Research and Field Trips

I kept my goal from Tuesday.  Twenty-five pages and by the end of today I'll have thirty-five done.  The weekend is going to be interesting: I never write on Sundays unless it's a journal-thing but that leaves me with Saturday.  Tomorrow just may be a good day to write my second draft of my short story, "Raven Eyes the Daymare."  I plan to submit that to the online magazine Intergalactic Medicine Show this month to be rejected.  I can't wait.

I realized I had to do research while outlining a couple of character arcs on Tuesday.  Ursula, my teenage protagonist, is a runaway from her mafia boss Dad, and Maggie is an ex-journalist working on discovering the Dad's story.  My plotting was nearly done when I was forced to admit that I know nothing about the mafia.  I've seen plenty of movies and read a couple novels involving the mob (The Untouchables and Gungrave are my two favorites) but as for the organization and what it's like to live with them, I hadn't a clue.

Normally, I'd go to Wikipedia (I don't care what anybody says, that is a great resource to use; I wouldn't have passed a couple of my science exams without it).  But the thing about encyclopedias is that they only give general outlines.  I didn't want the skeleton, I wanted to dig into some meat.  Not the whole cadaver; the mafia is only an added complication to the heroes--it's not supposed to be the story itself.  I just need enough to make Ursula and Maggie more believable.

So I only picked four books.  This is probably more than I should but I am a pretty quick reader and am already done with the first book: This Family of Mine by Victoria Gotti.  Fascinating first person account from the daughter of the late mob boss John Gotti.  She's a very good writer and I gained a lot of ideas for Ursula's family life (she's not going to be modeled after any of the Gotti's by any stretch of the imagination; it simply helped me think about Ursula's family dynamics like I'd never bothered to before.)  That Victoria Gotti is also a good writer and told an exciting biography was an added bonus for me.

This is how research is helping with a specific story.  I should point out that this is the first time that I've done research in this fashion and I'm wondering why I haven't done it before.  It could have only helped.

That doesn't mean that this is the only time to do research, though.  In fact, I do research for stories all the time.  But it's more for the idea box than anything else.  The idea box is that bottomless hole that all my story ideas go into and after they've sat in there for months collecting dust, I'll finally pull a couple of them out and see how they connect.  Yesterday was one for the idea box.

I went on my little sister's field trip as adult support to keep the brats in line.  I was kind of pissed that it took up my entire morning until I started having more fun than the kids did.  Our town's fairgrounds were hosting logging companies and showing off their stuff.  The kids were wowed by the big machinery and the demonstration of the tractors moving the big logs.  I was fascinated by the tree planting and nurseries, "mining whips," and the steam donkey.  We all enjoyed the ax show.

And suddenly, I have a couple ideas, one for a fantasy and one for a horror, both involving loggers as the heroes.  I'll let them sit for a while but I'm glad I took advantage of that opportunity.  Seriously, community events are amazing things.  These events have stirred my interest that I never would have considered otherwise.