She watched the street below, and hailed a little old lady on her bicycle. The lady tried not to laugh as she went to ring the bell of the folk in the apartment immediately below. The downstairs lady came out and threw Maiden a coat and pair of shoes, which she donned. Alessandra noted that, so she dashed to the coatrack and brought her own jacket and boots. Maiden tried to keep her occupied, but the little girl tired of that and ran to the kitchen, out of sight. What was she getting into?
The locksmith arrived and drilled out the lock. Alessandra reappeared and put her fingers into the new giant-sized keyhole. The locksmith had to coax her to the side so he could finish. The door opened, and Maiden was rescued. Oh, sweet warmth; she had been sooo cold! She hugged Alessandra—and the little girl was disappointed. She knew that the excitement was over. But what a grand adventure it had been!
The Bird Maiden wondered how many more days like this there would be before her marvelous little girl turned eighteen. “So, how was your Christmas?!” she inquired.
Meanwhile, the world continued. Panama was invaded, and the Communist Empire crumbled. The United States population reached 250 million. Robert Adams, author of the Horse-clans series and a Florida resident, died. He was just under a year older than I. TV personality Andy Rooney was suspended because someone else claimed he had made a racist remark, though he denied it and has no record of racism. Apparently the TV executives have minds like fanzine editors. Then the program he was on dropped twenty per cent in the ratings, and suddenly the execs had a change of heart and brought him back. I think those execs should have been suspended, not Rooney.
There is worse. At this time the child of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan was discovered with grandparents in New Zealand.
Dr. Morgan had ascertained to her satisfaction that her daughter was being sexually molested by the father, but the court had decreed that unsupervised visits be allowed. Maybe I’m no expert, but too many correspondents have told me how they were molested as children; a man who does this takes any opportunity he can get, and an unsupervised visit is folly. I feel that Dr. Morgan’s caution was reasonable. So she hid her child rather than accede to this—and spent two years in jail for defying the will of the court. It took, literally, an act of Congress to get her out. So much for trying to protect a child: the innocent get punished instead of the guilty.
What happens when the mother does not try to protect her child? The book Dark Obsession, published at this time, showed how Bobby Sessions admitted in court to having sex five hundred times with his teenage stepdaughter. She finally blew the whistle on him, and he spent six months in a luxury hospital and was released. She was shipped to a fundamentalist home for troubled children where girls were regularly beaten. But sometimes the worm does turn: she sued her stepfather and won $10 million.
Let’s return to more positive business. I had mixed news on my ongoing projects. My erotic novel Pornucopia, published in America only in expensive hardcover and forbidden to readers under age twenty-one, was selling well, and there was a flurry of interest by foreign publishers. I don’t object to sex, you see, just to sexual abuse. My collaboration with a teenage boy who was killed by a reckless driver before completing his novel, Through the Ice, was published at the same time, and reports indicate it is also doing well. My 200,000-word historical novel about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto, Tatham Mound, was taken by Morrow/Avon. The collaboration with Robert Margroff, Orc’s Opal, was taken by Tor. I took time off Virtual Mode to do a chapter in my collaborative novel with Philip Jose Farmer, not yet titled, and a segment of 49,000 words was put on the market. The main female character there is Tappy, a blind thirteen-year-old girl, a bit like Colene in her isolation and the drama of her changing situation. I had started it as a story in 1963; a complicated situation and a quarter century had brought it to this point. The galleys for my provocative mainstream novel Firefly arrived, and I broke to proofread them. In that novel I show voluntary underage sex, the girl being five years old. More of this happens than we care to advertise.
I placed two of the last three novels which remained unsold from the days of my blacklisting in the 1970s, and set up to rework the third with a publisher interested. I had built up a total of eight unsold novels while weathering the blacklist—you can read about that too in my autobiography, but the essence is that I got in trouble for being right, somewhat in the manner of a whistle-blower—and it was good to eliminate the last tangible vestige of it. This campaign of mine to get all my novels into print is one reason I may seem more prolific than I am; I’ve been writing novels steadily for twenty-five years, and by the end of 1990 the number of books I have had published may come to eighty-two. That’s about three and a quarter a year, average.
I read the finalists for a story contest and decided on the winner. I reviewed revisions for the novel Total Recall, necessary to bring the paperback edition into conformance with late changes in the motion picture.
The ladies of Putnam/Berkley visited and brought me a print of the cover for Phaze Doubt: the editors had finally taken one of my suggestions, and got a beautiful cover painting of a little girl playing hopscotch with a BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster). At last we would see whether the author’s notion of a good cover works to sell copies. You see, at this writing I have made the New York Times best-seller list with eighteen different titles, which may be the record for this genre, but all have been in paperback, none in hardcover. Other fantasy writers make the list in hardcover; why can’t I? Grumble. But in this period I did crack the Publishers Weekly hardcover list with the final Incarnations novel, And Eternity. Barely. I always was a slow starter.
I wrote a letter to a parole officer on behalf of a prisoner with AIDS, urging compassionate release, as he will otherwise be dead before he gets to see his folks outside. I had corresponded with him for two years, finding him to be a pleasant and principled person; I doubt he would be a menace to society.
My laser printer broke down shortly after the warranty expired: a counter which could not be reset, evidently defective when delivered. Twenty-dollar part, $560 repair bill. Par for that course. Which brings me to my present computer setup, for those who are interested: Acer 900 AT-clone, 73M hard disk, 5.25- and 3.5-inch drives, VGA monitor, laser printer; Fansi-Console for my Dvorak keyboard, Sprint for word processing, XTreeGold for file handling. I got that last program in this period, and had a time-wasting ball playing with its nice features, such as the ability to set up parallel windows, with different directories in each, or to show and work with the files of several drives simultaneously. I had changed from Dec Rainbow with reluctance, but it was the readiest way to get Sprint, which looked like the ultimate word processor for me, and now I am quite satisfied with it. I set up the Piers Anthony Interface, which is in effect my own word processor, following my rules, like no others.
I started exploring the literature on computer games, playing with the notion of Grafting a Xanth game that would be superior to what else exists. I know nothing about such games; naturally I figure I can do a better job than the experts, just as ignorant reviewers figure they could be better writers than I am. We shall see.