What you already guessed but I, of course, completely missed is that a famous name, especially a well-earned one like Orlean or Krakauer, is a selling tool. Even if my writing skill was comparable (it wasn’t yet but I figured with typical confidence that I’d get close during the drafting process) I had no name, no ‘platform,’ as agents and publishers say.

How could I have missed a detail so obvious and important? First, as I have said, I learn slowly. Second, I’m a writer because I love language. Fondle and collect words. Taste and touch and smell sentences. Good writing trumps all in the slightly skewed universe of Jo. : D

In the real universe what happened was I spent several months researching my book, a year writing it, at least a year doing several deep revisions, between which it sat, composting. And at the time of this writing, July 2009, I have still not sold it to a publisher.

But back to 2002. Over the spring and summer of that year I conducted long interviews with Clancy’s family and friends. I rode on a floodstage whitewater river taking page after page of waterlogged notes with a man who had loved and tried to rescue Clancy on the day of his death, Jon Barker. I read and reread Clancy’s journals. Watched and rewatched Jon’s many videos of crazy rafting adventures. In other words I did the kind of methodical, deep research you do if you want to write a good nonfiction book.

Periodically friends again tried to talk me out of this project. By this time, as usual, I was infatuated with every person I had interviewed, with the ways their lives came together, the ways their stories supported and contradicted each other. I knew I could tell their stories well and I badly wanted to. Stories like that deserved to be told, I said to my friends.

I was so immersed that some nights I dreamed I sat in a raft with Clancy, the oar handles propped under his elbows, low sparks of humor in his eyes as we swapped stories. No way was I going to quit this book, even if my friends’ warnings were starting to sink in and I felt a familiar discomfort, a feeling I recognized from other half-baked plans about to go awry. Not the feeling of guilty pleasure  I had had writing the cougar book. This was the feeling of a person in the middle of nowhere who has realized the tank will run dry before she sees a gas station.