Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

I was writing an irreverent history of Western Civilization for no eyes but mine own. It was really just an expanded timeline that included those things about which grown-ups are supposed to know ... the Protestant Reformation, the colonial wars, the Great Migration of African Americans from southern fields to northern factories, the Spanish missions in California ... crap like that.
As a wholly separate but similarly structured enterprise, I was looking at the creation stories for college and pro team names and mascots and linking some of them together.
The projects had something in common. I felt stupid for not having a complete grasp the significance of the Fall of Rome. And I felt stupid because I didn’t know what a Hoya was.
And I hate to feel stupid.
I had also arranged both timelines such that each element was dependent on that which preceded it and that which followed. That's simply because I can't remember a darned thing that doesn't sit between two other things that I accept as true. As an infant, I knew I wanted food. Later I would develop an affinity for fresh diapers. Any subsequent expansion of my world view owes to triangulation from those two initial data points.
When my research brought me to the English Civil Wars, the royalists’ Cavalier faction charged straight into the Cavaliers at the University of Virginia. That kind of freaked me out, and I spent about eleven seconds wondering if I could find such connections elsewhere before realizing I’d already sallied forth down that path.
At some point, I had to confess that I was certainly “writing a book,” whether that be for publication or no. Eleven years later the book was available.
Turns out, a Hoya isn’t really anything.