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August 2008 update

My thesis adviser once told me that he felt like it took about three years of "banging his head against the wall" before he began to feel like he was making progress with his writing. As I like to tell people now, I am only about 8 months into my own "head-banging phase."

I do have a couple fun things to report. My article on the life of Richard B. Knight, the founder of the Oregon Zoo, was recently reprinted in the newsletter of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. (I didn't know such an organization existed till they contacted me for permission to reprint the piece.) You can see the original article on the Oregon Zoo Web site. I also have a short piece scheduled to appear in the Nov/Dec Psychology Today issue.

I am still plugging along on the butterfly book proposal. I'm scheduled to visit an evo-devo university lab in Kentucky that uses Buckeye butterflies in research next month. This book proposal research has been an expansion of my master's thesis, Silverspot: Biography of a Butterfly, but I've been fumbling for the right direction for most of this year. It seems the process of writing is as much about figuring yourself out as it is about figuring out the story amidst the flurry of quirky facts and amazing people you encounter in your research.