Organizing Legends of Caltech IV

Today I spent several hours working a preliminary outline for the table of contents of Legends of Caltech IV, which should come out either May 2010 or May 2011.

As I discussed recently, I had been getting the urge to start working on the new Legends book, which was an excellent sign that the pain associated with the sprint to the finish line for Legends III had subsided substantially. The additional benefits of working on this today included (in no particular order) getting the thing organized so that we could start getting the actual stories more easily (i.e., the benefit that directly pertains to the book!), allowing me to not think about things that are still depressing me (I don't know when I'll truly get over that stuff; it's definitely going to take a while), and allowing me to avoid organizing and starting to write the grant proposal that I plan to submit as soon as possible after I show up in Oxford. (I'll definitely be doing some work on that grant proposal this week...) Plus, I had gotten a couple of different e-mails about Legends from Autumn this week, so the fact that she's doing some work on this stuff also provided an important spark. Given that today's Sunday and no e-mails asking me to do stuff arrived, I figured that today was the day I should start organizing the new book.

There are a couple of tentative title possibilities. Personally, I am most fond of "Legends of Caltech IV: Or How I Learned to Stop Studying and Love the Ride". The other one I wrote down is "Legends of Caltech IV: The Finesse, The Brute Force, and the Flaming", but that one really doesn't flow at all (even if the idea itself isn't horrible). Any subtitle suggestions? My current idea for a cover is to make it like the poster of a grindhouse movie (i.e., a B movie).