Piers Anthony's Blog

Many folk speak disparagingly of horse opera, which surely bears little relation to the historical exploration of the American West, but is entertaining on a superficial level. Similarly they sneer at space opera, which is horse opera translated to space. Bat Durston jumps into his spaceship and warps to Planet X where humanoid monsters are terrorizing the colonists. He whips out his blaster and goes after the monsters. Bang bang, you're dead. The colonists are grateful.

Okay, I have trouble doing anything conventionally, so when I set out to do space opera, I started from the plight of the Vietnamese and Haitian Boat People in the 20th century, so that was my historical basis, and went from there. The refugees in the space bubble encounter the same sort of pirates and most are brutally slaughtered. But a few survive, one of whom is Hope Hubris, who goes on to become a naturalized Jupiter (America) citizen and finally comes to rule Jupiter. He is the Space Tyrant, in the sense of one-man rule, not evil. It's a pretty wild and gritty and often sexy adventure. Critics never liked it, being too dull to understand what I was doing, but readers, being smarter, loved it. Why don't you sample it and see what you think?

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We had a grindalator thing under the sink that chewed up stray kitchen garbage, but it broke, so I started taking the garbage out to compost in our little flower garden square in the back yard. That worked, and also led to spot gardening adventures. Some of those leftovers were alive, and grew: potatoes, tomatoes, squash, avocado. I care for them as well as I can, trying to give them their fair chance to find their destinies, but this is not native soil for most and they don't do all that well. We do get tomatoes on occasion, but freezes take out the avocados before they can get big enough to bear fruit. This year when I was about to cut up a radish for our supper salad I saw that it was sprouting, and I thought if it was that eager to grow I should let it, and I planted it. It put out a fine cluster of leaves. Then something ate them off. We do live in a forest; wild creatures come. But it survived and grew new leaves, and flowered with little white four-petaled flowers. Things like to dig up our freshly-buried garbage, so finally I laid chicken wire on the ground, making it undiggable, and that helped. Sometimes I dose the garbage with hot chile sauce. But mostly I just water it and it's on its own. It doesn't look like much, but it's not for show anyway. I'm a vegetarian because I don't like to hurt animals, but neither do I like to hurt plants unnecessarily.

Army
My family is Quaker, more properly the Religious Society of Friends, one of whose prime tenets is pacifism. So I had a thorough childhood indoctrination in the doctrines of peace. But I was small for my age, being the shortest person in my class in ninth grade, male or female (I later grew most of another foot), and that meant that I made early acquaintance with the bully in the schoolyard. In due course I learned to fight, and that improved my situation. I did not seek fights, but I could take anyone within ten pounds of me and some well beyond that, which actually helped me avoid fights. I remember once when a boy about 40 pounds heavier bragged how he had taken me in a friendly tussle. He had, but for some reason that brag didn't bother me; it sort of made my point for those closer to my own weight. I concluded from personal experience that pacifism ultimately did not work; you do have to stand up for yourself if you want to live in peace. It's a philosophy I carried with me when dealing with publishers. So in the end I did not become a Quaker, and when the time came for me to register for the draft, as was required in those days when you turned 18, I did so. The alternative was prison, and I concluded that the Army would do less damage to my person and my philosophy, not to mention my marriage, than prison would. So while my family was shocked by my decision—I saw the jaw of one acquaintance literally drop—I did serve two years in the US Army and I believe today that I made the correct decision. It is said that there's the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. That is true. I'm sure it's true in the other military services too. I remember in a humorous TV program someone said “The Navy works in mysterious ways its blunders to perform.”As it turned out, the Army wasn't all bad. I had timed it cleverly between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, so avoided dangerous action. I expected trouble so wasn't surprised when I got it. I studied hard in basic training and finished first in my Survey class, and became a survey and basic math instructor. I got trough meals as a vegetarian by gulping down extra milk and stuffing rolls in my pockets to eat later, because they gave us seven minutes to eat and I'm a slow eater. But something bothered me, and finally I went to the Protestant (my specified religion was No Preference, which they took to mean Protestant) head chaplain with my concern. It was that while I was not a pacifist, neither was I a killer, and if they sent me to the front somewhere, put a rifle in my hands, and told me to kill some enemy soldier who I knew didn't want to be there any more than I did, I would not be able to do it. My tests with a rifle indicated I was close to an expert shot, but only at an inanimate target. It was a moral crisis, since the major purpose of the Army is to fight and kill if necessary, and I was a soldier in that Army. What should I do? He looked at me sadly and said “I'm sorry your patriotism isn't greater than that.” I did not argue the point; it was clear there was no worthwhile help or advice here. I saw that for all his religion the man was morally about knee high. That is part of what I judge religion on, and I remain firmly agnostic.The Army paid my way at a time when my home area was in a recession and it was hard to get any job, let alone a decent one. I was newly married and wanted to support my wife. Prison surely wouldn't have done that. The Army gave me an allotment for my wife, and when she had a her second miscarriage it covered the medical bills that would have bankrupted us. For a time I was on orders for Ping Pong (properly Table Tennis), representing our battalion. But that too is another story. I also got my American citizenship with Army help; I had been born British, in England. Army life was not great, but it was a life.Then came the time when I exercised my supposed right to say no. It is said that the Army can't make you do something against the rules, but it can make you wish you had. That is true. They had a campaign to make soldiers sign up for savings bonds, with about five dollars taken from your pay each month (of $168 monthly pay). We were exactly in balance, financially, and couldn't afford it, so I declined. What was the cost of that? They blacklisted me for promotions; I was a PFC at the time, due for promotion, but I left the army a PFC. They summoned all off-post personnel to report for early morning revile, letting them all know it was because of me. They hauled me from the survey class I was teaching and put me to work with a spade leveling the sand of the parking lot. Finally they kicked me out as instructor, though before I had been unable to take leave because they couldn’t spare me, and I was sent to another unit. Was any of this legitimate? Of course not, but this is the way the Army operates.But when I got out, they paid me for about six weeks of unused leave time, and that helped us survive in civilian life until I could get a job. A clerical error put me in Ready Reserve when I was supposed to be on Standby, and so had they called up troops for the Cuban Missile Crisis I could have been called. Missed a bullet, that time. Overall the Army was a waste of time, but it did pay my way when I most needed it.

One of my readers, Mark Geatches, suggested that I set up a FAQ section for the convenience of readers, which should also spare me the inconvenience of answering similar questions repeatedly. I pondered, and finally decided to do that here. He suggested some questions, and I'm adding more, and will add others as they come up. But be warned; I seem to be incapable of giving a simple answer to a simple question.
Will there be a new Xanth novel? 


Yes, as long as the market holds out. I have two more novels to go to complete the alphabet in titles (many letters duplicate), and after that we'll see. Xanth is easy, it's fun, and it sells well. Everyone likes it except the critics. So for the next few years, there'll be one new Xanth a year. The one due this year is Well-Tempered Clavicle, about Picka Bone the walking skeleton who discovers he can remove his clavicles (shoulder bones) and play music on his ribs. Princess Dawn hears him play so beautifully that she falls in love with him, but she's not his type, because of all that meat on her nice bones. But a princess is not accustomed to hearing the word No, if she even knows what it means. For 2012 it will be Luck of the Draw, wherein an 80 old Mundane man gets youthened and hauled into Xanth to court the last of the multiple princesses: sixteen year old Princess Harmony. It's not his idea or hers, emphatically; it's a Demon contest. Therein lies a story. Demons really don't take No for an answer.

 Eroma a composite of EROtic ROMAnce, is phrased as a virtual reality game in which the players' avatars participate. It is a sexual game; not only can avatars have sex, they are required to, to advance their positions. Every point is scored sexually. The players are connected so that when their avatars have sex, the players themselves experience thirty second orgasms, male and female, simultaneously. It is hard-wired, so to speak: when the male penetrates to operative depth, his member flips the buried switch that evokes an immediate climax for both parties. Naturally all male avatars are handsome and all female avatars are beautiful, and they throw themselves into the competition with a will. There are several settings; in each one, half the players are eliminated, until it is down to two, one man and one woman, and then at last a single winner.We follow one man, Pedro, and one woman, Fotina, as they compete but befriend each other as avatars, and in the course of the game come to love each other. That love becomes personal as they meet outside the game and discover the limitations of sex where mutual orgasms are not programmed and details can be messy. No wonder many players prefer game sex. Then they are the finalists, when only one can win, complicated by their real emotions as contrasted to their game setting roles.The settings range from a pleasant forested landscape where they must have sex to score points, to a dangerous alien planet where trees feed on players by sexually luring them into traps. In the first setting they must find private places for sex, or it can't happen; but most are already occupied by other couples. So players must be clever not only in their choice of partners, but in their choice of locale. Half are not clever enough. Those eliminated in one round may return in later rounds as obstacles: the surviving players must have sex with them, or avoid sex with them, depending on the situation, but they do not cooperate. It's quite a challenge.

Songs
Songs constantly run through my head. Some are popular ones I hear on the radio; many are folk songs I know from way back. Some are just incidental ones from anywhere. Each has its spot emotional history. For example “Cool Water” wherein two men trek through the desert, burning with thirst, dreaming of an oasis with plenty of water. “All day we faced the barren waste without the taste of water—cool, clear, water.” It's a lovely song. My mother wasn't much for the radio, but one day she turned it on, and they played that song. “I just somehow knew they'd play that one,” she said. When I mentioned it to a schoolmate, he said his favorite was the one on the other side of the record (in those days all we had was 78 RPM records that played about three minutes on a side), “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” That one's lovely too, about drifting along with the tumbling weeds, cares fading away. Westerns are not my favorite, but these are wonderful melodic songs. Another is “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” wherein an erring cowboy sees the riders in the sky, their horses' feet flashing fire, and one paused to warn him that if he doesn't change his ways he will wind up riding with them forever. What a message! But there are peripheral; other tunes dominate my skull. More on those another day.

One of my readers, Mark Geatches, suggested that I set up a FAQ section for the convenience of readers, which should also spare me the inconvenience of answering similar questions repeatedly. I pondered, and finally decided to do that here. He suggested some questions, and I'm adding more, and will add others as they come up. But be warned; I seem to be incapable of giving a simple answer to a simple question.

Does formal training help new writers get agents? This is the question, so I'll address it, but the simple answer is No. I had formal training, in the form of my BA in Creative Writing, but it still took me six years after college to make my first sale. Agent? An informal group of us aspiring writers queried all the agents listed, and not only got nowhere, some didn't bother to answer. Folks, Parnassus—that is, traditional print publishing, is essentially a closed shop and a Catch 22. Many publishers buy only from agents, and most agents won't even consider unpublished authors. The ratio of aspiring writers to available publishing slots is somewhere south of 100 to 1. As one established writer told me, the fat hogs have their snouts in the swill and they aren't about to let the new little piggies in. So forget about agents; if you're new, you can't get a good one, and you sure as hell don't want a bad one.So how did I make it? I went first for the magazines, where you don't need an agent, and kept sending in stories for eight years, two during college, six thereafter. Finally, by persistence and luck, I made a sale and a whole $20. Thereafter it was easier, as I gradually became known. I made only a pittance; my wife had to work to support us. Then, faintly known at least by magazine editors, I went to novels, and sold my first novel four years after my first story. But there's more competition today, so I think it's harder for a new writer to break in. That's why I say you need luck: to have your manuscript on the right desk at the right time.Fortunately today there are better options, some of which I have helped promote, such as self publishing and electronic publishing. So you don't need formal training, or an agent; just write your best and try the new markets and hope to get lucky. The question is irrelevant.

As I said elsewhere, I like to try different things, whether in life or writing. This is also true within the several genres I have tried over the decades. While my prior efforts have been mostly in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Martial Arts, Historical, or Horror, in recent years I have tried Erotic, notably with the dirty fantasy Pornucopia and its sequel The Magic Fart, and with the Relationships story collections. I regard myself as a natural story writer who got shunted into novels for economic reason, because it was not possible to earn a living from just stories. Two things are changing that: in my dotage I no longer have to make money from stories, and electronic publishing makes it possible for anyone to publish just about anything. So I have enjoyed writing stories again, of whatever type, but mostly erotic because that's where the main market is. Just as the fondest desire of most folk is to love and be loved, a writer's desire is to write and be read. And loved, of course; critics are not welcome. I have a huge file of story ideas. Whenever I get a notion, which can be anywhere/anywhen, I scribble a note in pencil so I won't lose it, then later type it up as a summary and put it in my Idea File, where it remains until it gets the curtain call and emerges to fulfill its fondest desire, which is to be written. Sometimes I get amendment notions on following days, amplifying or qualifying prior ideas, which become further summaries. A really hot idea can thus finally amass five or six thousand words and has to be written lest it burst out on its own and cut out the middleman, that is the author, me. But not every idea makes a perfect story. Some are fragments, moods, mental pictures, dreams, or have conceptual flaws, interesting but incomplete. Some are retakes of prior notions, as I realize when I see them formulated. I'm not sure how many times I've had this Great Idea for a situation in which beautiful women suddenly are as eager for sex as normal men are. It's a common male fantasy bearing little relation to reality. Chances are that a lovely woman who says she's eager for sex is actually interested in something else, like ironclad commitment; sex is merely a skillfully wielded tool to corral the man. But some of my ideas in the file are good original notions that ought to be used. To me a story idea is like a living thing; it should not be allowed to suffer without recognition in the dark dungeon of anonymity. Every notion, like every person, deserves its chance. What could I do with these desperate children of my imagination who could not quite make it on their own?Then I got a bright notion about notions: why not try making these failed story ideas into the chapters of a novel? Such as a virtual-reality game framework where the qualities of avatars are defined by sexual interactions. Or a castle invasion where the Amazonian warrior women—no relation to the bookseller/publisher Amazon, at least not that I know of—can be defeated only by sexually penetrating them deep enough to reach the internal trigger for their orgasm? Or the restaurant wherein the food is seemingly urinated, defecated, or vomited out by the servers. Could this possibly work?So I tried it, and it did. The ideas did not have to be complete stories; they needed only to contribute to the larger whole. Thus a man and a woman meet as players in the erotic romance game, competitive yet necessarily cooperative, their avatars having sex that their real bodies experience. That is, the game setting may be fantasy, but the sex is fundamentally real. They fall in love as avatars, and complete it in their real bodies. I'm not sure this kind of romance has been done this thoroughly before, but I loved doing it in Eroma. The title is made from the concept: EROtic ROMAnce.Which raises questions. Can game players really be wired to experience triggered orgasms? Women as readily as men? At such time as the technology becomes available, this game should break records for popularity. The assumption is that when women are freed of the physical and emotional risks of sex, as they are in the avatar state, and provided with a way to get the same instant pleasure from it as men do, they will happily compete. For one thing, they are universally desirable in the avatar state, regardless of their state in mundane life. Now they can be freely sexual in the wildest settings, with any number of partners, have it all on public display, and have no guilt, because after all it's only a game. So women can compete sexually on an even basis with the men, have repeated orgasms, try to win the prize, and become anonymously notorious. Maybe even be acclaimed as the most desirable creatures in the world. Pleasure for its own sake, the traditional male fantasy becoming a female fantasy too. Yes, I think women will like this game as well as the men do, perhaps for qualitatively distinct reasons, but just as intensely. The novel may be a mere prelude to a virtual reality not far in our future. What do you think?

One of my readers, Mark Geatches, suggested that I set up a FAQ section for the convenience of readers, which should also spare me the inconvenience of answering similar questions repeatedly. I pondered, and finally decided to do that here. He suggested some questions, and I'm adding more, and will add others as they come up. But be warned; I seem to be incapable of giving a simple answer to a simple question.

How do I write? Do I have a schedule, or wait for inspiration? 
I have a rough schedule. I can't work set hours each day because I have other things to do, like making meals, washing dishes, and grocery shopping, my wife's health restricting her, and I have a reasonably rigorous exercise program that also takes time. But I try to be at my desk from 9AM to 1 PM, and from 2:30PM to 5 PM, and from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. That is, about eight hours a day. I seldom get that much, and of course everything else in the world seems to have better things for me to do than write. Hell, this blog is an example; the time spent on it comes directly out of my novel writing time. So does fan mail. So does reading. So does making love to my wife. Life gets constantly in the way. I'm a writaholic; there is writing, and there is everything else. The two sometimes seem to compete with each other, like day and night. So I may average about four hours a day of actual writing, seven days a week. I write efficiently, and I get a lot done. I have mastered the Muse, being able to summon inspiration at need. So I don't wait for inspiration, I make it wait on me.

One of my readers, Mark Geatches, suggested that I set up a FAQ section for the convenience of readers, which should also spare me the inconvenience of answering similar questions repeatedly. I pondered, and finally decided to do that here. He suggested some questions, and I'm adding more, and will add others as they come up. But be warned; I seem to be incapable of giving a simple answer to a simple question.
What is my favorite book? 
That is one you probably never heard of, and might not approve of anyway. It is Rationale of the Dirty Joke, by G Legman, a huge compendium of dirty jokes, and a larger sequel No Laughing Matter. Together they come to more than 1,800 pages. The first was published in 1968 by Grove Press; it may not be easy to find today, though I hope electronic publication is catching up with these invaluable tomes. Here is why they are important: the author's thesis is that a person's true nature can be ascertained by analyzing his favorite dirty joke. I believe he is correct. Humor is a highly personal thing; what regales one person may leave another cold. A joke makes a person laugh, and that inevitably ties in with his fundamental beliefs and prejudice. If I encounter a person who laughs hilariously only at jokes that disparage black people or women or gays, I have a clue to the racism or sexism or homophobia he may not care to admit openly. But the book is considerably more exhaustive than that. He summarizes each joke in italics, then has a discussion of its nature and perhaps also its underlying meaning. There are thousands of jokes, and thousands of discussions. I learned things about mankind from this monumental work, and believe anyone would. There are fifteen major categories ranging from Animals to Marriage to Scatology, each with many subsections. Discussions are wide-ranging; I remember how he made the point that when it comes to pollution, it is shit that is clean (because it composts naturally), and the pure white powders that pollute (being unnatural and long lasting, like DDT). So okay, what is my own favorite dirty joke, that gives away my hidden nature? Would you believe, I did not find it in this compendium. So I wrote to the author, and he admitted he had not heard that one before. Score one for me. So what is that joke? It relates to the power of the word, because I am a writer and I do believe in the word. Here it is, in severe summary, with one key word expurgated in case anyone maiden aunt is reading this. A trucker came into a roadside cafe, and when waitress inquired what would he have he said “Gimme a cuppa coffee and a fudging donut.” She was upset by the vulgar word, as was the manager, and they had him hauled into court for obscenity. The judge heard their statements, then said to the trucker “What do you have to say for yourself?” The trucker said “Well, your Honer, it was a fudging bad day. The fudging alarm clock got me up too early, then the fudging truck wouldn't start, and when I finally got it rolling, boom! A fudging flat tire. Got that fixed but I was fudging late on my fudging schedule. Then I saw this nice fudging little cafe, so I said what the fudging hell, and I stopped there for breakfast. And this nice fudging waitress comes up and says what'll I fudging have? And I say “Gimme a cuppa coffee and a donut.” At that point the waitress jumped up and cried “That's a fudging lie!” and there was outrage in the audience. Whereupon the judge banged his gavel and said “Quiet! Quiet, or I'll clear the fudging courtroom!” So there you have it: when a word or a lie is repeated often enough, people start to use or believe it. Politicians know that, of course.