April 24, 2023
What are your favorite resources for research?
It all depends. It changes depending upon the book I am writing. Now that I’ve moved, it has changed again.
I’m no professional when it comes to various types of guns. Some guys I used to work with were heavily into hunting, and they would help me with various aspects of weapon use in my stories. (I wouldn’t know the difference between an AK-15, and AK-17, and a fancy paintball gun.) I’d just walk down the hall and talk to them. Since I’ve retired, that resource is gone. But in my last couple of books, guns haven’t been a major part of the story, so it hasn’t been an issue. (Jake Hennessey, my hero, doesn’t carry a gun. Never has.)
My current WIP (work in progress) is set in Pittsburgh around 1985. That’s changed everything as far as resources. I’ve been chasing rabbits to find the information I need. Although I survived the 1980s, I am looking for the details. What were the top songs and the favorite drug of choice? Those were easy. Trying to find a description of the Penguins’ owner’s club in the Civic Arena was another story. I spent hours watching old videos on YouTube and haunting Facebook groups. I finally got what I needed through one of my brothers, who knew someone who’d been there. Shoot, trying to determine the color of the uniforms the Pittsburgh cops wore back then was a challenge, and it wasn’t that long ago. I should have called their public relations department and asked, but I didn’t think about it.
As the story writes itself, I keep discovering more details I want to incorporate, but there’s no single website that offers me everything. I keep bookmarking additional sites so I can find them again. Remind me – I’ve got to check out the resources of the Pittsburgh Public Library system and see what they offer on-line.
The internet is a wonderful starting point for research, but there’s so much more. I’ve always believed that people are our greatest source of information, if you can find the right ones to talk to.
How about out other authors? What are their favorite resources? Find out by following the links.
As always, until next time, please stay safe.
April 24, 2023
What are your favorite resources for research?
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“I should have called… but didn’t think about it” Live and learn. 🙂
They switched from blue to black at some point. I couldn’t quite figure when.
I thought that writing Sci-fi would require little research, after all, how can you research something that’s not happened? How wrong I was. I quickly found that everything has to be based on a fact or principle, or the story doesn’t hang together.
My new book is set 20 years in the future. Even that was hard.
Historical fiction is definitely a different kind of critter when it comes to research, even when it wasn’t all that long ago! @samanthabwriter from
Balancing Act
I thought it would be easy to find things from 1985. After all, I lived through it. How wrong I was!