Submitted For Your Approval.

Source: Amazon.com. Reprinted as #9 this book was the fifth published in the series. Go figure.

When I was a kid my mother started me on the Danny Dunn books. They’re not as well known as The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books, but when I started on them I still wanted to be a marine biologist and I was interested in science in general, and, being light science fiction, the Danny Dunn series was fun. There are fifteen in all, and I read a little over half of them when I was young. This summer I thought I’d go back and reread the ones I knew and read the rest while I was at it.

The books are set in the fictional town of Midston, somewhere in New England, and aimed at young adults and follow the adventures of Danny Dunn, a ten or eleven year old who’s being raised by his single mother–his father died sometime when Danny was young. Danny isn’t a boy genius–he’s an ordinary kid with a strong interest in science. This interest is encouraged by Professor Euclid Bullfinch, who’s hired Danny’s mother as a live-in housekeeper. Professor Bullfinch is kind of a vague polymath whose skills include engineering, physics, and chemistry. He encourages Danny’s interest in science. Danny has a friend, Joe Pearson, who’s an aspiring poet. This balance of science and art is nice–Joe can’t always follow Danny’s explanations and Danny’s sometimes amazed by Joe’s ability to rhyme. The third book introduces another friend, Irene Miller, who, like Danny, wants to be a scientist—specifically a physicist, although in Danny Dunn And The Smallifying Machine she considers switching to entomology. And having a strong, interesting, female character is a pretty cool thing for a series that started in 1956. What’s even more interesting is Irene’s interest in science is rarely treated as anything unusual; it’s not until the sixth book in the series, Danny Dunn And The Fossil Cave, that a friend of Professor Bullfinch’s assumes Irene isn’t interested in science. She politely corrects him, he apologizes, and they move on. And one of the books, Danny Dunn And The Automatic House, introduces a four-year old named Emmett who wears a bowler hat and his father’s Navy sweater, and speaks his own made up language. In today’s terms we’d probably recognize Emmett as being on the autism spectrum. Unfortunately Emmett only plays a part in one book, with his special ability to make high-pitched noises playing a crucial role, but it’s cool that everyone around him just lets him be his own person at a time when it was widely believed that autism was something that needed to be “cured”.

Source: Amazon.com. I had a copy with this same cover I found at a garage sale.

The series was started by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, an interesting pair of guys. Abrashkin was a film director best known for his 1953 film The Little Fugitive, about a kid named Joey who runs away from home to spend a day at Coney Island. The film Williams has a cameo in The Little Fugitive as Jay the Pony Ride Man, and was also a successful writer for kids and adults. Abrashkin and Williams started the Danny Dunn books in 1956 with Danny Dunny And The Anti-Gravity Paint, and kept at it until 1960, between Danny Dunn And The Weather Machine and Danny Dunn On The Ocean Floor, when Abrashkin, who had ALS, passed away. Williams, apparently out of respect for his friend and collaborator, insisted that Abrashkin be listed as co-writer on all fifteen books. Although not as popular as some other children’s series the books were popular enough to be reprinted for decades, and Danny Dunn And The Homework Machine would be adapted into a musical album, unfortunately with songs so treacly you could lose a tooth just listening to it.

Aside from the introduction of Irene the books are completely non-sequential and self-contained so it’s possible to start with any one in the series, although reading them in order I couldn’t help noticing that another character, Dr. Grimes, who’s a friend and occasional sparring partner of Professor Bullfinch, has a major part for the last time in The Ocean Floor, only returning briefly six books later when he rescues Danny, Joe, Irene, and Professor Bullfinch who’ve been shrunk to less than an inch high. In fact I realized too late that the books really aren’t meant to be read in sequence, or even in a batch. Doing so sets up an expectation that the final book, Danny Dunn And The Universal Glue, published just a year before Williams died at the age of 64, will be bigger than the others. It does address contemporary issues of pollution and chemical waste after an industrial plant drains a swamp and its runoff threatens the town dam. Professor Bullfinch’s new glue, named Irenium after Irene figures out how to contain it, is used to seal up the dam and prevent a disastrous flood. I don’t know if it was intentional but this does seem like a callback to the first book in which Joe mentions an attempt by Danny to build a hydroelectric generator and ends up flooding a bunch of houses upstream. Maybe Williams knew he was at the end. The final book isn’t a grand finale but there is a sense of closure.

Source: Goodreads.com. Actually one of the better Danny Dunn books. I read this one straight through in church one Sunday.

It’s also pretty obvious that, for stories supposedly grounded in science, Abrashkin and Williams didn’t let facts get in their way. Professor Bullfinch builds amazing high-tech gadgets by himself in his home laboratory, often with materials he’s cooked up himself, sometimes with a little help from Danny who has a tendency to start fires or cause accidents that lead to surprising breakthroughs and that’s not how science works, and in a few cases Professor Bullfinch doesn’t even know how the devices he’s built work and that’s really not how science works. Sometimes, though, you just have to suspend disbelief. Is it plausible that Professor Bullfinch, cooking up some chemicals in his laboratory, would just happen to make a super-strong, super-light plastic and use it to coat a submarine then fly Danny and his friends to Mexico where they’d get stuck in the depths of the Pacific Ocean only to find a long lost Aztec treasure? Definitely not, but it’s a fun story. Would it be possible for a new superconducting polymer to stop a knife-wielding bad guy if it were hooked up to a twenty-five foot amphibious electric catfish found only along the Nile River in Sudan? I wouldn’t know where to begin with how much is wrong with that if I weren’t so willingly going along for the ride. Could readers willingly accept that a scientist would build a miniature drone in the form of a dragonfly and the military would try to seize it and use it to spy on American citizens? Well, yeah, actually that one seems pretty believable, but the important thing is the Danny Dunn books are mostly light, escapist fantasy, and what more could you want from summer reading?

So I have a problem with rejection. I don’t even like to get the turndown service at hotels. And most of the time it’s not a problem, but, being a writer, rejection is part of the job. I knew it back when I was a college English majors and all my aspiring writer friends and I assured each other that part of the process was we’d be able to wallpaper our rooms with rejection slips before we ever saw an acceptance. We heard it from established writers too—even professionals sometimes get turned down. Accepting something like that intellectually is very different from accepting it emotionally, though, which is why for a long time I was reluctant to submit work anywhere unless I’d worked and reworked it, sometimes until the original spirit of inspiration that prompted it in the first place had completely dried up, leaving something that, even if it were technically good, was lifeless—like a photocopy of a reproduction of a picture of a dried flower.

The rejections that inevitably followed would send me down an emotional whirlpool, and I’d think, that’s it, I should just quit, it’s not like anyone’s asking me to write anyway, but then that’s the trouble. I didn’t start writing, and I don’t keep doing it, because I’m being asked to. It’s a compulsion. And when I’d seriously think about quitting I’d suddenly be flooded with ideas that I felt compelled to get down because that’s what happens when you taunt the Muse. In fact the most powerful Muse of all was and still is Ironia, who was expelled from the pantheon for using a sheep’s bladder to invent the first whoopee cushion, and who, upon departing, placed a curse on the other Muses that they would never get the joke.

In the final, fading days of 2019, I made a resolution that I’d get over my dislike of rejection, or at least mitigate it, by sending work out and getting it rejected. Intellectually I’ve known I needed to do this for a long time. I’m in a local writing group and when we’re doing introductions I’ll sometimes say, “I haven’t published much but I do have a nice stack of rejections,” which was, for a long time, only partly true. I did have some rejections but not enough to qualify as a “stack”, even if I printed them—one thing that’s changed since my college days is submissions and their responses, whether affirmative or negative, are sent electronically so I can’t wallpaper a room with them, which is probably just as well because electrons don’t go with the rest of the house’s décor.

So my plan for 2020, even before any of us knew what kind of year it was going to be, was to submit at least one new piece once a month, to get over, or at least mitigate, my dislike of rejection, to build up a tolerance for it. And I’ve managed to do a bit better and ended up with about fifteen, including an offer to teach a class on flash fiction, which I count as the only acceptance so far, although some things are still pending. There’s a big difference between accepting that the waiting is the hardest part emotionally and knowing intellectually that it’s not just a Tom Petty song, but that’s another story. And doing all this submitting has been an educational experience.

While rejections still aren’t fun I’ve realized I really like submitting. It helps give my writing focus and even purpose. Before I could and would tinker with a story or even a poem for years, sometimes cutting, more often adding, and sometimes would end up with an unwieldy epic. Admittedly, I’m not in bad company there; no one can forget the time Pope Julius II said to Michelangelo, “When I asked you to paint the ceiling I meant blue.” Any deadlines may be arbitrary and self-imposed but they force me to get to a stopping point and accept that, for some things at least, I’ve gotten to a point where they’re as good as they’re going to be and anything else is gilding the lily or, if I kept at it, encasing the lily in a solid block.

I’ve also learned that, for me, rejections are easier to take if they’re quick. A local weekly used to have an annual writing contest and I’d always enter and always lose but I’d go to the awards ceremony and three years in a row I’d start talking to one of the editors. He’d recognize my name and tell me how much he liked my work and I’d thank him politely while seething inside, thinking, if you liked it so much you should have put a ring on it, or at least published a list of runners-up. I’ve gotten some rejections that went into great detail about what they found wrong with my work, and while I appreciate the time and effort put into telling me the plot didn’t work, the characters were shallow, there was a typo seven-eighths of the way down page three, I need to trim my nose hair, that dress looks like I pulled it off a thrift store discount rack, and that I should put down the milkshakes and spend some time on a treadmill I’m capable of seeing the warts in my own work. I don’t want to tell editors how to do their job—if I did I’d tell them “Publish my work and give me some money!”–a simple “Thanks but no thanks” holds at least a flicker of hope. It allows me to imagine that the subtext may be, “We’d say yes but we’re full up. Try the place across the street!”

And submitting a lot does make the waiting easier. Instead of sweating and fretting over one thing as I wait for a response I get to sweat and fret over half a dozen things as I wait for a response, which is somehow easier and makes me wish Tom Petty were still around so I could tell him to try it. It also gives me some things I can put on my curriculum vitae, or will if I get any acceptances. It’s also prompted me to stick my neck, or at least my work, out more—I’m even sharing more with the local writing group I’m a part of, which may be why a couple of other members contacted me earlier this month. They’re starting a literary magazine and they wondered if I had a story they could use. Oh, hey, someone’s actually asked me to write for them, and they gave me a deadline that wasn’t arbitrary or self-imposed and I got back to them a few days early. Now I’m still waiting for a response but I hope they’ll say yes. If they don’t, well, maybe they know a place across the street.