“My book.”
I brought the pitch for this concept to the editorial board with the idea that, if approved, they would hire someone actually qualified to write it. Instead, our editorial director decided I should write the book, and oversee the project. I was paired with a project editor and fact-checker, and spent about a solid month deciding the organizational structure, researching the archive for photos, writing chapter essays, and reading lengthy academic papers on things like botfly parasitism and tetrodotoxin to write two-line captions. The text was later adapted for the cover story of the first issue of NatGeo Wild Magazine. The book did not sell well, but apparently did gangbusters in both elementary school and prison libraries, two places where I would naturally expect to find my audience.
