Since We’re Too Lazy to Invent a Time Machine

It had been literally years since we bought anything from eBay, but we broke our streak this week. The world building for Sibling of Music Novel necessitates a lot of oddly specific research and we had to gather materials. The internet makes most research really easy, or at least possible with some digging, and we’ve been taking full advantage. But eventually you run out of ways to rephrase your search query, you know?

Countless youtube videos have been watched, web sites perused, images searched. Both of us can picture the sort of site that would answer all of our questions. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to exist. We’re forced to piece our knowledge together from myriad sources and hope that there will be few readers who will know what we get wrong.

But we don’t like to get things wrong, which is why we’ve turned our eye to eBay. You see, we’ve been to Manhattan, but we haven’t been to Manhattan in the 1940s, and that’s what we need information about. Not that the novel will be set in the 40s. Nor will it involve time travel. It’s just that we need a whole lot of detail about that specific time in that specific place. For reasons. So we bought a few vintage guide books and maps to get us started, and we’re planning to watch some movies filmed in the proper era and try to pay attention to the background details more than the plot.

Other areas of research so far: luxury resort hotels (if only we could justify a “research trip”), the floor plan of the Empire State Building, noble gasses, rooftop cisterns, and the earliest days of television.

On the upside, very few of our searches this time are likely to get us added to any watch lists. So there’s that.