On a Pale Horse (44 page)

I need to clarify how I do my writing, as I am not quite like other writers, professionally or personally. Of course,
no
writer is quite like any other; each thinks himself unique in some typical fashion. I live in the backwoods of central Florida and have a twelve by twenty-four foot study in our horse pasture. Yes, I am surrounded by horse manure! I now have electricity there—for three years I did not—
so I can type at night if I want to, but have no heating. In summer I use a fan to cool me, for we do hit 100° F often enough, and in winter I bundle up with voluminous clothing as if for a hike through a snowstorm. Our area seldom gets below freezing in the daytime, but even 40° to 50° becomes bone-chilling when one is sitting at a typewriter for hours at a time. Even with sweater, jacket, scarf, and heavy cap, I slowly congeal, because I must expose my hands to type. Back when I typed two-finger, it was possible to do it with gloves on, but now I touch type and must bare my flesh.

So I avoid winter typing when possible, arranging my schedule to write the first draft in pencil on my clipboard at the house, where we have a fine wood stove that puts out so much heat that my darling daughters complain. Between literary thoughts, I feed more chunks of my hard-sawed-and-split wood to the monster, maintaining my primitive comfort.

Don’t get me wrong; I live here because I love the wilderness and the rustic independence of it, and I distrust complex machines. The wood stove is not only cheap to operate, it’s fun. It also heats all our water in winter, via a copper coil in the stovepipe. (In summer the solar system does the job.) Then when the land warms, in spring, I hie me back to my study to type the second draft, and then the submission draft. Each novel is done three times, ironing out the bugs. But the four months of inclement weather are too long for a single novel; I need only two months for the first draft, and sometimes less, depending on the nature of the project. So I try to schedule two novels in pencil in the winter, then type both later.

The winter of 1981–82, my two novels were one fantasy and one science fiction, each the initial volume of what I hoped would be an ambitious, hard-hitting, social-commentary, five-novel series. The science fiction series was
Bio of a Space Tyrant
, superficially a space opera, covertly a serious political commentary, to be published elsewhere. The fantasy series was
Incarnations of Immortality
, that title given with a nod of appreciation toward William Wordsworth’s
Ode: Intimations of Immortality From
Recollections of Early Childhood
. This present novel, with Death as its protagonist, is the first of that series.

I understand some writers just start writing and watch almost with surprise what develops; I plan considerably farther ahead. I know how a novel will end before I begin to write it—and before I write it, these days, I sell it. I realize that sounds backward, but it’s true. I make a summary, and my New York literary agent shows it around, and if a publisher offers a contract for it, then I go ahead and write the novel. I have any number of summaries that no editor wanted, so those novels have never been written. Sometimes I really want to write one, but have to let it go. You might say that some of my best novels of the past have never been written. In the early days of my career I wrote my novels first and marketed them second, and naturally the editors gleefully bounced them. At one point I had built up a backlog of eight complete unsold novels. That’s not the best way for a writer to make a living. When I caught on and changed my system to escape that bind, my income tripled, and then began a sharper rise—because suddenly I was selling everything I wrote. Rather, I was writing everything I sold.

As it happens, both these series,
Bio
and
Incarnations
, relate strongly to death, a subject with which I am morbidly fascinated. I wish I were not; this constant awareness of death makes it impossible for me to go blithely about my life in simple contentment. This has been so since my closest cousin died, when I was a teenager. He is represented in this novel as Tad: the one who had everything to live for, while I did not. It seemed to me that Death had somehow taken the wrong one of us. Now I am highly aware that my time on Earth is limited, and I do not believe in any afterlife. It follows that anything I want to do, I must do in this session, as it were. Perhaps this explains in part the determination with which I write novels, including this one. It is my way of saying whatever I have to say while I have the opportunity, hoping others will profit thereby.

I think few writers have tried, as I have here, to present Death in a sympathetic manner. Therefore it was chancy to market
On a Pale Horse
, for many publishers seem to
be uninterested in innovation. If Death could not make it into print, how could there be any hope for the following notions that were percolating through my mind? For the rest of this series, as it finally shaped up, concerned other unusual protagonists: Time,
Bearing an Hourglass;
Fate,
With a Tangled Skein;
War,
Wielding a Red Sword;
and Nature,
Being a Green Mother
. All of it started with Death, and Death-in-print was not nearly so certain as death in the real world. This concept was obviously fantastic, corresponding to the established scheme of the Afterlife only very loosely; perhaps it would offend some readers. I, as an ornery writer, don’t much care if I offend a reader or two, but publishers have hypersensitive nerves about popular reaction, and very little courage of conviction. My more challenging notions have had trouble with publishers before. Those of you who think of me as a light-entertainment writer have not seen that portion of my writing that never made it into print.

So I played it safe. I sent a private, informal query to my fantasy editor, Lester del Rey of Del Rey Books, describing my notion and asking whether he might be interested in seeing a more formal presentation at a later date. A writer can do this when he knows an editor well enough. I have a track record at Del Rey; they know what my writing is like, so can tell from even a brief description whether a particular project of mine would be to their taste. If Mr. del Rey didn’t like the notion, or did not care to gamble his company’s money on it, he would tell me privately, and that would spare the two of us and my agent the embarrassment and inconvenience of a formal rejection.

Now let me switch to another subject, in the tantalizing manner of the storyteller I am. I have gotten interested in colored stones of the precious variety. Most people know of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and I have acquired samples of these. No, I didn’t spend ten thousand dollars for a one-carat diamond two years ago and watch its value shrink in half. Lack of money served in lieu of wisdom, there. Instead, I bought rough diamonds from a wholesale dealer at ten dollars a carat. They look like gravel; they don’t sparkle prettily from cut facets.
But they
are
diamonds, so I can lay claim to owning diamonds. I shopped similarly for bargains in other stones. There are many pretty ones, comparatively inexpensive, ranging from a hundred dollars or more per carat down to eight cents a carat for faceted smoky quartz in quantity. Know something? In a dim light, you could have trouble distinguishing quartz from diamond, and quartz will scratch window glass.

There are also topaz, aquamarine, garnet, tourmaline, zircon, amethyst, scapolite, andalusite, and others, each with its own special qualities. It is possible to develop an interesting collection of such gems for a tiny fraction of the price of the smallest cut diamond, and that collection may be a more secure investment than that diamond. Certainly this has been the case recently; the value of most colored stones has risen, in some cases dramatically, while diamonds have declined.

But there are pitfalls. People who aren’t expert in gemstones can get rapidly fleeced, unless they have a reliable source of supply. I had such a source in the large, wholesale House of Onyx, but was lured by an ad in the local newspaper for a huge star sapphire on sale privately. I went to see it, and it was an ugly stone—maybe it would be kinder to say the stone had character—with a fantastic floating star. It had come from North Carolina, where some sapphire mining is done. In sunlight, that star seemed to sit an eighth of an inch above the surface of the stone, and it shifted about on its rays like a spider as the stone moved, almost like magic. I’m a sucker for magic, considering that I don’t believe in it, so I bought the stone.

Then, of course, I wondered whether I had been smart. I had paid over ten dollars a carat for the sapphire, which was a lot of money for a stone that size—one hundred-fourteen carats. Good sapphire is worth a lot more—but was this one a bargain? Was it even true sapphire? Now that it was too late, I had to know. So I phoned Fred Rowe, owner of the House of Onyx—you can do that if you know him well enough—and he very nicely agreed to appraise the stone for me. He is not in the business of appraising other people’s stones, of course; he did it as a private favor, much as Lester del Rey did me the favor
of appraising my novel notion privately. I dare say there are two busier men in the world, but I really could not name any offhand. Sometimes the busiest are also the most generous.

On September 8, 1981, I received two important items in the mail—one from Mr. Rowe, the other from Mr. del Rey. Mr. Rowe was returning my stone with his appraisal: it was corundum (sapphire and ruby are both corundum), but of a cheap grade imported from India for fifty cents a carat and sold to gullible tourists in places like North Carolina as local stones for five to ten dollars per carat. He himself had sold a number of five-thousand-carat parcels of this type of stone to clients in North Carolina at the fifty-cent price. In short, this was a junkstone. I had been bilked. Not, I believe, by the person who sold it to me; he honestly believed in the value of the stone, and I’m sure many other people with similar belief have similar stones. But for what it’s worth, I recommend that people be wary of bargains in gems from North Carolina.

Mr. del Rey’s letter was more positive. Yes, he liked the notion of
On a Pale Horse
. No, I did not need to submit a formal presentation through my agent at a later date. He was prepared to offer my agent a contract on it now. He did not name a figure, but I knew from experience that this novel would earn me at least ten times what I had lost on the sapphire.

That was some mail! Fate had neatly juxtaposed these events. Mr. Rowe and Mr. del Rey had, figuratively, met in my mailbox. (Mr. Rowe, meet Mr. del Rey; Lester, meet Fred. So nice to have you both here. Now let’s get out of this hot mailbox!) Who was I to argue with Fate? Thus it was that my unfortunate star sapphire became a part of this novel. The two just seemed fated to merge.

There was more to it than that. I am ornery in various ways, and one of them is that I don’t like to make mistakes, but mistakes stalk me like sendings from Hell. So I try to turn every experience, good or bad, to my profit, whether monetary or intellectual. I had blundered in buying the stone, but if I used that experience in the novel, that might redeem it somewhat. In fact, by this device I could make this stone unique. It might not be worth much
as a junk-grade star sapphire, but as the stone that suckered Piers Anthony—um, let’s rephrase that. As the stone that launched a new man into the dread office of Death, it—well, it just might eventually be worth what I paid for it. Thus, perhaps, it could no longer be considered a blunder. Of course, this mundane stone lacks the literal magic of the one in the novel, and I dare say any potential purchaser would in due course catch on to that. But I don’t want to sell it anyway. I merely want to erase a mistake. Just think: If this ploy is successful, no one will ever know about my blunder in buying that stone …

I also put my watch into the novel, as the Deathwatch. I bought it about the same time. Mine is identical to the fictive watch, except that mine times forward, not backward, and it lacks much of the magic power. I have had a long history of trying watches, from simple ten-dollar windups to sophisticated solar chronographs, and all had one thing in common: they ceased working after a year or so. The folk who set a one-year limit on the warranty know what they’re doing. Thus I finally blew three hundred and twenty-five dollars on this Heuer heavy-duty mechanical timepiece, watertight and self-winding and unpretty. It weighs a full quarter pound, and if
it
conks out after one year, I will be most distressed. Time will tell.

I said at the outset that each novel is an adventure. This one has been more than I bargained on. My first drafts are more than fiction; they are running records of my ongoing life. Problems, interruptions, and stray thoughts (I’m always thinking) are included in the text, set off by brackets [like this]. I don’t know of any other writer who works this way—but then I don’t know of any other writer who never suffers the dread malady known as writer’s block, though it is barely possible some exist. I never block, because my text incorporates the blockages and converts them to text. When I complete the pencil draft, I review it and index my bracket notes, since they may contain the summaries of several additional novels that occurred to me along the way. A good notion for a novel is far too precious to waste; it must be caught the moment it flashes into mental view, or it will escape to the brain of some other writer who really doesn’t deserve
it. For example,
On a Pale Horse
was worked out in brackets in the text of the prior fantasy novel,
Night Mare
. My creative notions don’t have to wait their turn; they are always welcome.

This novel concerns death, as most readers will have grasped by this time. I don’t believe in the supernatural, yet I experience eerie coincidences. The worst of these are yet to come in this Note. When I started part-time work on this novel (because I was then typing
Night Mare
—I work on a kind of assembly line in summer, working on different novels in pencil and typing stages simultaneously) in September, two supposedly unrelated things developed.