One of the fun things I’m doing now that I have some time to think: gathering my thoughts on some new projects. I’ll be talking to my agent soon about what ideas I have and which ones might be the best way to spend the next few months. An exciting time around here.

To gather up the ideas, I started going through my Firefox bookmarks. Yes. I keep ideas in my Firefox bookmarks. Someone’s going to say that’s a crappy way to keep ideas, and they’re probably right.

What I found is lots of fun links I kept stored while I was writing Little Pretty Things. Thought you might like to see some of them before I clean them out.

For instance, here’s the image I had for helping me describe Juliet and Lu’s job tools. You, too, could have such an item about your house for $279. A steal.

Hoteliers are a strange sub-community. I learned a lot from this book. Enough, actually, that I should have thanked the author in my acknowledgements. Jacob Tomskey, thank you for writing this book. I also learned some things from staying in hotels, of course, including the existence of a thing called a “pillow menu.” When I got back from Mexico, I found this post to prove pillow menus existed. I took up the issue of hotel ratings with a quick research trip to Wikipedia.

These images pinged something in me about the story I wanted to tell in the book.

I tried to find some existence of “participation medals” from the Olympics, but in the end decided that Coach needed to have earned a real medal—because as a person who LOVES the Olympics, I’d never heard of participation medals. And if I hadn’t heard of them, they wouldn’t make sense to a more casual observer of the Olympics. Too hard to explain. And my friend who had been in the Olympics didn’t remember getting one. I also had this story saved, about people who have sold or tried to sell their medals. Didn’t use it, but still—you never know what might come in handy.

Here’s the image that convinced me that the tree on the cover of Little Pretty Things was indeed, as my friend Alan said, a PrairieFire Crabapple.

I found the links I was looking for, too, but this was a nice trip down memory lane. It’s really sort of satisfying to see all these pieces again—they all appear in some way in the book. Isn’t research the best?