Question Time: What's Next?

A weekly feature for paid subscribers

I’ve been holding on to a question Jackson Houser asked a few weeks back: How have recent events, both personal to you and in the outside world, modified your next book project? On a related note, what is your next book project? What can we do to help? (I apologize for my presumption in implicitly volunteering your subscribers, but I bet that there are others who would like to help, and who could supply something more than the mere encouragement that I can give.)

I like that last part! Encouragement is good, and right now the best thing anyone can do is buy my existing books, encourage others to do so, and post nice reviews on GoodReads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. (Unless, that is, you happen to have a spare half million charitable dollars lying around—in which case, let’s talk about an intellectual investment opportunity at Chapman University.)

I delayed answering Jackson’s question partly so that I could answer more timely inquiries but also because I hoped to have more news. My agent is waiting for word from publishers on a children’s book I wrote as a spinoff of The Fabric of Civilization and which I envision as the first in a series of similar books set in different times and places. The character and events are fictional but the setting and background are nonfiction. What happens with that idea will affect what happens next. Writing a picture book (no more than 1,000 words) takes a significant amount of time, requiring new research as well as imaginative storytelling. I did three completely new drafts of what we’re calling Veronica’s Summer of Silk before achieving a story that both my agent and I find a genuinely satisfying. We probably won’t have any news until after Labor Day.

Jackson starts his question with a provocative framing: “How have recent events, both personal to you and in the outside world, modified your next book project?”