This is a slide I show in my presentations to schools about The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (often right after students have speculated that I might have spent anywhere from two days all the way up to a year and a half working on that book):

shark-vs-train-vs-john-roy-lynch

Yes, I got the idea to write about John Roy Lynch (while watching a Reconstruction documentary) the same month I got the idea for Shark Vs. Train (while jogging). And that month was exactly ten years ago, in October 2006.

You can bet that I’m pointing that out — and the fact that one book took eight and a half years to get from idea to bookstores and libraries while the “fast” one took me merely three and a half — to schools that I visit this month.

Last week, though, I was able to go one better and let the kids at one school know that of all the elementary schools in the world, theirs is the closest — just a quarter-mile or so away — to the jogging route where Shark and Train first came to me.

I’m happy as can be to have made Shark and Train’s acquaintance, and that of John Roy Lynch, and of all the readers I’ve gotten to know thanks to the three of them.