Making Under the Sky We Make
February 2021
I get to narrate the audiobook! Venturing more than a 5-km walk away from my house (to the studio in nearby Malmö) for the first time since last summer is a thrill. My director is the delightful Lorelei King. To prepare, I read her book Storyteller (and later, watch her in Notting Hill, which I've somehow missed until now!)
January 2021
I launch my newsletter, We Can Fix It, with facts, feelings, and actions to confront climate change. Like the book, but in an 8-minute dose each month. :)
November 2020
Proofreading the typeset version in Lund Botanical Garden.
Fall 2020
Final final revisions, spending hours tracking down final final final fact checks buried deep in appendices. Facts matter.
October 2020
I meet the promotions and marketing team at Putnam, and start thinking more about how to connect with my readers.
September 2020
I hire two excellent professional fact-checkers, who go through every word in the book with surgical precision. I go through their 2,500 comments and make LOTS of tiny revisions for accuracy. Thank goodness for fact checkers. They should be an industry standard, as Emma Copley Eisenberg argues in Esquire.
Summer 2020
"There is no good writing, only good rewriting." I repeat this mantra daily. I share the book with experts to get input on everything from how the Earth will end to how Instagram works. I revise further based on their feedback.
The cover gets its final, dark blue sky.
The cover gets its final, dark blue sky.
April 2020
The first version of the cover, with a coral-colored sky.
March-June 2020
I go on book leave as a global pandemic hits. I work REALLY hard. There's a post-it over my desk of my biggest fear; naming it makes it less scary: "Write a dull, boring book." My book club reads the first full draft in March 2020, which is thrilling/terrifying.
February 2020
 Book deal announcement from Publisher's Marketplace, February 2020
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I get a book deal for UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE (and it's the Deal of the Day on Publishers Marketplace!). The book will be published by the Penguin Random House imprint G.P. Putnam's Sons. My editor is Michelle Howry at Putnam.
My aim is to give people a sense of agency, urgency, purpose, and joy in solving the climate crisis. Through stories of Tinder dates, family folklore, conversations with strangers who contact me for existential life advice, and more, I explore what science does, can, and cannot tell us about what it means to be human, and what we must make humanly possible in the next decade. |
July 2019
My BFF Lucy Kalanithi introduces me to my agent, the fierce Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. Anna starts mentoring me on the art of turning my manuscript text into a commercial nonfiction book proposal. I have sooooo much to learn!
July 2017
After a super-intense summer in the public eye for a new study on high-impact personal climate actions that I published with Seth Wynes, including being the subject of a tirade from Rush Limbaugh, I start thinking and writing about climate change differently: more directly, personally, and accessibly, as I would talk to my friends. I would write for half an hour in the morning, after coffee with my husband and before I officially started my day. This writing started to take shape as a book.
