What I'm working on

"Are you writing anything?" people often ask.  It is, I assume, just a conversation starter when they can't think of a better way to begin.My response is usually, "I'm always writing something.  I like to eat." But then, while eating is part of the issue, of course—writing is, after all, the way I earn my living—it is hardly all of it. I write the way I breathe, because it keeps me alive.I've just finished four small nonfiction books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They are for a second-grade-level series on the states, and so far I've done Florida, New York, Texas and California, seeing them through the eyes of a fun character named Mr. Geo.I took a break from a young-adult novel, Blue-Eyed Wolf, to write those books and am now back to the novel.  It is the story of a girl living in a small community at the edge of the wilderness in northern Minnesota in 1967 whose older brother enlists and goes off to fight in Vietnam. It is also about the destruction of the wolves in Minnesota during that time.I didn't have to do a lot of research about wolves before I could begin writing, because I have written about—and researched—wolves before. So I just did some refresher reading on that. I did months of research about the Vietnam War, though, from the perspective of the soldiers who were there, because the older brother's letters home are part of the story. I had to gather most of that information from scratch, because I was immersed in babies during those years and wasn't paying a lot of attention to the world stage.As usual, I have a couple of picture books I'm poking at, too. Some come together in a few hours, some take weeks and months or even years to finally find their shape. And some never make it. So far, the ones I'm working on are either rough, unfinished, or still tumbling around in my head.