{"id":8217,"date":"2013-06-07T17:11:44","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T22:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8217"},"modified":"2013-06-07T17:11:44","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T22:11:44","slug":"when-i-do-research-i-try-to-have-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8217","title":{"rendered":"When I Do Research, I Try to Have Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years, I didn’t write fiction that required a lot of research… on purpose. I wrote either short stories or fan fiction, and focused more on the characters and the situations than writing the sort of stories that needed research.<\/p>\n

I did the generic sort of stuff — checking Wikipedia for setting information, reading that one sex site everyone recommends for fan fiction writers — but until I started writing Real Adult Novels with Actual Stuff in them, I didn’t do a whole lot of factual research.<\/p>\n

I still haven’t done a ton. My NaNo’ing has left me in the habit of leaving notes and saving the research for stage two. I’ve only gotten one novel through that stage. There was a lot of boring research on diabetes and stuff. (I even called a medical professional friend!)<\/p>\n

However. There are a few memorable moments.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

What Must the NSA Think?!<\/h2>\n

I got stuck while deciding how the characters in a scene would be smoking opium. I’ve seen pot in action, but opium? Who still smokes opium? (Answer: lots of people.) Was opium even the right drug for this scene? It’s the future! Maybe they have FutureOpium!<\/p>\n

I ended up sticking with opium, but there were a lot of little details I wanted to snag, so that a character walking in the room would recognize it pretty quickly. I found details on what the high would be like, and what the room would smell like, et cetera.<\/p>\n

Yeah. I got a lot of hookah ads after that, and started doing the rest of my drug research in a porn<\/span> “Incognito” window.<\/p>\n

Slighty Crazy!<\/h2>\n

I wrote a story that was supposed to take place in eleven minutes. (I assure you it has a very clever title.) Since it was primarily dialogue-based — until the car crash — I sat in my room and timed the dialogue, trying to be careful of character cadence and emotion.<\/p>\n

Alone.<\/p>\n

I’m so glad I had my own bedroom by then. My poor sister.<\/p>\n

The Most Fun! And Frustrating!<\/h2>\n

When I was working on the fantasy story last summer, I got really caught up in trying to time the journey in the first book. This bothered me — because I know that I can’t do math, that I have no internal sense of scale, and I had been winging the setting from a map I made using some economic information from GURPS: Low Tech<\/a>… while I was drinking<\/a>. There was no scale. Have I mentioned yet\u00a0there was no sense of scale?!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ashley<\/a>
Scale is for pussies.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had concluded that the river the party had to walk up and along was roughly the economic equivalent of the Mississippi River back in ye olde day. (And now? See, I don’t know this shit.) So, I made Google Maps spit out the distance between St. Louis and New Orleans, using the walking instructions.<\/p>\n

I then spent a long, frustrated evening searching for the average speed of steamboats (and then, but what about when they’re going upstream?) and average walking speed. Then I tried to figure out how to translate miles-per-hour into something useful for the distance I had my characters travelling.<\/p>\n

Finally — utterly convinced that my math was wrong because I can’t math — I threw it all into Paint and came out with this:<\/p>\n

\"Ashley<\/a>
Nailed It.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s probably flawed. (It’s most definitely flawed.) BUT. Having that information allowed me to continue forward with the story and stop obsessing with the journey logistics. I was able to get through the rest of the journey without too much panic.<\/p>\n

Until, you know, I later decided that it was all wrong. As you do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many years, I didn’t write fiction that required a lot of research… on purpose. I wrote either short stories or fan fiction, and focused more on the characters and the situations than writing the sort of stories that needed research. I did the generic sort of stuff — checking Wikipedia for setting information, reading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[663,673,852,928],"class_list":["post-8217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-maps","tag-math","tag-plotting-a-journey","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}