A few minutes ago I e-mailed my rewrite of James to the editor who last June asked to see a manuscript combining elements of two earlier approaches.

June? Can it really have been that far back that I got her request for revision? And for a picture book? Yep. There was a lot of research I needed to do for this rewrite. While the draft I just sent does not directly use as much of that as I expected, I know James a whole lot better than I did seven months ago (reading the highly opinionated letters he wrote when he was 16 sure helped), and I hope that it shows.

There’s no contract for this book yet, and so I also hope that this new version will change that. If not, I may have to read more letters.

James lived to be 87. That’s a lot of letters. Please let this version sell…