In retrospect, I wish I had thought through the focus and scope more carefully at the proposal stage. My biggest challenge was in narrowing the scope of the book. I was able to describe, for example, one architect’s horror at discovering a large freezer of ice cream in a school cafeteria she’d designed to encourage healthy eating and her covert attempt to hide the chocolate milk. These tours were invaluable and led to some of the best scenes in the book. I asked the architects who had designed them to give me personal tours.
I worked early on to identify buildings that I wanted to feature, like an elementary school that was designed to nudge kids to be more physically active and a women’s jail that was designed to be more restorative than punitive. The editor did end up buying the book, and I used a significant portion of my advance to fund travel. Both of them gave me feedback as I developed my proposal. I already had an agent from my previous book, Frankenstein’s Cat, and I was hoping to work with the same editor again. Thinking about buildings as rich landscapes opened up all sorts of possibilities. The studies made me realize that our indoor spaces are complex ecosystems. The idea for a book didn’t occur to me until 2013 or so, when I began seeing studies about the “indoor microbiome.” Scientists were surveying the microbes that lived in our buildings, and their findings were staggering: there were tens of thousands of species of bacteria and fungi in our homes. I began exploring the science of indoor spaces more than a decade ago, when I wrote about collaborations between neuroscientists and architects for Scientific American Mind. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 23, 2020
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