Kerrie Hollihan, author of the just released book Reporting Under Fire (Chicago Review Press, 2014), invited me to take part in this Writing Process Blog Tour. She writes award-winning nonfiction history books for young people. Kerrie, myself, and another history-savvy writer, Brandon Marie Miller, do a blog that features fun activities to go along with our books, called Hands-On Books.

What am I currently working on?
At the moment, I’m juggling a couple of books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Scientists in the Field (SITF) series. My husband, Tom Uhlman, is a photographer for the series and we’ve done a number of titles together as a team. Our latest book, Park Scientists: Gila Monsters, Geysers, and Grizzly Bears in America’s Own Backyard came out last month. It’s about research projects in national parks. I just turned in the draft manuscript for another SITF book that will be published next year. It’s about Biosphere 2, that iconic glass pyramid near Tucson that eight people sealed themselves inside for two years back in the early 1990s. Now it's a one-of-a-kind research facility run by the University of Arizona where all sorts of cool experiments about climate change and soil evolution are happening. Plus I'm starting to do research on a SITF book about New Horizons, the first ever mission to Pluto due to arrive at the once ninth planet next summer.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I try to write a succession of sensory-filled scenes connected by information. I want my books to have a “you are there feel” so that readers experience what tagging along with a firefly researcher or geochemist at work is like. Scenes filled with action, sounds, sights, and smells generates interest for the facts presented. There’s no “information dumping” before a reason to want to know those facts is established.

Why do I write what I write?
Science is about discovery and what’s more exciting than that?

How does my individual writing process work?
It depends on what sort of book I’m writing, but like most nonfiction writers the vast majority of my time is spent on research. For the Scientists in the Field (SITF) books this means tracking down actual working scientists willing to share their research with young people and spending time with them doing what they do. Nothing is written until after I’ve interviewed, researched, and seen the work of the scientist. What ends up as text in the book is entirely driven by what goes on as I go along with a researcher tracking Gila monsters or checking the temperature of a geyser.

To continue the writing process blog tour, it is my pleasure to introduce three authors whose work I admire. Each author has answered the same four questions I answered above. Click on the author’s name to find out what they had to say and to learn more about them and their work.
Keila Dawson
Kathy Cannon Wiechman
Diana Jenkins