It’s nice to have a four-day weekend to catch up on work, both schoolwork and personal work. That beats being frantic during a normal two-day weekend, not being able to finish everything and ending up back at school Monday more exhausted than relaxed.

For several years my Chinese daughter has been urging me to write a nonfiction book about the tribulations of being an immigrant student in a suburban American high school. Since the majority of students I become close to satisfy that description, she believes I have the background and experience necessary to write the book. The problem is that I have never found a “hook” on which to base the book. I got some ideas from Pat Conroy’s The Water is Wide, but that only gave me an inkling of an idea.

This weekend the idea occurred to me that at least an interim idea is to turn the immigrant experience into a far-future story set on the immigrant planet I created for the story “A Bitter Taste.” I can even use the Math Lab as the setting if I turn it into a freelance craft hall. This idea might not work, but at least it might give me some ideas for the nonfiction book.

So I started writing the story on Thanksgiving Day...