Research Truisms

Quickly, because I am exhausted and cranky and I'm sitting alone on my boat when I'm supposed to be in sunny Florida on vacation:

The Lazy Database Admin's Research Truisms

1. Garbage In, Garbage Out
    Anyone can get data from a search. Anyone. It's just not always (if ever) going to mean what you think it means, because the *real* issue is learning to ask the correct questions in the correct ways to extract data that means something. When you begin research, be as specific as possible. "Gotta learn about the middle ages." Uhm. You do know that topic is an entire lifetime of study, right? So how's about we narrow that little. What aspect concerns your story? Castle life? What aspect of castle life? Moats? Privies? Rushes on the floor? Did people bath? If all you need is to know whether you can have your heroine lounging in a bathtub in the tower so the hero can walk in on her - you've just saved yourself an incredible amount of work and increased your likelihood of finding a useful answer.

2. Never Rewrite a Search When You Can Steal Someone Else's
    It's likely you aren't the first to want to know what you want to know. Use that. Pay attention to the people around you. Your chapter mates, if you belong to a writing group. Your critique partners. Your online communities. In just the three groups I've mentioned, I can get detailed genetic information on how color works in cats. Or I can get stupidly granular detail about Civil War Naval ships and battles. Or I can get anything I never wanted to know about running a horse farm. Granted. This may all be useless to my stories, but suppose (as once happened) I wanted to know how to swear in Romanian. True story. I asked my international cat fanciers association. Within two hours, I have three people bringing me identical lists of words and their translations. Never underestimate your connections.

3. Verify, Verify, Verify
    Running your search and getting an answer once is nice, but if you cannot reliably reproduce your results, you got nothing. So. Gotta have a secondary source. Doesn't count without backup. Whatever it is you're searching for, you haven't found it until you have found it at least twice in two different searches. Eh. Okay. My analogy breaks down. For me to verify a search on a database, I have to rewrite my query a couple of ways and make certain I'm getting the data I need rather than what I expect. Subtle difference. When talking about research, I'm only saying you can't stop with finding one instance of the answer you're looking for. You have to verify it with a second source. More, if the tidbit of info you've discovered has any controversy associated with it.

There's more, I'm sure, but here's the other dba truism: I need a drink.

Research, Writing and Worldbuilding

I'm a big believer in research as a key part of writing, regardless of what you write.  It's funny, because I've heard people-- in talking about writing fantasy or sci-fi-- that it's easier since "you can just make stuff up".  But nothing could be further from the truth. Good writing, especially genre writing, requires verisimilitude.  It needs to feel legitimate, and that comes from research. 
Some of that research comes from learning a basic understanding of how the real world works, and applying that to the worlds you build.  For example, in our modern society, it's easy to be divorced from the fundamentals of where our food comes from*-- but that's no excuse for writing a story in which you have a Nordic-style medieval culture where they have fresh subtropical fruits.  Yes, I have seen that.
But research can also be lateral.  I love reading non-fiction books, especially about history, and one thing I loved was The Disappearing Spoon, which was about the history of the periodic table of elements, including bits about the history of each element on the table.  What this gave me was insight into some of the history and methodology of the formal and informal scientists from the 15th to 19th centuries.  I was able to use that to give verisimilitude to the academic environments in Thorn of Dentonhill.  It wasn't research to that end, but it was increasing my general understanding, and I was able to use it.
Research can also be hands-on.  I have a writing friend who, in writing a main character who was a drag-racer and wheel-man for bank robberies, went to drive on a racetrack so she could get a direct sense of the high-speed driving her character would do.  I went to Mexico City and observed how street interactions went in different neighborhoods**, and that went into Thorn and how the folk in the Aventil and Dentonhill neighborhoods behaved. 
The short point is: research makes for better books.  And maybe you'll get to drive a racecar.
---
*- Yes, I'm often using food as an example.
**- This was especially useful because I was out of my spoken-language comfort zone, since it forced me to really focus on the body-language of interaction. 

Whatcha Don't Know

How many times have you heard, "Write what you know."

I'm not going to argue it. Good stories happen when the author has drawn on something deep within themselves and paired it with something they have knowledge about.

For instance, I used to play lead guitar in a rock band. In the Persephone Alcmedi series, the love interest Johnny was werewolf...and a guitar-playing front man. My years in and around that scene allowed me to invigorate his persona and deepen his character into a three-dimensional person.

But...what happens when you want to write a rock-n-roll bad boy but don't know a Gibson from a Les Paul?

You read. Books, magazines. You watch shows, informative films and how-tos. You talk to people in the know, interview them and pick their brains.

Yes, you know all that. You get it. And my companions here at the Bordello are sure to provide links, theories, suggestions and options (or have already, I've read the posts so far this week)...but I want to give you a little bit of inspiration to get you into the research.

Personally, I love the research. Sure, it's time consuming. Sure its dangerous--each new detail might lead you down a rabbit trail where you could get lost.

But it might also guide you

to that one significant detail

that changes everything.

You have to get in there and learn your way around, meaning you have to learn the way you find inspiration among the information. It takes experience to recognize the difference between skid row and the road less traveled. I can't tell you how to do that, because its your mind, your stories, your drive.

Don't think of research as work...

it's a world of options forming.

Research & Release

 Prolific Word-Whore @jeffekennedy has another book out this week. This one's a contemporary erotic romance and the second in her FALLING UNDER eBook series.

UNDER HIS TOUCH

Amber Dolors knows better than to get involved with her boss. Devastatingly handsome in his sharp suits and sexy beyond belief, he possesses an air of command that fuels her darkest fantasies. But she's worked too hard to get this job, and keeping it will lead to a brilliant future. She won't cross that line—even if his way of giving orders and demanding her best performance gives her delicious warm shivers.

Alexander Knight prides himself on his integrity and self-discipline. After all, he hasn't risen to the position he enjoys by indulging his whims over ambition. He also isn't blind. He's certainly noticed his sharp, young assistant is hot as hell. His self-imposed sexual hermitage doesn't stop him from watching her. And endlessly fantasizing.

The day Alec's cool reserve cracks and Amber catches a glimpse of something simmering beneath his apparent indifference is the day everything between them changes. Alec gives her what she's been looking for sexually—as masterful in the bedroom as he is in the boardroom. He finds himself in the grip of an affair that tests even his boundaries, while Amber's new role as willing student pushes them both past any consideration other than mutual longing.

Buy It Now:

Amazon     B&N    BAM!    CarinaPress

_________ Weekly Blog Topic_____________

I write High Fantasy. I still have to do research.  Even the most bizarre fantasy has some hooks in a common reality; otherwise, readers couldn't engage with the story and wouldn't be able to relate to the characters. In Larcout, my upcoming release, here's a short list of things I had to research:

• Armor (my editor and I went round about bevor vs gorget being the more recognizable piece).
• Gemstones
• Rocks and their formations
• Proper address for royalty and its variances across Courts 
• Whether it's "Courts" or "courts"
• Vomiting
• Dying
• Effects of Poisons
• Regional and Ethnic Names

Some of that research made it into the book. Less of the research made it past the many, many edits.  Lots and lots of that research never hit the page.

RESEARCH IS FUN...AND DISTRACTING.

The danger of research is getting lost in it, losing too much precious time to it, and exploring one too many rabbit holes. It's still necessary. I'll be bold enough to state that it is necessary regardless of genre.

I've a bookmark folder titled "references."  Here are five randomly chosen sources, should they be of use:

1. The SCA: Research and Resource Links: http://www.sca.org/links/misc.html
2. Welsh-English Dictionary: http://www.geiriadur.net/ 
3. The 26 Stages of Death: http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Death/Stages.html
4. 10 Things Writers Don't Know About The Woods: http://dankoboldt.com/things-writers-know-woods/
5. The International Colored Gemstone Association: http://gemstone.org/

Secret Tricks for Optimizing Research

Tomorrow sees the release of Under His Touch, one of my contemporary erotic romances. The lovely ladies at That's What I'm Talking About are hosting a Sunday Snippet from the book, if you care to check it out. It's one of my favorite scenes in the book, when my very correct Brit hero just can't quite stop himself from touching the heroine. A chaste caress, but oh, so fraught.

My favorite thing!

Okay, one of my favorite things...

This week's topic at the Bordello is Research Tips and Tricks.

I want to tell you guys what I tell everyone when they ask me about doing research - that I write what I do because I can make things up and don't have to do research!

Seriously, this is why I don't write historical anything.

That said, I did go to a fancee college where I learned to use a research library. Because I double-majored in biology and religious studies, I became adept at finding both cutting edge scientific data and obscure old mystical texts. And loved it all. In grad school, I began to do my own research, which developed another set of skills.

Of course, this was all back in the days before the military-industrial complex developed the Internet, which was then swiftly appropriated by free-thinkers the world over, in one of my favorite bits of irony.

See? I have a lot of favorite things.

It's pretty amazing. I wrote a novel five years ago that I adapted Sanskrit words for to create the world, which means I used this ginormous Sanskrit dictionary - four inches thick and not in alphabetical order. It's a giant PITA to use. I never sold this novel, but I recently adapted it for another go at the market. This time I discovered an ONLINE SANSKRIT DICTIONARY. I cannot rhapsodize enough on how ever-so-much easier this is to use.

So, that's my tip. Use the ever-loving Internet.

Save the dictionary links, learn how to improve your Google-fu with specific searches, know which are the good research site, donate to http://www.wikipedia.org/ because they're awesome. And I'll give you one more.

Twitter.

I know, I know - I'm always going on about Twitter. But the Twitter hive-mind LOVES questions. You can throw a question out on the waters and someone will answer. It's amazing. It helps if you have a fair number of followers, but you can always add "Please RT" and people will pass it along. Best reason ever to build followers.

For example, when writing Under His Touch, I asked Twitter if it would be reasonable for a man in New York City to go out on a Sunday morning and buy a high end hairbrush from a place nearby. Not only did an NYC gal answer, she even wanted to drill down to what neighborhood he'd live in and where he might go.

(The answer was yes.)

So there you have it. Go forth and retrieve that information!

The Deluge of Inspiriation & The Danger of Details

What sparks my creativity? From where do my ideas come? Do I research my concepts or just the details?

Questions, questions.

~drums fingers with glee~

Story concepts come to me often. Very, very often. More often than dog hair appears in my coffee.  They really like to come in groups, great whooping distractions during the writing of another story. I've no shortage of BIG ideas.  From whence do they come? Uh. Hmm. Bwwwwwains. Nummy bwwwains. Whatever the scientific or mystical source, I'm just grateful they keep coming.  Usually the concept slaps me with a vivid scene. A moment in the grander story. It's akin to a 30 second video clip. If I'm lucky, it might make it to a full  five minutes of quality daydreaming time. I then wrap a plot, characters, and settings around it. Sometimes, it's not the scene but the protagonist who will come to me. She'll rap on my forehead. Arch an expectant brow. Every detail of her is clear to me. Every scar, every thread, every stain, every strand of hair...even how she smells (which ain't always a pleasant aroma, I assure you). 

The details of the story, however, require effort...and research.

Like most authors, I can get easily lost in research. Use the right resources and the research is more than enlightening; it's fun and hella distracting. Therein lies the danger of research. The hours, days, and months lost in the weeds of research when all we needed was one pine tree. Sure verifying credible sources is a good idea, but that too can send one on the wrong trail. Try to resist. I use a three-source rule if I need accurate data. I stop verifying after I find three (preferably diverse) places with the same info. And I don't limit my searches to The Wiki no matter how convenient it is.  I've a story about stone movers. I had to research assorted types of rocks (a geologist I am not). Jewelers' sale pages and FAQs turned out to be the most helpful. Web searches are great for that sort of thing.

All hail the Google-Fu. 

However, if I need to "feel" an environment, then I read, I watch TV, view paintings & sculptures, listen to music...there's no limit to the sources I'll use. I drench myself in a specifically crafted environment. Example: I've a WiP in which a third of the story takes place on galleons and in shipyards. There's a whole lotta jargon and physical detail that I had to research before I applied the filter of what I used versus what I just needed to know for framing references. There are countless shows, films, books, librettos, etc., on the topic. My favorite go-to for writing those scenes was my father's fifty year old album (yes, vinyl plate) of sea chanties. It continues to be well loved. I continue to need a bar of Ivory Soap for singing along.  ~ehem~

Ideas for stories aren't hard to come by, thankfully. However, the danger of the details isn't in the sources, but in the time-suck.