"Yes," Juliana agreed with a nod. "Except you can just walk up to people to interview them. The people I need to talk to are a little more elusive," she pointed out. Not that this was really a barrier in general, since she had such a large body of research to draw from already. The letters she'd been writing and collecting over the past ten years could provide enough fodder for a dozen papers, depending on which bits she pulled out to use as quotations and how she wanted to frame them, but in the instances where she did think she needed something new, it wasn't as simple as putting a finger on it and then sniffing around until she found someone who might give it to her. Or maybe it was — truthfully, she hadn't tried it yet. She'd spent so long writing her first paper, and then the book had really centered on three women who had already told her their whole stories before she'd started writing it.

"I have most of it already," she continued, taking a sip of her tea. "Otherwise I wouldn't have written the abstract at all. I'd already been thinking about this paper for a long time. But now that I'm starting to put it all together I just feel it's missing something," she explained. "The narrative component is missing something, I mean. The research is strong enough, I think."

---