted. My objection is based on two main factors. First, the cost to me, considering the value of my time expended in preparing, packaging, and mailing an item, is probably substantially more than it will sell for at the other end. Thus it is a losing game, overall; if I wanted to contribute, it would be cheaper for me to send a check. Second, while stocking libraries and such is good, I feel the cost ought to be borne by the community that library serves, rather than folk like me, who will never see it. Such solicitations in their essence boil down to transferring the cost to strangers. I once received a letter from a young man who had decided to become a millionaire by soliciting money from every address he could get; the principle is the same. So a library is a more worthy cause than a greedy person; that simply suggests that the end justifies the means. I feel the means is unjustified, and I oppose it on principle. At first I did contribute to such efforts, until I had a request for copies of every one of my titles, plus manuscripts and magazines, to be shipped overseas at my expense. Thereafter I wrote letters explaining why I did not. This day I decided to stop responding to them at all. Call me ungenerous if you will. The line has to be drawn somewhere.