Tagged: research

Down The Rabbit-Hole Again Some More

We’ve found ourselves doing more research than usual for the Ghost Novel(s). Wouldn’t want to allow any inaccuracies in our depiction of ghosts, which of course explains why we felt the need to take a deep look into:

  • lava tubes
  • sex magic
  • acorns, culinary uses thereof

…And many other topics besides. Like, it’s a long list. Whenever we spend any significant energy on looking something up, we make a note of it. We’re fascinated by the variety of stuff that winds up on the list. We’re fascinated by how hard it would be to predict what is going to show up on the list, especially considering that we really did have a solid idea of the story before we even started prose composition on it.

A writing partner is the only other person who wouldn’t think your research list was evidence of a diseased mind.

Our Wide-Ranging Interests

Research is an important part of writing, even when you’re writing novels about ghosts. And it’s fun to absorb new knowledge. Beware, though: in this age of instant access, falling down a rabbit-hole and spending the whole day on “research” is a constant risk. That’s why it’s important that you develop the discipline to stay focused and only devote time to topics with legitimate relevance to your project.

It’s hard to imagine our list getting much zanier if we gave up all pretense of discipline. Believe it or not, legitimate research topics for the Ghost Series include all of the following:

  • blue roses
  • ice cream shops in Copenhagen
  • Jonestown

That’s not output from our prompt generator. That’s an actual sampling of what we’ve looked up so far.

A writing partner will be there for you, sometimes to pull you out of the rabbit-hole and sometimes to join you in taking the plunge.

Boo!

We’ve been immersing ourselves in the supernatural as we work on our ghost story, but perhaps we took things a bit too far. Netherwordly manifestations sprang up at the HQ of Skelleyco Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises. But the creepiest part? Every child in the vicinity seemed impelled to approach. Impelled by a hunger, a hunger for… candy.

Last year we missed trick-or-treating because we were in freakin’ Transylvania on Halloween. So this year we brought our A game. Not that we merited anything better than honorable mention in our neighborhood. The bar is set crazy high. We did have a great time, as did Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord.

decorative tombstones

front door flanked by skeletal bats

a corgi and a golden retriever in bony costumes

What we did not do was get much writing done. Doorbell was kept pretty busy.

A writing partner is someone who holds your hand when things get scary.

Search, Then Search Again

A novel set in the vague “present” allows the author to, for the most part, write what they know. You might need to dig into the details of a profession your character has, or a location they’re going to live in or visit, but you don’t need to research everyday life. Pretty much everyone knows what modern cars and airplanes are like. You can drop in a reference to Netflix or Uber or Joe Biden without needing to explain streaming entertainment, ride sharing, or the state of politics.

Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is set in the past, which has required us to do more research than usual. We want to be as accurate as possible, but we’re trying not to get too hung up on minutiae. No one wants to read a book that sounds like it was written by the most anal people on IMDB who take it personally when the train seats in a movie are the wrong shade of brown. Plus, it’s a ghost story. We’re allowed to take liberties.

Some of the research we’ve done for the Ghost Series will come as no surprise: mausoleums, funerary flowers, tarot. Some of it will give you a hint to the time period we’re working in for the first book: telegrams, livery stables, the British Raj. And some of it will hopefully have you scratching your head: world record for underwater breath holding, the history of welding masks, Gloria Vanderbilt.

Put all of that in a pot and stir. Sprinkle in some teen heartthrob magazines, circuit breakers, and the tunnel through the redwood tree, and voila! You’ve got yourself one heck of an untitled ghost novel!

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you fall too far down the research rabbit hole.

We Can Be Taught

The purpose of our recent trip to New York wasn’t to spend a lovely afternoon with our agent — that was an immensely enjoyable bonus. The true purpose of our visit was to scope out locales that figure in some of what we’re writing. What we’re currently writing, no less. Yes, we can learn — this time we didn’t wait until the draft was all the way done before heading out to do recon. This time we’re in the middle. Perhaps someday in the future we’ll be organized enough to conduct our location scouting before we start writing at all.

The need for this research took us by surprise. We’ve been to New York before — more than once! — plus, there are a million pictures online to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We thought we were all good, but once we set fingers to keyboards we discovered more and more details that were a little too fuzzy for comfort. Details that our google-fu was inadequate to turn up.

The specifics of where we went and why are on a need-to-know basis, but we’ll share a tidbit that’s not too spoilery: verifying certain facts entailed renting a rowboat in Central Park. In the process, we verified that working a set of oars brings out the creative side of many New Yorkers.

We really do hope to be able to stay put for a while now, and focus on the actual writing. A writing partner is someone to enjoy a romantic getaway with under the guise of research.

Be Seeing You

Anybody a fan of The Prisoner? As part of our recent vacation, we visited The Village, home to the cold war’s retired spies. In reality The Village is a gorgeous little seaside resort in Wales called Portmeirion. Everywhere you turn there’s a fantastic view or a quirky little surprise.

Just, be on your toes.

 

The town square, with its fountain and its colonnades. And its palm trees.

 

That’s right, the infamous Welsh palm trees everyone raves about.

 

In the lower right you can catch a glimpse of the Stone Boat.

 

Here is No 6’s cottage (the cute round one). The interior is now the Prisoner Shop, not 6’s funky bachelor pad.

You’ll just have to imagine the marching band.

The Bandit Lord is a Welsh Corgi, so we were on the lookout for his ancestors. We did not see a single dog in all of Wales!

Now that we’re home and over our jet lag, and Jen is just about recovered from the evil lung-rot that the terrible woman on the plane infected her with, we’ve started cranking out the prose again. As you can see, we have plenty to fuel our imaginations.

A Damn Good Excuse

Progress on Sibling of Music Novel has been non-existent lately, but damn do we have a great excuse. That excuse is “Iceland.” Holy crap you guys, it’s gorgeous! It’s also not the warmest place this time of year. Who could have predicted?

We visited Gullfoss, a 105-foot waterfall.

 

At Thingvellar National Park, we stood between continental plates. Seriously.

 

In Reykjavik, the Punk Rock Museum is in a disused public bathroom. The toilets are still in place.

 

Kent enjoyed some Icelandic beer, while Jen stuck with the lamb stew.

 

Mmmmm… sheep dung smoked.

 

In Akureyri, on the northern coast, the stoplights are heart-shaped.

 

From Akureyri, we boarded this teensy little plane and flew north. Why? Because that’s where Grimsey Island is.

 

And Grimsey Island is home to the Arctic Circle.

 

And puffins!

So you can blame our stalled word count on the puffins.

The Iceland and Grimsey legs of this trip count as research for a couple of novels in the Science series, and the Wales leg counts for the Music Novel. Sure, those books are all already written, but now we can zhuzh up the descriptions during editing. Learn about our Welsh adventure next week!

The Areas of Our Expertise

One of the fun things about being a writer is all the research. Wait! Come back! We’re serious. The classic advice is to write what you know, but even if you knew some really cool and exciting things, you’d have to reuse them over and over and they would cease to seem so cool and exciting.

Kent and Jen want their characters to be well-rounded people with varied interests, and they want them to be distinct from one another. While we do draw some from our own lives, neither of us is a villain, and we’ve found that our novels work better when there’s some conflict. We’re also not scientists, or rock stars, or psychically gifted. When our characters are, it requires some reading on our parts to make it all feel real.

We also don’t want to set all of our novels in our boring little home town. Even when we invent a new setting, it still draws heavily on the real world. We like to visit sites we’re writing about, but that’s not always possible. So again, we hit the books. And the internet.

To give you a taste of Sibling of Music Novel, here are a few of the things we’ve been researching lately:

  • the ingredients list of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts
  • the immersive sensory details of eating said Pop-Tarts
  • the Burmese alphabet
  • old Agfa cameras
  • sesame allergy symptoms
  • how quickly a pot seed can reach maturity
  • postmodernist painters
  • home computers of the 1980s
  • the lunar cycle in 2008
  • the original floor numbering of the Empire State Building
  • old dentist chairs
  • the salinity of the Hudson river
  • audition monologs

Now that we’ve spilled so many details, you have to promise that you’re not going to write the novel faster than we do!

Juggling

Elsewhere’s Twin continues its sojourn in its chrysalis, preparing for its glorious emergence next month as a beautiful butterfly of prose.

Grandson of Science Novel is chugging along, approximately a quarter of the way to the first draft finish line.

Sibling of Music Novel, which is next in line for composition, is like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger, collecting more and more plot complications and character details. Soon we’ll have a full-blown avalanche of an outline on our hands.

We’ll talk more about each of those in the coming weeks. Mark your calendars!

Right now we’re splitting our time between writing, brainstorming, and research for a variety of projects. Our current research topics include brain structure, the history of the New York City skyline, cancer, the Mandela Effect, and birth videos. And there’s a TV show that touches on subjects somewhat similar to some things we’re working with, so we’re binging our way through that to make sure the similarities stay in the realm of “slight” and don’t require us to restructure anything. So far so good. And it totally counts as research. It’s not a distraction, honest!

Plus, of course, we’re keeping up with Twin Peaks. Our son comes home every week to watch with us. No, your family is weird.

Wordcount is Happening

r-avatarThings tend to repeat themselves, here in the writing cave. It’s natural for a cycle to emerge, given that we consciously follow a process that we’ve honed over several projects. But what’s interesting is how the unplanned things also seem cyclical. Falling down the research hole when we’re supposed to be writing? Check! Both Jen and Kent have resumed everyone’s favorite form of procrastination. (Okay, playing mindless games and messing around on Twitter are also popular choices here in the writing cave. But research has such a sheen of respectability. Ooooh, shiny!)

What are we researching? Well, that’s need-to-know. For now we’ll only classify our studies as diverse and rewarding. Hence, their effectiveness at slowing down the actual writing.

Despite such impediments, we are making progress. It’s not as fast as we planned, which come to think of it, it never is. And even though it’s absolutely, positively, not a competition, Jen does have a bit of an edge if you score things by words, although Kent is ahead by one if you count scenes. We might require adjudication to settle that one. Probably smarter to just keep writing.

Another source of distraction is the launch of Miss Brandymoon’s Device. (We might have mentioned, but in case it slipped our minds — it’s available free from our site as well as at Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.) We got the first hard-copy proof yesterday and we can’t stop fondling it. My, oh my, that’s a sexy book.