NEW YORK - It wasn't just artistic drive that caused author Sloane Crosley to spend months making dioramas based on essays in her newly published collection. It was more of an obsessive, neurotic thing.

She made the dioramas because Crosley, herself in public relations at a publishing company, needed a creative way to promote her new book, "I Was Told There'd Be Cake." Her editor wasn't convinced at first.

"He had the general definition, but I think he was expecting a shoe box with dried noodles," she said.

So she created three separate dioramas in Plexiglas boxes based on three essays that are decidedly not constructed from dried noodles. Whatever her motivation, the intricate, queer little see-through boxes have taken on a life of their own separate from her book, a witty and pleasantly sardonic collection of nonfiction essays.

"I'd like to think it comes from artistic skill, but it's more from a problem-solving place," she says of the skill, quipping: "It's a neurosis."

A video of the dioramas using finger puppets (hard to explain, better to just watch) was posted on YouTube and had thousands of hits, and she's received notes from enthusiasts around the country.

"I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the reaction to the dioramas," she said. "I didn't know there is a whole world of people out there like me."

Crosley comes from a crafty family. Her sister is a jewelry maker, mom is a teacher and dad runs an advertising agency in New York. Growing up in White Plains, she says she picked up attention to detail from her relatives.

"My mom is a bit of an artists, my dad does everything with this intense attention to detail so that caused me, in the third grade, to have a functioning arctic biosphere full of sugar cubes, a dry ice fan. You know, the whole thing. I couldn't even do long division and yet I could do this," she said.

The intricacy in her dioramas borders on obsessive, but in an awe-inspiring way. She fashioned paper clips into hangers, stole a squirrel button from her mother's sweater for a nature scene, and sewed a teeny dress to represent a fancy boutique. She also glued orange spoons to the wall for subway seats and used the springs from pen caps to show plastic ponies leaping from a kitchen drawer, the plot of her first essay, "The Pony Problem."

"I used three essays that were the most visual," she said. "It was an interesting to distill the experiences even further down from the essays."

She knew she wanted the frame to be Plexiglas to imitate the experience of reading an essay where paragraphs flow into one another. The rest she made up as she went along, spending about three months carefully choosing tiny items, ordering doll furniture and raiding her home for bits to use in the dioramas.

Since she's sort of an expert on the subject now, Crosley offered up a few tips for budding dioramists:

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DIORAMA 101: A diorama is defined as a scene, often in miniature, reproduced in three dimensions by placing objects in front of a painted background. Think of the images of extinct wooly mammoths and cave people found in most museums, then make it small enough to fit on your kitchen table.

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CHOOSE WISELY: Pick an idea that means so much to you that you have to capture it in a diorama. Something you'd want shrunken down, something Civil War figurine enthusiasts would appreciate.

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GET ORGANIZED: Make a list of what materials you may need, and order what you need to order - it's OK if you can't make a tiny refrigerator on your own. Figure out the scale of what you want to produce, and figure out the frame. Do you want it to be square boxes? A long tube? Gather as many materials as you think you may need around you.

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KNOW THY GLUE: Not every glue works. You may need several different types and it may take bottles and bottles to get anything to adhere. Beware. Be ready.

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SCOUT IT OUT: The best things are what you find laying around, Crosley says. "You see the world different, temporarily," she said. "That's not really a pen cap, it's an awesome wine cup. The gold circles on pens become rings for shower curtains." Crosley also used secret things from her own home, like a dollhouse rug made by her mom for the family's dollhouse.

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ARTS AND SMARTS: You don't have to be a Van Gogh, but you have to have some visual sense of what you want to do. But you also need a sense of planning, Crosley says. For example, she had a dollhouse chandelier she wanted to use, and so she needed to make her dining room in one diorama on the bottom so she could hang it from the ceiling.

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BUDGET: Crosley suggests $200, but it depends on what you're trying to make. "If you're doing an intergalactic space station with working rockets, it's going to be more than that. A field with lilies will be less than that," she says.

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