Preparing?

Look at the first part of the 2nd sentence in Steve Clemons's post excerpted below:

The source did not have any knowledge on whether Bolton was one of Miller's sources on the Valerie Plame story she was preparing [emphasis mine]

I've followed this scandal pretty obsessively, and this is the first time I've heard anyone say for sure that Miller was preparing a story -- as opposed to doing reporting in case she wanted to write one.

For a long time, Miller's non-story has struck me as a potentially key question: why didn't she write a story given that she was evidently doing relevant reporting? A friend in the MSM business has suggested it's possible that Miller (or her editors) just decided there wasn't anything extra there. I don't know if I buy that. An alternative is that Miller was going to break the story, only to be stymied by Novak's scoop. But still -- why not write an article when you've done reporting and supposedly know some key stuff?

It's possible Steve Clemons inserted that phrase himself, but I wonder if his "highly placed" source knows something else that we don't know.