Amber and the Written Word

Amber Karlovassi poured water into a plastic bowl full of PerfectCast, a modeling mixtue. She stirred it carefully, as per the directions, and then, taking a deep breath, proceeded to pour the mixture into the two plastic molds, each one containing six or seven types of bones – neck bones, arm bones, pelvic bones, and so on.

There, that was done, she thought, as she filled the last hollow.

She referred to the directions again. She’d have to wait at least an hour before the casts were completely dry, before she could apply the magnets and stick everything together.

And then, she’d have a 19 inch tyrannosaurus skeleton that she’d be able to place on her desk, to accompany the velociraptor and the triceratops that were already there.

What to do while she was waiting?

Amber looked at the row of library books on her book shelf. She should work on the article she was supposed to write for the Girl Scientist Magazine website. She’d been procrastinating about that for several days. She loved dinosaurs, and she loved reading about dinosaurs, but when it came to writing about them…she was stuck! Everything had been written so much better by everyone else!

“I suppose I could start my vocabulary list,” she thought. “That’s easy. I just need to write down what other people say, and how they define the words. And then, as long as I list the source that I got the words from, it won’t be plagiarism!”

She nodded sharply. “Yes, it’s time I got to work on this. Emily has already written two articles, and Trelane has written three, and I haven’t done anything yet.”

She plucked Dinosaurs off the shelf and looked at it. Well, that was going to be hard to identify, for a start. It was published by Igloo Books, in England, but it didn’t say who had written it, or who had edited it, or anything!

Amber shrugged. If she couldn’t give them a proper citation, that was their own fault!

She turned to the back of the book and began typing out the first part of the glossary:

Ammonite – extinct marine mollusks, had coiled shells.

Ancestor – Animal from which a later, related animal evolved.

Ankylosaurs – a group of armored herbivores that lived 76-68 million years ago. There were three main groups of ankylosaurs:
Ankylosaurids
Polacanthids
Nodosaurids

Aquatic – water dwelling
Archosaurs – Triassic reptiles, immediate ancestors of dinosaurs.

And that was all the As.

That would do, thought Amber. She saved the file, opened up her email program and sent it to Emily, who had agreed to be their website editor – uploading all the material that she wrote, and that Trelane and Amber sent her.

“Hi, Emily” she wrote.

“I’ve just gotten started on my Vocabulary page, and here are the As. More to come later.”

That done, Amber breathed a sigh of relief. Then she turned to the first page of the book and started paging through it, reading entries that caught her eye. She, like a lot of aspiring writers, had learned early on that she didn’t want to write, she wanted to “have written.”