You have no idea how skeevy it feels to have a statement like "I'm writing a book" just hanging out there in the blogosphere. But, I'm going to just let it hang, and live with the discomfort, and even compound it by sharing what the book is about, to the extent that I know what it's about.


My dad was a huge Harley-Davidson aficionado. In September 2002 he took a solo road trip around the perimeter of Texas--a distance of 4,000 miles. His goal was to ride through each of the perimeter counties in Texas. (I've mentioned this before on the blog.)

He kept a journal of the experience, which I have been reading and writing responses to over the past couple of months. Many of the places he went have triggered my own thoughts and memories and questions. He intended to take that journal and expand it into an article, or maybe even something longer, but as most of you know, he died four months later. So I'm writing on his behalf. Only it's not about the trip per se, the trip is a metaphor for his life and our lives as father-daughter, and it forms the structure for the book.

Why I waited to share this is I needed to talk to my brothers and my stepmother more fully about this--I need their cooperation since there are lots of gaps in my memory. I've been doing some outlining and some research, and I will need to interview various family members as I put the pieces together.

So I'm working a little bit at a time, with the sense that sooner or later I will have to actually visit some of these desolate places and tiny towns he writes about--the Texas Gulf Coast, Big Bend National Park, the wide stretches of highway (and gravel road, and dirt road) in West Texas, a tiny town that has our last name (actually a former town that's nothing but an abandoned railway station and grain elevator), and so on. My current thought--I'm eligible for a sabbatical in 2008 (SO hard to believe), so next year I hope to apply for a Lilly grant and part of my proposal will be to retrace portions of his route.

PPB's comment in the last post [she asked whether I had a book deal--yeah right!] makes me think about the book proposal. I've been holding off on that because I'm told if you're unpublished folks want to see the whole thing. And I'm also not convinced that I can pull this off. One of the things that struck me though is that this book would be interesting to market because it would have elements of memoir, travel, Texana (not a category outside of Texas I know), and spirituality (think Kathleen Norris's Dakota). And of course, motorcycles.

So there it is.