On A Pale Horse (41 page)

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.

One was a series of excellent three-mile runs. I have adult-onset diabetes, a mild case, and I treat this by staying away from free sugar and by exercising vigorously, including my thrice-weekly cross-country runs. When I do well, I break twenty-two minutes for the distance, then jog and walk another half mile, warming down, so as not to stress my system unduly by abrupt changes. Well, in September I was finishing a decent but not great run when the weekly garbage truck came up behind me in the last half mile. That truck cuts through the forest to reach another section of our wilderness, and our paths happened to coincide here. So I speeded up to get out of its way, without stopping my run. It's amazing what a stimulus it is to have a truckful of garbage pursue you up a hill! Suddenly I was running a record finish, and because of this, it became one of those rare sub-twenty-two-minute runs, by just two seconds. Well, good enough; and next time I kept a slightly faster pace and broke twenty-two again. And a third time I did it a little faster yet. Unexpectedly, I had a string going. I had never put together more than three of these in a row before; could I do it on this Garbage series? Yes! I did the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and finally, with great effort on a drizzly day, the tenth. What a series! Now I could relax. But the series continued, until it carried me through the entire month of October, despite problems of scheduling the runs. I was amazed and gratified.

The other thing was negative. My wife's father had been suffering some low-grade malady during the summer, but now it got serious.

[Interruption at this point to go pick up a horse's balky foot for my daughter. We check and clean out the feet before riding, to be sure there is no stone or stick wedged that could cause lameness, but the horse doesn't always cooperate. I have more power than my daughter has; that foot came up for me. Had this interruption occurred earlier, I would have thought to have my protagonist check the feet of his gallant Deathsteed. Now, in the Author's Note, it is too late. Well, I'll catch it in another novel. This has been a sample bracket note, a live performance.]

My wife's father had to be hospitalized, put on dialysis for kidney failure, and have abdominal surgery. He was still bleeding internally, so they set him up for corrective surgery—but were not sure he could survive another operation so soon. The chances seemed to be fifty-fifty; if the bleeding didn't kill him, the surgery might. His wife, my wife's mother, was distraught. Naturally my wife went down to Tampa to help out, so she was away from our home about half the month of October. That was why I had a scheduling problem for my runs, because I don't like to do them when there is no one to backstop me at home. There are hunters out there in the forest who don't necessarily see straight enough to tell man from deer, and there are rattlesnakes and such, and rampaging garbage trucks; and, of course, I'm laboring so hard that I could trip over an unseen root and take a fall and pull a muscle and be in trouble, and I want someone to call the ambulance if necessary. (I believe I mentioned my morbid streak.) But we managed; my two daughters, then aged fourteen and eleven, helped run the household and feed the animals when they (the girls) weren't in school. Penny, the elder [whom we just met in a bracket], cooked supper, while I washed the dishes. And my father-in-law tided through.

Things eased up in November and December, as I worked full-time on the first draft of this novel—and my series of twenty-two minute runs continued. My father-in-law made it home for Thanksgiving, though ravaged by what had turned out to be Wegener's Syndrome, a rare and normally fatal malady before modern medicine changed the odds. We live, in some respects, in fortunate times.

I finished my first draft of Pale and shifted to the first volume of Bio for a couple of months. My good runs continued—forty, fifty, sixty in the series. In fact, they speeded up to a subseries of 21:30-minute efforts, and then to a sub-subseries of sub-twenty-one-minute runs. I was breaking the seven-minute mile! To my amazement, I managed to put together ten of these superfast-for-me runs in a row, before the rising heat of a Florida spring put an end to that in March. But I was still on my twenty-two minute series: seventy runs, eighty... when would it end?

My mother-in-law, perhaps worn out by the terrible siege of her husband's illness, got sick herself and went to the hospital. But it was more than that. She had cancer of the pancreas. We didn't know much about this disease and thought she would have six months or a year to live. But after only six weeks, as I was typing the second draft of Pale in late March, she died.

This is a novel of death, as I have said. The serious illness and sudden death, occurring while I was immersed in fictional death—this disturbed me deeply. I had a brutal refresher course in what death feels like to the survivors.

There was nothing to do but go on—with novel, with running, with life. But there was now a deeper quality of gloom about it. Death is not funny. It may be the normal end of life, but I still don't like it. No, not at all!

My run series hung on, despite my depressed spirits and outdoor temperatures in the mid-80s. I made runs number eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three... maybe I could actually make it all the way to one hundred! I reject all superstition vehemently, yet I found myself counting those runs as if they were years of my life. It seemed I had now been promised at least eighty-three years; how many more? Nonsense, of course; still...

As April 1982 came, I was near the end of my second-draft typing and saw that the novel was going to be short: about eighty thousand words instead of the ninety thousand or so expected. There is normally a ten or fifteen percent expansion in the submission draft, because of polishing, blank space at the end of chapters, and the addition of notes that have been crammed into the margins of second-draft material. I needed enough second-draft wordage so that that expansion would put the final draft comfortably in the hundred-thousand word range I had contracted for. Normally I run overlength and have to tighten up a bit, but this time my bracket notes had taken up more space, throwing off my estimate.

Writers pay a lot of attention to wordage, because some publishers seem to care more about length than about quality and will automatically reject novels that don't fit their narrow standards of length—or will chop out extra wordage to make a novel fit. Not so long before, I had had to chop out twenty thousand words from my novel Mute, damaging it; I share the average writer's aversion to such mutilation, especially since it makes the finished product seem choppy or disorganized when it wasn't that way originally, and can damage his reputation for intelligibility and thus perhaps harm his career. Editor Lester del Rey has never done that to me, and so my fantasy has prospered—but I don't push my luck.

In this case, there was material I had wanted to include, but had bypassed because of the difficulty of organizing a novel with a high emotional commitment. Fortunately, the notes were right there in my brackets. Some key cases of death—I could break Chapter 6 into two parts and fit these scenes in the first part, and this would bring the number of chapters to thirteen—exactly right for a novel about death. So while I typed the second draft, I resumed work on the first draft, doing those scenes. Oh, yes, writers do work this way; the smooth, finished product you readers see is likely to be the result of considerable and scrambled effort.

Good news came in on the early sales of my science/fantasy novel Blue Adept, lightening my mood; the paperback edition had jumped to number three on the B. Dalton Bookseller list, and to number five on the Waldenbooks list. This is rarefied territory for light fantasy, and the best performance of any of my novels so far. It meant Blue was a mainstream bestseller, though it didn't quite make The New York Times list. A writer lives for such news!

The phone company sent a man out for no reason we could see, and he switched the lines, so all our calls came to our neighbor and vice versa. My New York agent tried to phone me three times about ongoing negotiations on the sale of Bio of a Space Tyrant, my biggest contract so far, and each time wound up talking to the neighbor's boy. Par for the course. Satan only knows what kind of contract I might have wound up with, had I not caught on and hastily phoned my agent back. Maybe Satan sent the phone man out! Of such minor elements is a writer's life fashioned.

I did my eighty-fourth sub-twenty-two-minute run on Monday. Ha—I would live to age eighty-four! On Tuesday, April 6, at 1 P.M., I did my alternate-day exercise, the Japanese push-ups. I can't describe them; they are done in martial arts classes for warm-up, and they are more complicated than regular push-ups. They have put new sheaths of muscle on my arms and chest, so that I no longer look quite as thin as I am. Over the years I had built up to seventy-five push-ups within a five-minute span; I time them on my Deathwatch. Without the time limit, I have done one hundred—but those final ones become hellishly uncomfortable, so I eased back. Why do I do push-ups? Well, running is good for every part of the body except the arms, so I do pull-ups and push-ups to shore up that weakness.

When I was less than half my present age, as a draftee in the U.S. Army in 1957, I was poor at regular push-ups. When I was unable to do ten in one session, the corporal told me to go back to the barracks and find a man to replace me. Only in the Army is manhood defined by push-ups, which is part of what's wrong with that institution; nevertheless, that corporal would not so address me today.