I have never been shy about writing fan letters, so I wrote one to the UC  Davis prof who’s written a terrific new book, Right Out of California, about political, economic and social conflict in 1930s California.

I also am a shameless little man, so I included the Domingo Martinez piece from the Arroyo Grande book and told her I was looking at writing about the 30s, too.

She emailed back later yesterday:

I’m so glad to hear that my book was relevant to you. I’m also very interested to learn about your own work. The central coast has some great stories from the interwar years to tell; and it seems, from the sample you provided me, that you’re the right person to tell them.

That’s nice. That’s not the clincher, though. My big sister, Roberta, wants me to write it, too.

So I guess I will.

What’s making me dawdle, before I pitch the book idea, is knowing how miserly the pay is. For each $21.99 copy of the World War II book, over a year’s work, I get about $1.50. And I’ve done the research, the writing, located 70+ images from all over the world, some which required me to buy usage rights, and I’ve done a good deal of the marketing.

So I feel like your basic oppressed proletarian.

The other factor: The sheer magnitude of the subject is daunting. World War II, as large-scale as it was, was chronologically compressed and its events already so familiar, so it was much more manageable.

So I think I’ll expand the scope of this book to include the 1920s. That sounds counterintuitive, but I realized that I don’t have the talent or the graduate assistants for a narrative history. What I can do is to generate a thematic overview of the interwar years, to tell good stories well. Themes might include Prohibition and crime; politics, Mr. Hearst, contrasted with the poor; the collapse of farm prices and that impact; daily life, especially of young people; dissidents and dropouts; the New Deal’s impact; the coming of the war.

I’ve got to expand the locale as well, so we’ll include material from Northern Santa Barbara County, even a little from Taft, from San Simeon, of course–but the bulk of the book would come from the area between San Luis Obispo and Nipomo.

[What’s hardest to come by, and what I hunger for, are statistical data that’ll give a snapshot of the Central Coast–everything from foreclosures to crop prices, housing starts to high school dropout rates. Those are hard to find.]

So it would be The Interwar Years on California’s Central Coast or something like that. Or maybe Pete’s Dragon.

Now I’ve got to generate a proposal and go back to my two most important secondary sources and organize the margin notes I’ve taken. I also need to read again David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear.

Not a good day to feel under the weather.