From BAM! to BURP!

“Dur­ing a school vis­it in 2016, I men­tioned that the atoms inside us today could have been inside a dinosaur that lived 150 mil­lion years ago on the oth­er side of the world. A hand shot up. It belonged to a curi­ous third grad­er brim­ming with ques­tions. Where had the atom come from? How did it end up in us? Where else had it been along the way? I didn’t know the answers that day, but I was curi­ous too. So I start­ed researching.

“Writ­ing a book that’s sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate and fun to read is no easy task. My ear­li­est drafts traced a car­bon atom’s path all the way back through time, but it was bor­ing and repet­i­tive. Next, I tried mak­ing the car­bon atom a char­ac­ter who told its sto­ry, but that just didn’t work. Words like BAM! and KABOOM! orig­i­nat­ed in an unsuc­cess­ful attempt to cre­ate a comic.

“Thank good­ness I saw a pre­sen­ta­tion in which author Can­dace Flem­ing rec­om­mend­ed choos­ing moments to high­light and col­laps­ing time when using a sequence text struc­ture. What a great tip!

“Then, after read­ing an arti­cle about Theia, I decid­ed to flip the book’s sequence and begin in the past. That’s when the man­u­script final­ly came into focus.”