The best part of a busy week

It wasn't toting home from UT an enormous stack of books about antebellum Charleston and the B&O railroad as research for my Impostors project.

It wasn't reading a terrific nonfiction proposal from a new friend and then putting her in touch with a children's literature professional who was just as enthusiastic as I was.

It wasn't picking up Keep Your Eye on the Kid as a baby gift for a film-historian mom's firstborn (See? I'm doing better!) and then visiting with a kidlit friend while I was in the neighborhood.

It wasn't even finding out about another friend's wonderfully ambitious (and long overdue) historical and literary project.

And it wasn't finishing my first reads of the manuscripts I'm critiquing for this month's conference, or successfully shaving 12 pages of my own down to 10 for submission to a critique group, or making plans for a get-to-know-you lunch this week with a couple of local literary folks.

Nope, it was an hour spent at my kitchen table with a pair of preteen writers. They came equipped with loads of enthusiasm and terrific questions about writing and publishing, and I got to share the evolution of my relationship with one publishing house from rejection letters -- all of which I saved and was able to show them -- to acceptance of one of my manuscripts.

And the best part of the best part was when one of them said, "Little, Brown! Almost everything I read is from Little, Brown!"

What am I working on (3/08)?

Well, since last time, let's see...

Researching and writing new profiles for my Impostors project, a.k.a. Pasta.

Booking a summer trip to Boston, where I'll visit my Day-Glo publisher and hang out with my agent and some of her other clients.

Starting manuscript critiques for next month's SCBWI conference, and making plans to entertain out-of-towners.

Revising my recent picture book manuscripts, starting with Bell.

Toiling away on a plan to raise the profile of children's and YA nonfiction right here in the (or at least a) River City.

Trying to keep my writing-related-but-not-actual-writing-writing activities in check. So with that, I'm off...

What am I working on (12/07)?

It's been a while since my last update along these lines, so the answer must be "not much." But since I just met my final deadline of the year -- three new sample profiles with which Pasta's publisher will try to tempt potential illustrators -- now seems like a good time to get my head clear on what's next:

Making copies of the many, many Lomax materials currently in my possession (Austin-area libraries and Interlibrary Loan have been very good to me) before I go out and get any more. And with an April deadline looming, I really ought to just stop gathering materials for a while, make sense of what I've got, write what I can, and then see what holes in my research still need to be filled.

Saying "no." I'm full for 2008. Can't take on anything else. Not that other folks are asking me to take on a bunch of other things -- most of the opportunities that I'll need to say "no" to will originate within my own head.

Filing!

I hope I'm better at switching gears than staying organized

The other night I'd thought I'd sort of finished a first draft of Chapter 4 of my Lomax book. Then, yesterday, a source called back with some illuminating information about one of Alan Lomax's many undertakings in the years just after WWII.

Then, today -- and I can hardly believe this -- I remembered that I never had made it all the way through the letters of his that are available here in Austin at the Center for American History. (I'd left off in the mid-1940s back when I was still writing about the mid-1930s, and I guess I got distracted.) So, I spent a late lunch hour there today getting still more clarification about the period covered by Chapter 4.

I'd love to keep this momentum going, but I'm due for a major gear-switching. For several months my plan had been to spend December turning out drafts of three more chapters for Pasta. With the recent change in editors, though, I hadn't been sure whether the original vision and schedule for the project would hold.

Yesterday, I had a enjoying and reassuring first conversation with my new Pasta editor, and the upshot is that all previous plans for the book are still intact. Which means it's time for me to get ready for those additional Pasta chapters. I just need to make sure I remember to go back to the CAH for the rest of those Lomax letters when I'm done.

Be there then (and staying there now)

If I wasn't already involved in next spring's Austin Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference as a panelist, I'd be knocking folks out of the way to get my registration into the mail.

Perhaps I'm biased -- one of the faculty members sold one of my manuscripts to another of the faculty members -- but the lineup of professionals, sessions, and activities is the best I've ever seen this side of the annual SCBWI conference in Los Angeles. It truly seems perfectly designed to meet the needs of children's and YA writers at every stage on the path of publication.

They even found someone to critique nonfiction manuscripts.

***

Earlier tonight I found out what will happen to Pasta, the manuscript bought by an editor now moving to a different publishing house.

The most likely options were that the manuscript would land in the hands of a different editor at the same publisher (Dial), or that it would go with the original editor to her new employer.

Turns out, I'm staying with Dial. I'll miss working with my original editor -- she and I had put our heads together in her office last spring to come up with a vision for the book -- but I also get a kick out of knowing that, in a sense, I've sold the manuscript twice, once to each editor.

And if the new editor and I come up with a different vision, no biggie: I haven't done much more than think about this project since finishing the proposal.

From the department of "Just Keeping Things Interesting"

I found out today that the acquiring editor in my most recent sale is switching publishers.

Well, that's a new one for me. Perhaps this is understating things a bit, but I sure am curious to see what will happen next.

Three is a magic number

In my first 75 months of writing for children, I made one sale (The Day-Glo Brothers). In the past five months, my agent has made three on my behalf -- S.V.T., my Alan Lomax biography, and now Pasta.

This third sale, to Dial, was announced just yesterday, and we're describing this Y.A. project as a "collection of profiles of real-life impostors ranging from charlatans to survivors." Since it doesn't yet have an official title, or much else -- we sold this one based on a proposal and two sample chapters -- Pasta gets to keep its code name. (Get it? Impostor, pasta -- I guess it helps to imagine a New England accent.)

These past few months have been thrilling and bewildering, rewarding and discombobulating. After more than six years of always actively trying to sell what I've written, I'm in the unfamiliar position of having enough work lined up to keep me busy for the next couple of years. I like the security and stability of the situation, but I hope I'll still have the flexibility to jump onto some new project temporarily should inspiration come from an unexpected place.

But that's just me overthinking things. For now, I'll close with this quote from my limbic brain:

"Woo-hoo!"

What am I waiting for (3/07)?

News from editors on Pasta, James, Smith and P.O.

Submission (or revision) news on J.R. and Arbor.

Word on whether, where and when I'll be traveling to do some on-site research for one project or another.

The Cybils post-mortem. Get your comments in now.

The receipt through Interlibrary Loan of an obscure figure's autobiography -- a book that might well be a crushing bore but might also inspire yet another research project. The two are not mutually exclusive, you know.

Official confirmation on a couple of fun pieces of news that I can share with you all.

The arrival of my very first issue of Horn Book, which I ordered over the weekend. It seems like it wasn't very long ago, when I was first getting started in this business, that subscribing to Horn Book seemed like a total cart-before-the-horse extravagance.

What are you guys still doing there?

Satchel Paige once said, "Don't look back: Something may be gaining on you." For me these days, it's more like, "Don't look back: A pair of old manuscripts may still be sitting there waiting for you."

With J.R. out the door and Pasta still making the rounds, I've recently turned my attention to Arbor, a middle grade novel that's been in the works for about a dozen years. Half of that time, it existed only in my head, but that still leaves a long history of development on paper. I've been happy with Arbor for a long time, too, but parts of it still aren't clicking with editors, so I've gone back and worked some more on the first few chapters, where I think the problem lies.

Then there's James, a biography I began researching about five years ago. On Monday, I read four "final" drafts of considerably different tellings I've tried along the way in attempts to make the story resonate enough with editors for them to want to help me shape it further. The most recent draft, which I last touched a year ago, I like very much. Still, I may be on the verge of yet another approach to James' story.

The thing is, I don't mind. I feel like my writing has come a long way over the years, but I really want these old projects to come with me.

What am I waiting for? (2/07)

News from editors on S.V.T., Pasta, James and Smith.

P.O.'s return to circulation.

The right time to travel a few hundred miles east for some on-site research for J.R.

Anything that may develop from an animation studio's recent out-of-the-blue inquiry about one of my projects.

TLA!

What's next? Who knows?

Whatever else 2007 may have in store, it doesn't look like I'll be spending much time ginning up ideas for writing projects. Instead, I'll just need to figure out which one to pursue next.

I've gotten encouraging editorial news lately on several of the projects I've got in circulation. Revision notes are supposedly forthcoming for both the James and Smith manuscripts. My Pioneers proposal has elicited interest in seeing a complete manuscript. And my Pasta proposal has met with a request for an additional couple of chapters.

On top of those are a trio of nonfiction projects that haven't been pitched to any editors yet (including J.R.) but which I'm itching to tuck into, along with long-on-the-drawing-board ideas for a couple of middle grade novels.

This is a happy situation to be in. I vividly remember a loooooong period a decade or so ago when I wanted badly to write something but had no clue as to what, or even any idea about how to figure that out. I sure don't miss that feeling.

I thought it would be easy, mais non

I suppose it's a good sign that I'm having to turn down requests for personal appearances already: A local school asked me to be a "celebrity (hee!) reader" during Children's Book Week, but I had to pass, given my commitment to the Cybils.

About that commitment: When I was asked to be involved in the Nonfiction Picture Book award, it never occurred to me that part of my job would be having to divine what's nonfiction and what's non-nonfiction. "Nonfiction" seemed pretty straightforward to me: It's true stuff.

But then folktales and fairy tales and history-based slapstick and whatnot entered the picture. Libraries shelve some of them with fiction, and some with nonfiction. It can vary from library to library. Even some plainly true stories are showing up in the fiction sections, which just seems wrong, as does shelving items that don't meet the "true stuff" sniff test in the nonfiction section. Anyway, we're trying to do right by these authors and illustrators and give their books a fair shake in the right category. I just expected more fair-shaking and less category-righting.

***

In other developments...

There's more good news from Disco Mermaids. Congratulations, Robin!

Cynsations' neat-o series of editor interviews continues with Yolanda LeRoy of my favorite publisher.

If This Jazz Man sounded good to you, check out Publishers Weekly's article about how the book came to be.

***

And finally, Pasta didn't stick with the editor I'd first discussed the project with back in January. I got a rejection letter yesterday -- not for the topic, but for the voice I'd used in the sample chapters. She just flat-out did not like it -- not one bit. I'm a little sad, on one hand, in that a project I'd been working on with this editor in mind failed to strike a chord with her, especially after she'd been so enthusiastic in the beginning and so patient along the way; I'm already thinking of other projects for her.

But I'm also oddly excited -- I went outside my comfort zone in coming up with the voice for this proposal, and it may just be that producing something that's not everyone's cup of tea is simply part of going outside one's comfort zone as a writer. I'm still very excited about the voice, and something about this rejection feels different from the many others I've gotten over the years.

Of course, this rejection could well turn out to be merely the first of many, by which point this feeling could be all too familiar.

What am I waiting for? (11/06)

Half a year since I last posted about this, I'm still waiting for more things than I'm working on. Including:

My first glimpse of the art for The Day-Glo Brothers.

News from editors about several manuscripts:

• My biographies of James (picture book) and Smith (middle grade), which are both with the same editor. This editor gets them, I think, but there's a big difference between "gets" and "buys."
• My middle grade novel, Arbor.
• My proposal and sample chapters for Pasta.
• My picture book/graphic novel series P.O.

Copies of the books nominated for the Nonfiction Picture Book category of the Cybils.

The next big industry/literary event I plan to attend: the Texas Library Association annual conference in San Antonio in April.

Next summer, when -- a year before The Day-Glo Brothers' publication date -- I'll get cracking on a full-fledged web site, curriculum guides, and whatnot.

Reading? Writing? Who needs 'em?

Aside from not getting much reading or any writing done, yesterday was terrific.

First, my editor paid me a great big compliment as we resolved a micro-issue related to the publication date of The Day-Glo Brothers. By the way, we should be about a year away from having advance copies.

Then I heard from my agent that my Pasta proposal -- two chapters and descriptions of additional subjects ripe for coverage in the subsequent chapters -- is ready to send off to the (very patient) editor who expressed an interest back in January. Plus, I got some encouraging and constructive feedback on SVT that -- along with what I got from Don and Julie last weekend -- I'll put to use when I start revising next week.

And then there was the party, a Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith-hosted affair in honor of the guests in town for today's SCBWI conference. If I drop any more names, I'll be spending the entire morning adding links to their sites and blogs. But regardless of who was there, I was impressed yet again by the warmth and congeniality and fun (and noise) generated by a house full of people who love children's literature.

I learned of new contracts, new books, and a nearly completed trilogy. I got to pass along a message from an out-of-town author to the visiting editor, and I took a message from the visiting writing coach to pass along to an out-of-town blogger. There was enthusiastic talk of the Cybils (and not just by me), nervous talk of the next day's presentations, and grin-and-bear-it talk of ongoing revisions. And lots of curiosity about how The Day-Glo Brothers is coming along.

Best of all, I found in a couple of New Yorkers an appreciative audience for the title of the country song I'm writing. But since it was too loud to sing in there, I'll share the chorus (the only part of the song that actually exists so far) with you. Feel free to imagine my wife rolling her eyes as I sing:

I'll ask you one more time
And I swear, it's not a joke
Tell me honestly
Do these tears make my heart look broke?

Me to self: Are you serious?

Blah, blah, blah. Whine, whine, whine. Seems like I've spent much of the past few months talking (to myself, at least) about how much I'm looking forward to "just making stuff up" once I cleared my current nonfiction project, Pasta, off my to-do list, even if only temporarily.

Well, on Friday, I did, submitting two sample chapters and a host of summaries suggesting additional profile subjects. And so, for the first time in ages, I'm facing no deadlines -- self-imposed, agent-suggested, or contractually mandated. I have no writing obligations to anyone but myself, and I've got several fiction ideas to choose from.

So, how did I spend my leisure time this weekend? By reading an adult nonfiction book that directly ties into the next picture book biography I've got in mind. Why can't I give myself a break?

My wife says it's because, at heart, I'm a reportorial storyteller. I think it might be because I'm a chump.

When I put it that way, it doesn't sound like a children's book at all

Yesterday I finished the first biographical profile in Pasta -- finished at least enough to send it along to my agent for her review. And let me tell you, it's a whole lot different than the tales of, say, anthropomorphic apes and birds and bears that I've written over the past six years. It's got a character in extreme jeopardy and a plot that includes genocide and attempted sexual assault.

All of it's true, and it's a story of resourcefulness and survival that I think is worth sharing with young readers. But how young? The editor whose interest spurred me to explore this subject in the first place works for a house that has only recently expanded from picture books to middle grade. And to me, at least, this first chapter feels awfully YA.

Now I'm off to work on the second chapter, which is much lighter, as it has to do only with theft on a major scale and the endangerment of a couple of thousand people.

Memoir or less how it happened

I hit the skids with my sample chapter for Pasta, but I've figured out why, aside from just being brain-tired (which I'm remedying through ways too mundane to mention here). This is the first time that I've ever had a biographical subject's memoir available as a source, and I've been leaning on it too heavily for this early draft.

This memoir (as all good memoirs should be) provides lots of tasty details knowable only to the subject himself, but there's so much that necessarily got left out about the time and place in which he lived -- things he never noticed, things he took for granted, things he forgot, and things he chose not to include. (I suppose it's unreasonable to expect memoirists to recount every sensory impulse they ever experienced.) And it's those environmental, incidental details -- and the flavor that they inject -- that my draft is missing.

So, as of yesterday, I've got two or three thousand pages worth of books about my subject's time and place wending their way through the request systems of my local libraries. Those should give me all the flavor I can stand. And I'll try to keep this lesson in mind when I tackle my children's-book adaptation of one of my favorite books from my own childhood.

Notes to self

Any day that involves me shelling out $140 for unplanned auto maintenance before 8:15 a.m. is generally going to have to work extra hard to come up with some redeeming qualities. But the blow was immediately softened for me this morning by the fact that I was able to get a little unexpected reading done for Pasta.

As I learned from my weekend's critique with Don and Julie, I needed it. My sample chapter had too much sample, not enough chapter. I have a habit -- a bad one, I'm suspecting -- of taking notes immediately on my initial reading of books I use for research. That one reading is all I had time for before generating the draft I shared this weekend (ideally, I'd allow myself a note-free read-through at the outset), and the neat-o approach I took to telling the story failed to connect.

It wasn't the narrative approach itself that was the problem, I don't think (I could be wrong), but the fact that I simply didn't know the protagonist well enough. I knew the outline of his story, but I hadn't made the effort to inhabit his character, to see his situation through his eyes, to feel his heartbeat quicken at the moments of high drama, of which there are many in his tale.

This morning, I began re-reading one of the books I'm using for my research, and I was amazed at how much I'd missed the first time around. The notes I took today didn't overlap in the slightest with the notes I took previously. Quick descriptions and references that hadn't resonated before had meaning and relevance like nobody's business this time through.

I'm dying to return to my manuscript to work in what I've gleaned today, but I think I'm best off reading this book again in its entirety before I do. If the mere act of reading can take the edge off an early-morning outlay that would have been better spent on 15 or 20 cheese enchilada plates, there must be something to it.

Free publicity? Feh.

Pasta has been eating up a lot of my time as I've readied a couple of chapters for Saturday's critique. So has life in general, interfering with my writing time in that bothersome way that life tends to do.

That's why I've neglected a few things on the publicity front:

• The next Carnival of Children's Literature. I missed the submissions deadline for this one.
• The 2007 Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market, which includes a mention of Bartography. I haven't even gotten mineself to a bookstore yet to have a look.
• In her kind post about Joe Switzer's birthday, Anne Bustard found this article about the recent-ish discovery of daylight fluorescence (think "Day-Glo") naturally occurring in flowers. This is something I should know more about. Thank you, Anne.
  

If I can't keep up with this stuff now, how am I going to manage when I've actually got a book on the shelves?

No writer left behind

Any progress I make as a writer in the next week or two, I feel I will owe to No Child Left Behind.

I suppose I should explain.

A literary agent of my acquaintance was ruminating recently on the poor sales prospects for simply told, old-fashioned children's nonfiction and historical fiction:

I called one editor who is passionate about historical fiction to talk with her about it, and she said it's due to No Child Left Behind and the standardized testing that has become prevalent in American schools. For a couple of decades, the whole language movement has dominated, and teachers at all age levels have used trade books--picture books, chapter books, and fiction--to expand and underscore the lessons they teach in all areas, not just for reading classes or library time. The way standardized testing has come to dominate the educational landscape has caused the pendulum to swing away from the whole language approach, and now teachers are relying, again and unfortunately, primarily on textbooks, which better prepare students for those multiple-choice questions, supposedly. Even institutional publishers who specialize in the school and library market are finding they cannot do historical fiction and other nonfiction subjects terribly successfully outside of textbook form, and so naturally, trade houses are also pulling away from nonfiction, history, and biography--unless they are such strong stories that they would be successful whether they were truth or fiction, and the truth-behind-the-story aspect becomes just a bonus, rather than the point. [emphasis mine]

I tend to write nonfiction in a pretty straightforward form and with a pretty straightforward voice. I would be hard-pressed to describe that voice, other than to say that it sounds an awful lot like the way I talk.

But once I read this theory about the impact of NCLB, I realized that I've been undercutting myself by not paying anywhere near as much attention to voice and form as I do to the facts and themes of the lives I write about. And I immediately resolved to do something about it -- in some unspecified project at some point in the maybe not-so-distant future.

Just a couple of days later, I was talking with my wife about all this when I two-thirds-jokingly suggested an off-the-beaten path approach I might take to Pasta. To my surprise, the idea rang in my ears like I'd struck a tuning fork -- it felt just perfect for the stories I'll be telling in this project. The next morning, it still did, and a few days later -- now that I've actually begun writing -- it still does.

So there you have it: Whatever else one can say about NCLB, it has jolted me out of my narrative rut. And I don't even have to take a standardized test to prove it.

I'll never sit on the end again

So, yesterday was the big conference. You know, the Texas Christian Schools Association conference here in Austin. What, did you think I was talking about some other conference?

The children's authors and illustrators panel was in the afternoon, but I took the whole day off and spent the morning at UT doing research for Pasta. About an hour into my work, there was a fire drill, and let me tell you -- you will never see a slower moving bunch of evacuees than in a university library at 8:55 on a summer Friday morning. But I survived that, and the withering look I received from the guy at the help desk when I asked him to direct me to the bound volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, and came away with 75 pages of material.

The format of the panel was very different from the last one. For one thing, there was a larger group of us -- besides me, the panelists were:

• Nathan Jensen (Don't Ever Cross that Road: An Armadillo Story)
• Janice and Tom Shefelman (Sophie's War)
• Lindsey Lane (Snuggle Mountain)
• Anne Bustard (Buddy: The Story of Buddy Holly)
• Mark Mitchell (Raising La Belle)

Instead of a discussion, the panel was conducted presidential-primary-style, with a series of questions asked by a moderator and answered by the panelists one by one, with a time limit, from one end of the row to the other. This might not have been all that significant for me, except that I innocently sat on the left end, which meant that I was up first to answer each question.

It was good practice for thinking on my feet, or at least in my seat. Still, there wasn't a single answer I gave that I didn't reconsider and come up with a better alternative to while the other panelists were still answering but after my chance to chime in had passed. I did, however, sport my Signal Green T-shirt, and since nobody came up to me after the panel and asked, "What's Day-Glo?", I consider my day's mission accomplished.

Plus, any day when there's such good hanging-out to be done with other author/illustrator types is a good one in my book. Besides those of us on the panel, audience members included Dianna Aston (An Egg Is Quiet), Brian Anderson (The Adventures of Commander Zack Proton), and Kathi Appelt and Joy Fisher Hein (Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers). So, many thanks to the TCSA, the UT library, and even to that incredulous guy at the help desk for making my day.

Something old, something new, some things borrowed, something strange but true

On my way to UT's Perry-Castañeda Library today, I was shocked to discover that the main southern street entrance to the campus no longer exists. It's been replaced by 100 cedar elms framing the view of the Capitol, right next to the Blanton Museum of Art, which has replaced the parking lot outside my old dorm. Score one for paradise.

Inside the library, I was in for another surprise: the sight and sound of an actual typewriter in actual use. It looked just like the ones we used in my high school journalism class (before we replaced those with late-'80s technology) and is apparently still the fastest way to get patrons' names onto temporary library cards.

Besides my renewed card, I got what I went for -- three books to aid in my Pasta research. And it occurred to me that I've gotten tons more use out of the UT libraries these past few years as a children's writer than I ever did when I was in school there. In fact, the only book I can remember checking out while I was a student was -- I kid you not -- the autobiography of singing drummer Levon Helm.

I had a great title in mind for this post, but then I saw that someone else had already used it

The good news is that yesterday I brought home a couple of books to help me gin up candidates for inclusion in Pasta.

The bad news is that one of those books has a title nearly identical to the one I had recently decided I would use.

Geez, what are the odds that that author and I would both be so exceptionally clever, and not just a couple of guys who gravitate toward the obvious?

And I also play a totally decent triangle, I must say

Here's one for my fellow research nerds out there, accomplished and aspiring alike.

This week I've made lots of progress seeking out candidates for inclusion in Pasta, so I thought I'd share how I've gone about it.

Rather than using examples from my actual project, though, I'll use a stand-in topic that won't give away any proprietary, potentially valuable information: singing drummers. I'm pretty sure I'm not ever going to work on a children's book about singing drummers.

But, geez -- there's Ringo. Levon Helm. Philip Bailey. Meg White...

Hang on a second.

***

OK, I've talked to my agent, and she assures me that I won't be working on a children's book about singing drummers, so let's proceed.

To cast a net for singing drummers who might be interesting to write about, my first step would be to search for phrases that would likely be used in an article about one or more of these talented artists, such as "singing drummer" (note the pages mentioning Ringo, Don Henley, Phil Collins, and Micky Dolenz) "drummers who sing" (which points the way to Peter Criss and Dave Grohl), and "drummer sings lead" (Jim Capaldi).

The next step -- where I am today in Pasta -- would be to triangulate between the names turned up in the previous search and find books containing references to at least two of these people on the same page. Examples include "don henley" + "phil collins" (which turns up a book also mentioning Kevin Godley of 10cc) and "ringo starr" + "dave grohl" (through which I was reminded of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson).

My next step would be to dig deeper into the lives of each of the people I've come up with and see if I'd like to begin dedicating my early mornings and lunch hours to telling their stories. So, if you know of any good Dennis Wilson bios...

Pasta's prologue

After another insightful weekend critique from Don (followed by a trip to the neighborhood pool with our sons; eat your heart out, Fuse: I've seen Hot Man #12 in his swimsuit), a considerably improved Toast went off to my agent this week. Between that, and the fact that all my other stuff is in circulation among editors now, I'm able to get going this week on a new project.

Except that it's not exactly new. It's one that I pitched to an editor earlier this year and began dabbling in this spring when I was distracted by other projects. I got nowhere with it -- thanks, "multitasking"! -- and set it aside until I could focus on it exclusively. And that time has come.

This nonfiction project -- I'm going to call it Pasta, because it will make me laugh every time -- will be an anthology of sorts, a collection of profiles of people with a common experience. This spring, I'd read biographies of a couple of these folks, took a few notes, and took a stab at starting the profile of one of them.

Without even looking at the work I did earlier this year, as I return to Pasta, I'm taking a big step back. Before drilling into any individual's story, I want to make sure I'm clear on what I'm trying to do with the project as a whole, and how I'm going to go about it. So, I spent my lunch hour today in a comfy chair at Half Price Books, making notes in a little pad -- questions I might want to answer with each profile, ideas for how to get started with my research, right down to the keywords I'll want to begin searching by tomorrow morning.

My thinking is that I'll write two or three of these profiles and build a formal proposal around them for the editor who was interested back in January. And while I've got three good candidates in mind for those profiles, the first thing I'm going to do is try to figure out who the other 10 or 12 people are that I'll be including in the proposal.

I know they're out there. First thing in the morning, I'll begin seeking them out. Wish me luck.