On the Magpie Mind and the (Mis)Uses of Research

This evening I had the weekly write-club session with my writing buddy Peter M. Ball (the man who committed the novella Horn). I went back over the novel, which I've not touched for about a month for a multitude of reasons (PhD, proofing short story collections and stories for various anthologies, fear, laziness, etcetera). I re-read the last chapter I'd written just to get a feel for it, to put myself back into the story (so I can distinguish the pseudo-fairytale German-like setting from...