Thank you. I'm flattered and humbled by your confidence in my ability to tell this story. As you correctly guess, I've spent a lot of time agonizing over the next book. There is a great temptation to write a here's-what-really-happened book, but that's what everybody does and the truth is - nobody yet knows what really happened. With so much of our research still on-going, at least once a week I learn something new that changes some part of the picture. I could write a "fact-based historical novel" and nobody could fault me if I got something wrong because after all, it's only a novel. I actually took a stab at that a while back and wrote a novelization of the wreck of the Norwich City. It was great fun and, in all humility, pretty good
, but I quickly realized that by filling in the gaps in the historical record with my own imagination I was creating such a convincing artificial reality that it was almost impossible for me to keep straight what was documented and what was made up. I found myself resisting new facts that disagreed with my imagined truth and that's deadly to an on-going investigation.
I hope and trust that there will come a time when I can write the nonfiction, footnoted here's-what-really-happened book, but we're not there yet. Your suggestion that the next book be "Finding Amelia: The Evidence Search" makes sense (although we might work on the title). A book that, as you say, begins where FA left off could be a chronological narrative of what has become an amazing cultural phenomenon. I could explore the WWII origins of the Japanese Capture theory, its flowering in the 1960s, and the Crashed & Sank backlash of the 1970s. TIGHAR comes into the story in 1988 and there is, of course, much to tell - but TIGHAR's work needs to be seen in the context of what went before and since.
As I think about it, the second volume in the trilogy would feature many of the same elements as the first - unrealistic expectations, wishful thinking, false starts, successes and failures, inflated egos (
), and so on. Most importantly, like volume one, it could be a true history book - not a polemic that espouses a particular theory. Just lay out the documented facts and let the reader decide.
Does that sound reasonable?