Researchin’ the Books

I imagine, sometimes, what friends might think if they could see my Google search history, which looks something like this: “why do cats vomit so much?,” “symptoms of concussions,” “buttercream frosting recipe,” “ defensive driving techniques,” “list of carnivorous plants,” “best way to slit someone’s throat.” I imagine I sound like a spy, a deeply disturbed person… or a writer.

Every book I write requires some research. Sometimes it’s brief, like the carnivorous plant search (in Hunted Dreams, our hero, Reed compares one of the other characters to a pitcher plant). Occasionally, as in the book I recently finished writing, The Tithe, the research is much more involved. In the latter book, I researched different kinds of disabilities and spent hours collecting data on Charcot Marie Tooth (CMT) Disorder, a neurological disorder I assigned to Josh, the novel’s shero. I hope it lends itself to a much more sympathetic, not to mention accurate, portrayal of those who have CMT.

I’m a college instructor, and I teach a class on research methodologies. You’re all lucky, I tell my students, shaking my finger like all those professors I remember from my days as an undergrad, to live in today’s world. (I want to say something like, “Back in my day, we used abacuses to calculate statistics and had to walk uphill in the snow in flip-flops to reach the local library,” but I figure they get the idea.) The thing is, they are lucky, and so am I. My students research papers without ever setting foot in a library; likewise, I sit on my well-padded derriere in front of my own computer, researching everything from the components of overpass bridges (“abutment” just sounds naughty, amiright?) to how long it takes a person with a gut wound to bleed out.

For Hunted Dreams, I tried to keep my research to a minimum, since, as they say, we should write about what we know. But since every novel can’t be about a boring college instructor and ex-animal rescuer who pens poetry in her spare time and because most paranormal romances involve a good fight or two, I did have to research a few violent things. Mostly, I found out fighting is more incapacitating than media lead us to believe; luckily, my characters are superhuman, so I can bypass petty concerns like biological limits.

Between you and me, I most often use the Internet to check on my grammar and punctuation. You have no idea – No. Idea. – how often I skip to, for example, dictionary.com to make sure I’m using “abrogate” correctly, visit Grammar Girl to ensure I know the difference between compose and comprise, for example, or ask the Google gods whether, as I did in the first paragraph of this post, a list of quotes involving a question should include the comma inside or outside the quotes after the question mark.

“Put comma inside quotation marks after a question mark?” Wow. I guess people reading my search history might not be so impressed after all. I promise my novels are much more exciting than my research process.