Warning: the following post is academic

I'm never quite certain how much personal or professional information to share on this blog. And I know I don't want these posts to turn into a kind of "Dear Diary" forum. But I also realize that my one-year "blogiversary" is approaching (mid-May) and that I began this blog as a way to talk about race and American culture as a form of pre-writing for the book I'm working on.

And the decision I made, just today--just a few hours ago--was to re-vamp the entire book project. Because what I realized after talking to a book editor and senior colleague in my field is that the topic of what I wanted to write about is not quite what I am writing about. Let me give you an analogy not in my field. I thought I was writing a book about free-range chickens as a metaphor for the organic food movement, but it turns out that what I'm really interested in is organic farming.

OK, maybe this doesn't make sense...and I'm not comfortable with telling you the specifics of how I'm changing my argument from "M" to "W" (see--I thought it looked like an "M" but it is really a "W" turned upside down).

Anyway, the good news is that I'm still writing about race and mixed-race issues and Asian Americans--at least that's the good news, to me, otherwise the last year of research and writing would feel like it was all for naught.

So I figured that I'd share this with you, especially since many of my readers seem to be people who are familiar with academia, and some of you even know the vagaries of trying to write a book from scratch (this is my first post-dissertation work and in some respects it's liberating not to write with the audience of your grad committee--in other ways, though, it's a bit daunting, especially me being pre-tenure, to think about writing for a book editor/larger audience).

Thanks, dear readers, for indulging my more personal/professional obsessions. I haven't written any real opinion pieces for a week because I've been obsessed with trying to write this book proposal. I've promised someone a copy of it on Friday so maybe by next week I'll have some fresh thoughts to share with you about race and the state of mixed-race America. Lets hope so.