Good news today from my favorite publisher. A series proposal I’d submitted a couple of months ago is going to contract.

The project: A four-volume series called The Human Family, bringing together the most current scientific thinking about human evolution, from before the australopithecines to the dispersal of modern humans from Africa. Yippee! I love this topic and will truly enjoy writing this series.

Did I mention it’s for kids? Yep, the target audience, as for most of my books, will be middle schoolers. There’ll be sidebars and wacky facts galore, but basically it will be Darwin’s Big Idea–and all the changes rung on it by subsequent generations of evolutionary scientists–applied to people. If that doesn’t get me some hate mail, I don’t know what will. I speak from experience, as I still get the occasional rancorous email or letter from a fundamentalist or creationist about a kids’ biography of Darwin that Oxford University Press published a decade ago! Y’know what? I’m just glad that book is still on the library shelves, getting read and pissing people off