I was all set to offer up a short post about the progress of my Day-Glo revisions. And I will. But first…

A few moments ago I received an e-mail from an editor describing one of my not-yet-sold projects as “the bomb.” THE BOMB!!! (Take that, Ursula Nordstrom!) This, of course, will make it a little harder to get to sleep tonight, which is unfortunate since I need to be up at 2 a.m. (okay, 5 a.m.) to work more on Day-Glo. Sleep deprivation never felt so good.

So, about that Day-Glo, and the title of this post. Since I hadn’t touched the manuscript in over a year until I received my revision notes, I’ve had to approach my old research files almost as if they were for a brand-new project. And I’m loving it. I’m falling in love with the story all over again. If there are writers at this point in a project who discover that they hate their story, or are just lukewarm about it, I feel really, really sorry for them.

And probably because of the other nonfiction projects I’ve worked on in the meantime, I have a better sense than I did a few years ago (I started working on The Day-Glo Brothers in 2001) of where I need to dig deeper in my research. Hence those 1,300-odd pages of history about the Signal Corps (nothing there for me, as it turned out), and a fresh interview with the 80-something younger brother of my title characters, and the dozens of pages of 70-year-old handwritten notes that I should have by this time next week.

Oh, and I’m also reading How I Live Now. Wowee.