My work for Capstone I think is what built me into a children’s author. Writing non-fiction for children, particularly that type of nonfiction, is incredibly difficult work, because first of all you have to research the heck out of it because they have to be correct.
You also have to, you have all kinds of limitations to how you can write the thing. You have all kinds limitations on your vocabulary choice. You have all kinds of limitations on how long your paragraphs can be. But then your books also have to be engaging, they have to be factual and they have to be funny.
So it’s like nonfiction haiku with jokes. It’s really hard. But boy, oh boy, did that hone a lot of skills for me.
And it was great work for me, because I’m a curious person. I love calling scientists and finding out what they’re doing. I love learning about that guano that was cool for me. I love learning about the history of the sewer system, because the history of the sewer system by the way is amazing, because once a culture, and this knowledge has like come up independently of the other places and they would figure it out and as a result their civilization would flower and then eventually it would get lost.
But the thing is, the reason why their civilization would flower was because once they could figure out that if they had clean water to drink and they were able to get rid of all of the gross germs and everything else from our leavings, then suddenly their babies didn’t die of dysentery or diarrhea or disease. So their babies didn’t die. And then also their kids were not fighting diseases all their entire childhoods so their children were getting bigger and stronger. Their brains were more developed, because they were able to hold onto more of their own nutrition.
And so their brains were developed in a better way. And so suddenly they had better engineers. They had better philosophers. They had better soldiers and stronger soldiers. They had better laborers and stronger laborers. And suddenly they were Rome, right, and take over the world. And in fact, you know, when the barbarian hoards came in to Rome and sacked it, they did two things, they knocked out the sewer system and they knocked out the aqueducts and they brought Rome to its knees.
The sewer system was so important to Rome that they even had a goddess of the sewers, Cloacina. And there was like this two week festival in her honor every single year, because they knew that like this was important stuff. But also the Indis people in what is now Northern India, they had indoor flushing toilets and a modern sewer system back in 4000 BC. So this knowledge has sort of come up. It was so fascinating. I loved learning that. It was so cool.
I learned all about how to maintain water. I learned all about sweat that a human being can run down any animal on earth except for a horse, even a cheetah, because most animals will overheat and we don’t. We can run for days. We don’t like to, we would prefer not, but we can. We literally are built for it. Pretty nuts, huh? I love that. I love learning stuff.