How Precious Was That While, page 31
That wasn’t all. It became apparent that there were problems in the Georgia operation. It was taking them six months to publish an issue of the newsletter, so that its material was dated by the time it saw print. What was the matter? They said it was at the printer, but the printer didn’t get it done. We weren’t told more. But in time we figured it out: the printer wouldn’t print the next newsletter until it got paid for the last one. That wasn’t the only bill that wasn’t getting paid. There was bad feeling being generated for me, because some of our suppliers weren’t getting paid, and they thought I was the one who was stiffing them. I was subsidizing the operation at the rate of $25,000 a year, but apparently that wasn’t enough.
There was more. Ed Maul’s Image Marketing liked to get a percentage of the action, on the theory that not all of its efforts could be tangibly measured. It was difficult to figure what their effort on Hi Piers’s behalf was worth, but it was hoped that it would help my career, and thus lead to greater income for me. So I agreed to try it. Since I was already making a very good living, with or without their efforts, we set up a formula by which a certain portion of my earning above that would be shared with them. The details were more complicated, but one year I did send them about $18,000 on the formula. Unfortunately, it was becoming apparent that their efforts were not improving my image; in fact my image was being savaged in some respects, and the indication was that my career had crested and was commencing a decline. So I honored the deal we made, but do not believe it was worth it for me.
Finally, we took action. My wife took over the operation and moved it to Tampa, where we would have complete control. She hired an office manager and an assistant, and did the accounts herself. My researcher Alan drove to Georgia and brought a truckload of books and calendars down. We trained our own people, whose loyalty was directly to us. Thereafter the newsletter came out five times a year and all bills were paid, including about $20,000 worth that were owing from before our in-house takeover, that we hadn’t known about until we got the accounts.
It turned out that the losses were worse even than that. The folk in Georgia had been selling the books I had bought from the publishers but had not been restocking them. In effect, they had been selling free books. So the apparent losses were only half the real losses.
So how did we do in Tampa? It took a while to get it straight, because there were no proper accounts from Georgia. We had trusted others to know their business, and our trust had been misplaced. But in due course we did get a notion: Hi Piers was still losing $50,000 a year. This was an improvement, because these accounts were straight, with due allowance made for restocking the books actually sold. But it was apparent that Hi Piers could not continue indefinitely.
My daughter Penny’s husband took an interest in the third Xanth calendar, which we had made up but not yet marketed, and worked to get it published. He had me write a full story for it, about Jenny Elf’s quest to leave Xanth and return to the World of Two Moons, and he lined up a printer and queried stores and distributors. Most of the big distributors turned it down. This is the big problem for small publishers: you can’t sell your wares if you can’t get good distribution, because most folk choose from what they see in the stores and don’t inquire about what isn’t on display there. It was a nice calendar, that many folk would like and buy—if they knew it existed. But the powers that be in the realm of distribution don’t care about that; they don’t care to deal with small outfits, and that’s that. We sent information to the individual stores, but they tend to buy from their regular distributors, not direct from small publishers. So commercial failure for this one was virtually guaranteed, through no fault of the calendar itself. But at least we got it published, and advertised it in the newsletter, so that my most ardent readers could get it by mail.
That wrapped up the Xanth calendars. I lost about $100,000 on them collectively. I think they could all have been best-sellers and more than paid their way, but we were up against a system rigged against this sort of enterprise. I don’t mind having given it a try, but I do learn from experience, and in time I tend to lose my taste for losing large amounts of money.
Meanwhile Hi Piers has served as a useful liaison. It is the surest and fastest way for my readers to reach me, or to locate my books that can’t be found in the stores. Publishers forward letters, but it takes them anywhere from two weeks to a year to do so, with the normal delay being one or two months. Hi Piers forwards letters weekly. Gradually the majority of incoming fan mail has shifted from the publisher to Hi Piers. Of course I would prefer to have less mail, rather than more, but if there has to be mail, I prefer that it reach me reasonably promptly. And, as described in Chapter 12, reader correspondence can be interesting. Sometimes a business connection calls. This hasn’t actually happened, but I like to think that if a movie studio suddenly decided to make a phenomenal best-selling picture from one of my obscure novels, it could get in touch quickly. Of course Hi Piers would simply refer it to my Hollywood agent for negotiation, but at least the contact would have been made.
So what is the future of Hi Piers? We had to close it, although readers did appreciate it. Its long-term outlook was bleak. Chalk it up to experience: so now we know whether a prolific, popular writer can market his own books by mail and make a profit while making his readers happy. The answer is no. So Hi Piers had to be shut down, but one aspect of it remains: www.hipiers.com on the Internet. That actually was to grow in importance until it reached many more readers than the original physical Hi Piers did.
Fourteen
ANIMALS
When my family moved to Hilltop Farm, in the Green Mountains of Vermont, in 1940, we soon had animals. At first their names began with J, matching our own surname: Jacob. So there was our first goat, Junie, and our dog, Juliet. Later there were to be many more animals, including a herd of goats and some sheep, and a woolly angora goat that looked much like a sheep. Also hens, including one called Halfchick, who had hatched from an egg laid by one variety of chicken, and incubated by a hen of another breed, so seemed to be half and half. Also angora rabbits, whose tempers were not sweet. My memories of the first animals are faded, except for two unpleasantly striking ones relating to the dog.
Juliet was undisciplined, and she thought that the goats were her natural prey. She was a small dog, who had no chance against them, but the goats didn’t want trouble, so tried to ignore her. One day a goat walked from the barn to the house, a distance of several hundred feet, and Juliet kept growling and leaping at her neck. The goat paid no attention, not striking back at all, just waiting for the annoyance to pass, but the dog simply would not give up. Finally, my father Alfred snapped; as they passed him, he kicked the dog so hard she sailed into the air with a pained yipe. That ended that; the dog left the goats alone thereafter. At the time my sympathy was with the dog, but today it is with the goat. Sometimes obnoxiousness needs to be curbed unequivocally. But it was also an early lesson for me in the futility of pacifism. The pacifism of the goat seemed to encourage more of the bad behavior on the part of the dog. My father was a pacifist, except when it came to the crunch. I remembered that. To me, a philosophy that endures only so long as it is convenient is inconsistent. I have seen similar inconsistency in many other people, notably in would-be censors: “This isn’t censorship; we just don’t like this view, so must suppress it.” Uh-huh.
One time when we were traveling in our battered old converted telephone truck, we had the animals in back: two goats and the dog. They didn’t get along well, but the goats were tied, so all the dog had to do was stay clear of them. We drove a stretch of perhaps twenty miles, then stopped to check in back—and Juliet was gone. We drove back over the whole stretch, looking at the road and along the sides, but there was no sign of her. She must have jumped out and run away. We never saw her again. I hope she found a good home.
The first kids—that is, baby goats—born, were when we were away from Hilltop, in New Hampshire, I think. They were male and female, and we named them Peter and Penny. The odd thing about that was that years later my sister Teresa’s first child was named Peter, and our own first surviving child was Penny. I think that was coincidence, but it’s an odd one. Sometimes I tease our Penny, saying she’s just a kid.
Cam and I lived for eleven years as a childless couple before we got two children we could keep. When children came, so did pets. But we did have one set of pets before then. It started coincidentally rather than intentionally.
Back in the 1960s Cam’s sister Jane got a parakeet. It was cinnamon-winged green, so she named it Cinnamon. When she moved, she gave the bird to us. It didn’t seem right to have a bird without company of its own kind, so we arranged to get another from an acquaintance: a blue parakeet. To keep the style of naming, we called that one Nutmeg. Then we got Clove, who was gray. We built a larger birdcage from fencing wire, three feet long, so they could fly, with perches at each end, because it didn’t seem right for a bird not to fly, and we didn’t have them trained well enough to be loose in the house. They did seem to like it. We bought one from Meares, a big plant nursery in St. Petersburg; Mr. Meares also had a bird hobby. We named that one Ginger. Then we were given two more: a hyperactive yellow one we called Saffron, and a blue one we called Angelica, another kind of spice. We weren’t quite certain of the gender of any of them; theoretically a brown bar above the beak means female, and blue means male, but Clove’s beak changed from one to the other, and the others were mostly nondescript brown. But we thought of Ginger and Saffron as male. They got along okay, and seemed happy. We had had a parakeet called Lucky in our first year of marriage, in Vermont; now we had six. They all had personalities. Cinnamon was taciturn, while Saffron was endlessly perky; he could dance up to another bird and dare it to respond. Once he came up to another, and the other went chiiirp! negatively, the language plain: Don’t bother me! Angelica had an illness, and her beak was warped; we learned later that mites can infect the bills. We could have had her treated, had we known in time; we thought she just had a rough beak. Her wings had been clipped so that she couldn’t fly; they were slowly growing out, and we hoped that she would recover her power of flight in due course. The other birds tended to shun her. Then Ginger grew ill, and sat on a low perch. Angelica came to nudge up against him, and he was too ill to move or drive her off; she took it as a welcome. Again, we see similar in people, misunderstanding each other’s motives. Next day Ginger was sitting on the floor of the cage, where the birds never stayed voluntarily. We watched helplessly. Then he died. We took the body to Mr. Meares, wondering whether there could be an autopsy or something, but he said these things just happened. We were much saddened by the loss; it seemed that little birds should not die like that. We think it was a heart problem. We learned that birds died of the same ailments that human beings do, when in captivity. In the wild, of course, it’s another matter; predators keep lives short. Later, there was news of an exotic malady spreading among birds; to stop it, whole populations of exotic birds had to be killed, and Meares’s phenomenal collection, which ranged far, far beyond parakeets, was wiped out. I think it destroyed the man’s interest in life. It seemed like a cruel sequel: we had bought one bird from him, and lost it; he had lost them all. Our other birds went one by one, of different causes, until only Cinnamon and Saffron were left. The mites infected Saffron’s feet, but now we knew of them, and got them eradicated; he died of complications of age, and I think was the last to go. I remember when Nutmeg was ailing, and died; I was afraid Cam would cry when I told her, but I was wrong; I was the one who cried. It reminded me of the terrible shock when President Kennedy was assassinated. That was a national calamity, affecting every citizen of the United States, and to a diminishing degree, the world. The death of the bird was a minor thing, but very close to us, and just as a penny may hide a mountain, if held close to the eye, the close death of the bird hit me almost as hard as the distant death of a president. When the last bird died, we decided to have no more; it was too painful for us. Later I wrote them into a story, “Beak By Beak,” published in Analog. I think the length of our time with the parakeets was six or seven years. After that we had children, and they required other types of pets, which was how we got into dogs and cats.
I described our first dog, Canute, in Bio of an Ogre, and our cat Pandora II. After him we got Conny, a hyperfriendly crossbreed, part Basenji, part fox terrier. We thought she would outgrow her puppylike friendliness, but she never did. When our local veterinarian, Dr. Richard Shinn, saved the life of a full Basenji that had been brought to him, and couldn’t find the owner, he gave him to us. We named him Cenji Basenji. He was a housebroken dog with one complication: he hated all other animals and would attack them on sight. Except Conny, who he evidently realized had prior tenure at our house. He learned to climb our high wire fence, so as to escape and attack other dogs; we had to put L braces all around, so that it bent at right angles inward at the top, to stop him. We got a brace chain, so we could take them walking together, and Cenji’s full Basenji lines brought out the Basenji lines of Conny, improving her looks. And so for eleven years we had them both, until Cenji quietly faded. He just stopped eating, until he died. That upset Conny; she missed him, and perhaps feared that she would be next. I buried him in the garden, saddened by the sight of one of his ears sticking up out of the cardboard box-coffin as I shoveled dirt on it; it seemed wrong that such a pretty ear should meet such a fate. I hadn’t really liked Cenji; we had a truce, whose nature was he didn’t bite me, and I didn’t bash his head into a tree. But his death hurt me anyway. As did Conny’s, a year or two later. Little things can get to you, in such events; I had a good night’s sleep, came downstairs, and saw a blank space: no dog dish there anymore. That was like an arrow through the heart, suddenly catching me. I think we block out the big things, but then are prey to the myriad little things that escape the block.
Meanwhile we had adopted an outside dog, Lucky; the neighbors had taken in a stray, who had puppies, and Lucky was the smallest and prettiest, always yipping as he got the worst of a pileup. He took to sleeping under our car, away from the others, to get some peace, and so gradually he became ours. With proper feeding and care he thrived, and became the largest and strongest of the litter. Once he encountered one of the other dogs, and she thought to push him around, as in the old days; ROAR! and a show of teeth forever abolished that notion. I can see it. But when he was a puppy he had tried to be friendly with Cenji, when the indoor dog was out, and been roughly disabused, and thereafter stayed clear. Then one day, when I was in the hospital with a kidney stone, Cenji got loose outside and took off after Lucky. Lucky tried to flee, but could not, in the fenced yard, so finally he turned around and fought. He clamped his jaws on Cenji so hard that it took a couple of neighbor men to pry them off. After that Lucky took no guff from Cenji, either. Lucky was now a much bigger dog, and stronger, and knew it. Cenji had brought it on himself, really. Lucky, on the other hand, welcomed company. When we adopted a puppy from a following neighborly litter, and took a second to keep the first warm, Lucky welcomed them, and the three dogs got along well for the rest of their lives. Thus Lucky didn’t attack those who hadn’t attacked him first. That, too, I find compatible. But then it turned out he had a genetic skin ailment that treatment couldn’t cure. He would lie on his back, rubbing at the itch until the fur wore off, leaving a bare patch. We hated to see it, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. As an adult he turned vicious to strangers, but was always good with family members. We didn’t train him to be that way; it may have been that he had some pit-bull ancestry, and there was also the matter of his experiences when young, when he had to learn to fight. Again, I understand, seeing a parallel to my own experience. It’s not easy to learn how to fight to survive, but it’s no easier to unlearn it. He would fight to protect the two females, long after they were grown.
We had two because though Cheryl adopted one, Tipsy—because she had white on her body, but none on the tipsy of her tailsy, in defiance of the rule about dog coloration (one wonders whether “experts” ever actually look at the creatures to whom they apply rules), Cam had boarded a second puppy, Bubbles, because she was afraid one puppy could not survive the cold outside weather alone. Bubbles was for the neighbor boy, and he could take her anytime he wished; meanwhile we fed her and cared for her. There was a bit more to it than that: there were too many puppies to keep, so they planned to take them to a pet store. But we feared that was just what they told the children, and that the puppies were actually headed for the pound—and that Bubbles would be taken too. So we intervened, tacitly, to prevent that. One day he took her into their house, and she pooped on their floor, and that effectively ended that, and she just stayed with us. We offered to buy her, but they told us just to keep her. So Cam adopted Bubbles, who was named by the neighbor boy, perhaps after an older canine cousin Bubba. Of the two females, Bubbles grew larger and more solidly fleshed. At first she seemed bolder, but Lucky informed her in no uncertain manner that she was the boss of no dog yard, and she became shy. Tipsy was lean and fast, as an unfortunate rabbit discovered just before it died. When a raccoon (we think) broke into our chicken coop and stole a hen, we let the dogs out into the main yard at night, and thereafter nothing invaded it. Once in a while the two bitches (that is after all the name for female dogs) had an argument and would fight, and we would have to break it up. Lucky was never involved in that. Cheryl was traumatized by it once; she tried to separate the dogs, and was almost bitten, and at the time they were not much smaller than she was.
