I am feeling oddly lethargic right now, alternately mesmerized by CNN's coverage of Haiti and the reading I am currently doing: the media's inaccurate coverage of the Middle East because it is so easily and willingly manipulated; mountain top removal in the Appalachians because generations of corporate power controls our perception of cheap energy and the lives of those who must submit to their will; women in the Middle East who are lucky to see grade school educations and the Battle of Fallujah which was simply all that is horrible about war.

My editor at Booklist is conspiring with my March column to beat me up, inside and out. That book on Nellie Bly from National Geographic can not arrive soon enough. (Although as she reported from inside an insane asylum I'm not expecting it to be a big happy read either.)

Sometimes the world is an impossible place, although this does all bring a cold dose of reality and reminder that one's own small grievances are not worth the pain we often grant them. In other words, yet again, I note that we should all grow up.

Presently, while not reading or reloading the CNN page, I am blending my two books on Alaska flying into one cohesive title. My agent and I think that perhaps this is the fresh new take on it that might finally push the book into the hands of an excited editor. It will roughly double its length and bring the strongest piece I've written to the opening chapter, which is a good thing. It will also create a blend of history, memoir and fiction. All the flying is true, all the history is true, everything about my father dying is true but I've taken stories from about a dozen guys and given them to seven and also all the conversations are not true as the events occurred so many years ago. That means the book is overall fiction (one drop of fiction makes it so) but still, it's a hybrid.

The first and last chapters are done. I've blended "We Flew Dead Bodies" (fictionalized) and "A Boy and A Gun" (100% true) into one chapter and now I'm blending three chapters on taking chances into one. I've also been slowly weaving the thread of Ben Eielson's story and Russ Merrill's through the whole book - both were iconic Alaskan bush pilots who died in 1929 and their lives and deaths mirror in many ways the actions of contemporary pilots. I wrote about them in both books, now I need to pull it altogether.

So here I sit, back in Alaska and flying. Again. I have to get this right though. I feel like if I don't the next book will that much tougher, that much more impossible. That much more intimidating. I just need to feel like I have made "Map of My Dead Pilots" as good as it can possibly be and reading over it now, I know that still that is not true. Nobody else has written this, nobody else has cared so much about this, and who knows if anyone else is even thinking about this.

But still thinking about all of this after so many years is daunting. Me and Eielson and Merrill. We just keep crashing, but we don't go away.

[Post pic from Flickr member Robert Catalano and available via Creative Commons. It was taken in the Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island.]