The Two Kinds of History Research
There are two kinds of history research. (Three, if you include serious people doing serious things.)
In the first type, which I shall call Type One because people tell me I am very creative, I go hunting for facts and figures related to something I have already written, or am actively in the process of writing. This is why it can take me all day to write a single page (that, and music videos from the 80s on YouTube). I find myself having to look up things like, How much does a cow weigh? or, How many people are on a cricket team? or, How do you spell "Eyjafjallajökull"? I always have plenty of questions to resolve, not the least of which is, Why am I setting a fictional cricket match on the slopes of an Icelandic volcano, and why did I choose to end it with a high-velocity bovine impact?
As I previously explained in this post , my stories tend to lie somewhere along the adventure/fantasy/science-fiction spectrum and are only nominally historical. Although I certainly love history and find it fascinating, I am not writing academically rigorous material, and comply with the rules of factual accuracy only where it is compatible with the plot. That having been said, I do make some reasonable effort to keep period details, well, period.
The second type, which I will not name because I like to defy expectations, is general research — not necessarily directly related to the manuscript at all. I spend a lot of time reading about the whole era, especially in a particular geographic region, just to get an overarching sense of the milieu. This is where a lot of great ideas come from, but mostly it's just a blend of curiosity and interest on my part. Chances are, I don't write about something in the first place unless it catches my attention for some reason. The turn of the century has always appealed to me because so many things were beginning and ending around that time, and people had never experienced a world war. The optimism and naïveté are charming, but the terror people felt when confronted with such rapid change is equally intriguing. Empires were ending and a new order, dominated by technology, was beginning to rise. Those in power clung to it with murderous jealousy while one social revolution led to another. In that manner it was no different from any other time, except that the pace and scale had massively increased.
I just crossed the approximate halfway frontier in Crass Casualty, Book II in this series. I can identify that milestone based on the size of Book I, Dicing Time for Gladness , which was 266 printed pages. Today I took Crass Casualty from 132 pages to 135 pages, so unless the second book ends up being substantially longer than the first, I'm probably somewhere around that midpoint. I think the ratio of general-to-specific research has not changed noticeably from the beginning of this project. Maybe I will become more focused on the details as my deadline looms, but then again there are all those 80s music videos.
In the first type, which I shall call Type One because people tell me I am very creative, I go hunting for facts and figures related to something I have already written, or am actively in the process of writing. This is why it can take me all day to write a single page (that, and music videos from the 80s on YouTube). I find myself having to look up things like, How much does a cow weigh? or, How many people are on a cricket team? or, How do you spell "Eyjafjallajökull"? I always have plenty of questions to resolve, not the least of which is, Why am I setting a fictional cricket match on the slopes of an Icelandic volcano, and why did I choose to end it with a high-velocity bovine impact?
As I previously explained in this post , my stories tend to lie somewhere along the adventure/fantasy/science-fiction spectrum and are only nominally historical. Although I certainly love history and find it fascinating, I am not writing academically rigorous material, and comply with the rules of factual accuracy only where it is compatible with the plot. That having been said, I do make some reasonable effort to keep period details, well, period.
The second type, which I will not name because I like to defy expectations, is general research — not necessarily directly related to the manuscript at all. I spend a lot of time reading about the whole era, especially in a particular geographic region, just to get an overarching sense of the milieu. This is where a lot of great ideas come from, but mostly it's just a blend of curiosity and interest on my part. Chances are, I don't write about something in the first place unless it catches my attention for some reason. The turn of the century has always appealed to me because so many things were beginning and ending around that time, and people had never experienced a world war. The optimism and naïveté are charming, but the terror people felt when confronted with such rapid change is equally intriguing. Empires were ending and a new order, dominated by technology, was beginning to rise. Those in power clung to it with murderous jealousy while one social revolution led to another. In that manner it was no different from any other time, except that the pace and scale had massively increased.
I just crossed the approximate halfway frontier in Crass Casualty, Book II in this series. I can identify that milestone based on the size of Book I, Dicing Time for Gladness , which was 266 printed pages. Today I took Crass Casualty from 132 pages to 135 pages, so unless the second book ends up being substantially longer than the first, I'm probably somewhere around that midpoint. I think the ratio of general-to-specific research has not changed noticeably from the beginning of this project. Maybe I will become more focused on the details as my deadline looms, but then again there are all those 80s music videos.
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Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards
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