Saturday, July 19, 2003
The productive writing days are becoming the norm again, which is a good thing. Yesterday I wrote 1,214 words on "The Dead and the Moonstruck." I'll finish the story today. There's a certain satisfaction to conceiving and completing a short story in the space of only four days. Especially one that you know's going to a good home. Never mind that five hours of writing leaves me too drained to work on other things I'd like to be working on. It's better than the alternative.
This morning I was having breakfast and, for no particular reason that I can recall, began thinking about the kid who lives across the courtyard. A few days back, he was sitting on his porch playing with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs. I wasn't sure kids still played with toys that couldn't talk to them and give stock quotes. When I was a kid, there was no finer toy on earth than a plastic dinosaur, except maybe a very big pile of plastic dinosaurs. I must have gone through a few thousand by the time I was ten, mostly the ones produced by Marx (the toy company, not the communist or the comedians), based on Rudolph Zallinger's gorgeous mural, "The Age of Reptiles," at the Yale-Peabody Museum. They weren't fancy, nothing like the anatomically-correct, modeled-to-scale dinosaurs available these days from the Natural History Museum in London or the Carnegie or the Boston Museum of Science. Generally, each one was molded in a single primary color (blue ankylosaurs, yellow brontosaurs, red allosaurs, and so forth). Imagination was required to make them more realistic.
With a pile a plastic dinosaurs and a few plastic cavemen (also manufactured by Marx), I could reenact the high points of One Million Years B.C. (the '60s remake with Harryhausen sfx, not the original) or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Throw in a few plastic cowboys and horses (I don't know who made those) and I had the cast of The Valley of Gwangi. A handful of plastic dinosaurs and I was ready to go back to the Cretaceous, or to Caprona, or Pellucidar, or some pastpresent place I created right there on the spot. I spun very elaborate stories around little more than plastic dinosaurs and the topography of my backyard. The fact that I preferred plastic dinosaurs (and books, oftentimes featuring dinosaurs) over football or baseball with the kids down the street prompted my parents' earliest concerns (later confirmed beyond their wildest fears), that I was "not right." Good for me. And the plastic dinosaurs. They didn't talk and weren't computerized or interactive (except, of course, in the sense that one was meant to interact with them), but they helped me learn to tell stories. And, because I could play with them alone, and usually did, they also helped to foster my budding anti-social, introvert behavior, without which I never would have become the recluse that I am today, capable of giving up entire weeks in the pursuit of THE END of a story.
A shame they couldn't teach me to spell, as well. Or use commas correctly. Then again, that's what proofreaders and copyeditors and spell-checking programmes and the Webster's Dictionary are for. Plastic dinosaurs have no business trying to teach you to spell.
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