Hidden Hotel Research

Writing novels often comes with research. No matter the genre, there’s probably going to be research involved. (Though I admit that part of what I love about writing fantasy is that I get to make up a whole bunch of things.) For creating the enchanted races world as a whole, I did some research into different supernatural races to pick out all the races I wanted in these stories. What did I research specifically for writing The Hidden Hotel? Conflict resolution. 

Inspiration

Customer service is a big theme in Whispers of Enchantment, and when I was writing it and realized I’d just come home from a non-fiction book run to the library and hadn’t grabbed any books on customer service for research, I was rather disappointed in myself. But not enough to correct it. Luckily, like many people, I’ve worked in customer service, so drew on my own experience for the book. 

Though I admit my own experience was rather NOT like Dahlia’s, even when she worked in fast food. I spent much of college working at the craft store Michaels, which has pretty tame customers. And then I worked in training for a company where I needed people to be comfortable coming to me when they screwed up so I could fix it. And I am rather proud to say that after only a few months in the department, people started reaching out to me over someone else because I was so nice about things. (Customer service for the win!) 

But conflict resolution is NOT something I have experience with, and I wasn’t comfortable trying to wing that for Whispers of Danger, so I did some research on basic conflict resolution principles which made their way into the book. And I have to say that though conflict resolution never came up in my line of work, it might be a rather handy skill for someone in customer service who has to frequently deal with difficult customers. 

And it’s kind of fun to research random topics for my writing now and again. Mostly what I look up is baby names to help me name my characters whenever I don’t already have something in mind. 

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