Sunday, July 20, 2003
I wrote another 1,604 words yesterday and finished "The Dead and the Moonstruck" at about 4 p.m. Today I'll read it aloud to Spooky and Jennifer and then do a polish, and get it in the mail to Candlewick tomorrow. It's a story I'm very pleased with. It's somewhere new and, at the same time, somewhere very familiar. And it's the 59th short story I've written and sold since July 1993, almost exactly ten years ago.
My dinosaur post yesterday seems to have been popular. Thanks for the e-mail, etc. I was thinking about the post through much of the day. I'd forgotten about the Aurora models that came along about the time I was "getting too old" for the regular plastic dinos. All these things fall under the category of Stuff I Wish I Hadn't Let My Mother Sell At Yard Sales. My mother was a yard-sale fiend, and even blue plastic ankylosaurs and Aurora Woolly Mammoth models were fair game. I did manage to keep almost of all my books from childhood. I think my mother's reverence for books kept them clear of the yard sales. I still haved all my Burroughs paperbacks, for instance (that's Edgar Rice, not William). And, of course, the plastic dinosaurs helped foster my love of paleontology, as well as my ability to tell stories. I didn't get to excavate my first real dinosaur until 1980 (I was still in high school), but I pretended excavations years and years before that, encouraged by books by men like Roy Chapman Andrews and Edwin Colbert. Never mind that all the rocks where I lived were Paleozoic, and never mind that even as a kid I knew that meant there'd be no dinosaurs in them, it didn't stop me from looking. And I did find lots of fossils in the process - trilobites, ferns, brachiopods, snails, crinoids - that sort of thing. Things disappointingly invertebrate and botanical. But it kept me going. Anyway, yes, plastic dinosaurs were very fine things indeed.
Someone should send a few to Pat Robertson. Maybe he'd discover more constructive fantasies than his current attempt to pray three "liberal" Supreme Court justices off the bench. I just love people, especially the sort of fundamentalist Christians who balk at the smallest hint of paganism, who reduce prayer to the most simplistic sort of magic. Say the right words and get what you asked for. And when those prayers are meant to affect the minds of other men and women, doesn't that create a rather sticky paradox with regards to free will?
I need to get to work. "The Dead and the Moonstruck" and then I have to get Low Red Moon extras together for Subterranean Press, and attend to some other smaller matters. Tomorrow, I'll get back to work on Chapter Six of Murder of Angels.
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