Key to Survival

Author's Note

It has been a decade since I started writing this series, doing one novel roughly every two years. When I wrote #4, Key to Liberty, my wife's condition was deteriorating and my writing slowed to a crawl. We finally got the diagnosis, Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy, and with treatment she slowly recovered. Then Congress changed the rules, and the hospital would no longer give her the essential treatment. Instead we picked up the cost ourselves: $3,000 per treatment, every five to six weeks. The choice was that, or to allow her to slowly descend toward paralysis and death. Fortunately we didn't waste our money made in my bestselling years, and were able to cover the cost.

This affected my appearance. My wife used to cut my hair. When she became too ill to do it, I stopped having it cut. Now after more than two years I have naturally waving brown tresses over a foot long, which I wear in a pony-tail. I never knew what lovely hair I had until after I turned 70. I think I'll keep it, even if I do spend more time doing my hair each day than I save by not having it cut.

This time my wife had heart surgery. Technically, an aortic aneurysm, wherein the largest artery of the body, leading directly from the heart, was swollen and getting worse, so it seemed almost as large as the heart itself. If not fixed, at some point it would leak or burst, and she would be dead. Surgery was scheduled for early May, 2007, but then postponed a month because of an infection. So in that windfall month we saw three movies, bought new furniture, got an errant air conditioner fixed, and replaced our 19 year old washing and drying machines. And I had my best month writing the novel, and completed it.

Then in June she did have the surgery. They stopped her heart, cracked open her chest, cut open the artery, put in synthetic tubing, and closed her up again. A week later she was home from the hospital, recovering. She exists largely on pain pills, because every time she coughs there is a jolt in her chest, and she is weak, but the worst seems to be over. She has a big heart shaped pillow she clutches to her chest when coughing. She's not allowed to use her hands to help lift herself from a chair, so I heave her up while she holds her heart. In this period I run the household and edited the novel. We're getting through. Her recovery is not finished, but the novel is, and this Author's Note is being written at the time of our 51st wedding anniversary, June 23, 2007. We're celebrating by having some cheesecake. She has a highly restricted diet, and most of what she really likes is off it.

I am 72, pushing 73, trying to stay fit via serious exercise of body and mind. I fit what I can into the daily routine.

For example, it is three quarters of a mile from our mailbox and newspaper boxes to our house, so I jog out before dawn on alternate days, and use an adult large-wheeled scooter on other days. The scooter makes excellent sense; it is simpler than a bicycle and easier to balance on, which counts increasingly as I get older and my reflexes slow. I also have a recumbent bike, though, and I work out with dumbbells. I try archery twice a week, though my aim is not improving and my scores are abysmal. But it does give me exercise.

Anyway, one secret of health and longevity is activity, not just physical. I'm still writing, and I'll never retire.

Though the publishing industry denies practicing ageism—that is, systematically rejecting authors above a certain age—when they refuse even to look at my novels, such as the ChroMagic series, there is a suspicion. I saw the handwriting on the wall more than a decade back, and took steps to get around it. Namely, going for the movies.

Anything can be a best seller, regardless of merit, if there's a movie associated with it. Now two fantasy options have been exercised, meaning they will be making an Anime movie from Split Infinity and a pilot for a TV series from On A Pale Horse, and a third on A Spell for Chameleon gives every indication it will also be exercised. So my career is simultaneously low, in that I can't get much significant traditional print publication, and high, in that this seems likely to change dramatically in the next few years. We'll see.

I have used the "low" time to catch up on projects I wanted to do, like ChroMagic. I used to wonder why Jack Vance, one of the finest fantasy writers ever, did so many great novels, like the Lyonesse series, for small publishers, where they got little attention. Now I know, and I'm doing it too. Big publishers are motivated mainly by money, but they're not necessarily very sharp about making it. It's like the unfunny joke, where she says "You think I'm good for only one thing!" and he retorts "And not very good for that." Small press, largely denied the corrupting prospects of big money, at least has some notion of quality.

I also maintain my www.hipiers.com Web site, where I have a bi-monthly blog type column that generally runs 6,000 words or more, fulminating my liberal, ornery, humanistic opinions. There is information on my works there, and an ongoing survey of electronic publishers and related services. I list any electronic publishers I learn of, and assess them candidly running anonymous feedback from the authors who use them, positive and negative. I do this because I want to help other writers find viable markets and avoid some of the pitfalls that I fell into, in the course of my eight year struggle to make my first story sale. I do it because writers who talk back to publishers are apt to get threatened, punished, blacklisted, or sued, even when—or especially when—their complaints are valid. It happened to me. I am, because of my intervening success, essentially immune to any of that now, which means that I can afford to publish the truth. If someone wants to sue me today for telling it as it is, I have an attitude like a tankful of hungry sharks and I would expect to make them pay. I have done that, too, before. Not many writers can get away with the truth, so I feel an obligation to do it. This does lead to some ugly confrontations with errant publishers and their minions, but also considerable private support: many writers, and even some publishers, are glad to see this material covered.

Last year my computer system crashed, and naturally I had neglected to back up some key files. It is always the key file that gets overlooked. It took me months to get set up with a new system, in part because I was trying out different distributions of Linux, the open source operating system. I support open source on principle, but it can be a pain to install. Finally, with the considerable help of a geek (that is, one of the secret masters of Linux), I got set up with Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE environment I prefer. This is the first novel I have done with it. It's not perfect; it has a distressing occasional tendency to shut down my word processor OpenOffice when I use the Escape key, and to shut down the whole system when I try to back up a file. It can't go online with my 64 bit system, so I receive no updates or fixes. So I don't know whether I'll stay with it. But it does do the job.

Enough about me. What about this novel? When I finished ChroMagic #4 I knew that #5 would concern the war between the Glamors and the machines. That was it; the details remained stubbornly blank. I had no idea of the nature of the engagement. That bothered me. Meanwhile I had a separate idea that occurred only when I was watching movies: someone with the ability to move a small object, like a chip of wood, a small distance, like half an inch. With his mind. That didn't seem like much, but I realized that if it could be applied to something like a pistol, it could make that gun fire while still in the holster. That could be devastating. Suppose it was used to depress the keys of a distant computer? So a seemingly insignificant talent could have global or galactic effect. There were real prospects here. But I had no story for it. Then, while watching a movie, of course, I thought what about ChroMagic? And that connection crystallized in due course into the entire novel. Oh, there were other details, as you may have noticed, but that was the main theme. Once I had that, the rest of the novel coalesced around it. In the course of that illumination, I realized, as Havoc did in the last chapter, how the war with the machines related to the whole ChroMagic framework, right from the first novel. Now at last we know who prepared the way for the Glamors, and why. I didn't know when I began the novel. Yes, there may come a critic who will say that he knew it from the first page of the first novel. But it's an open secret that critics are made of manure. Ask any writer.

I collect pictures. I once aspired to be an artist, before I concluded that my talent was insufficient and turned instead to the artistry of words. But a nice scene still turns me on. I also like women, as a glimpse of the women in this novel might suggest. So I collect pictures of women too. Nothing special; I just cut out newspaper and magazine ads and save them in a folder. Some bra ads are fabulous. And one of those I see as Weft: this gorgeous blonde just about bursting out of her bra. Even though I have never been into blondes romantically. So I know what Weft looks like. Most of the others are merely nebulous figures, lacking sharp definition. Maybe some day I'll see a picture of Gale, Monochrome, Shee, Flame or Opaline. It doesn't matter; I trust my readers to form their own mental pictures, or maybe even to cut out their own bra ads.

It can be difficult to keep track of essential background details when doing a series of novels, so I had files for ChroMagic to keep them straight. For example, my Characters file describes people to the extent they are shown in the novels, and has things like what each of Havoc and Gale's children call their parents. For example Flame calls them Havoc and Gale, while Weft calls them dad and mom. Each has his/her own way. I can't remember, but the file does it for me. But there are larger things, such as the associations of colors with magic, or the specialties of individual Glamors. For those I had the Colors file. I am including it as an appendix so that any readers who are interested can check it, no obligation. The fact is, even the wildest fantasy needs to be consistent to the extent feasible.

Fantasy also needs to be realistic, odd as that may seem. If you write a story about a contemporary man living in a contemporary house in a contemporary town, you can skimp on details because your readers are familiar with the setting and find it believable. But if you write about folk living in colored volcanic magical zones, red, green, blue etc., becoming those colors themselves, and able to do only their own colors of magic, you had better labor to make them believable. What about when these magic folk get involved in a galactic space battle? The idea of spaceships getting into individual dogfights and shooting each other down in flames—when they are light seconds apart, in deep space, with no gravity, where no fire can exist? So my space battle is not quite like that. I was unwilling to sacrifice realism for drama.

Did I write myself into these novels? No. I love the realm and characters and envy Havoc, but obviously I am not Havoc. Oh, I have noticed how writers who get old and sexually fading tend to write increasingly sexy fiction about immortal characters. Yes, I seem to be following that route. But I hope it is nevertheless a good story, and that those characters come alive for the reader. Come on, admit it: if you're a female reader, wouldn't you like to spend an hour no fault with Havoc? If you're male, how about a walk between villages with Opaline?

This is I think the final ChroMagic novel. If by some mischance someone makes a movie from the series, and the novels all become super bestsellers, and there is demand for more, well, I suppose there could be some interaction with Andromeda galaxy. Something about an anti-matter bomb that annoyed the folk there. But why should we yank Havoc from his well-earned retirement as a traveling minstrel? That wouldn't be kind.

—Piers Anthony, June 23, 2007