It's Research, Not Stalking...Honest

When I first began writing seriously (meaning past naming characters, putting them in designer clothing and making up some dialogue), I never did research. I sat in a cold, concrete floored room at the back of The Ditch and wrote what I knew.

Pages upon pages of what I knew.

Then, I began to make outlandish things up.

And I filled pages upon pages with words.

I never sat around thinking, "Hey, I don't know enough about that, I should look it up."

Granted, this was the day and age before the internet was in your hand at all times, but the Internet was a happening thing and I believe I sometimes ventured over to use it to research things whilst still in high school. I know I used it in college.

I hated the internet.

I'm honest. I hated with with a flaming passion because I could NEVER find what I wanted. Throughout college, I sat in the dusty library and did my research using books that sometimes hadn't seen the light of day since the sixties.

And I still wrote.

Still filled pages of notebook paper with words, still typed Word docs filled with stories and characters I grew to love.

But, never once did I research anything passed maybe looking up a meaning of a name I was unable to find within one of the numerous baby name books I own.

It never occurred to me that as a writer of works of fiction, I'd have to do research, have to do something similar to what I did when writing an essay for school.

Then, one day, my mother informed me I ought to "look something up" so it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I do not remember WHAT she told me to look up, only she created a monster.

I am a research monster now.

I'm still not any good at it, the internet still fails ninety five percent of the time to tell me what I want it to tell me, but I research everything now. Hours of my life are wasted on various websites looking up random bits of information. I've spent time hunting down slang used in the Old West for ONE SENTENCE.  I've wasted time trying to find how a British person would say "crazy" in the twenties. I spent an hour trying to find out when the rollerball pen was invented and how widely used it was in the 1940s. I spent at least two days searching floor plans online till I finally gave up and made my own-- just so I could describe something better. I've lost track of how many time I've made sure the stupid pop culture reference I've made actually would be known by certain characters and are the right time period.

It's a lot of freaking work.

And that's just for the fan fiction I've been working on as if recent.

Last summer I spent days on end looking at school catalogues to get ideas for course to stick students in. I've wasted hours making sure the schedules I made for them actually worked. I've spent years trying to figure out what colleges some of my characters are going to attend, though I don't plan to actually write about them IN college. I've spent days staring at a map of Glasgow on a real estate site trying to find a flat. For a fictional character. (I did find one. Well, two. Then I merged them, as what I wanted doesn't actual exist.) I've scoured the internet for images of interiors so I'd have a good idea how to describe them. (One day just to find out they'd remodeled the building I was trying to write about so I really had to just use what was in my head. No one thought to take pictures of the fourth floor Adam Smith lecture hall before they redid it...)

Hours of my life were lost when I was working on HYRM and I got lost in a world of quotes. Quotes ate me alive for days on end.

Many of the clever things I come up with in my original works as well as my fan fics no one bothers to really take note of...it's like I always thought: no one notices. They are reading and enjoying the story-- not looking for symbolism, not looking for those little things.

Then, I got feedback when someone noticed the painstaking effort I put forth.

One of my stories follows two real people, who are quite famous. I went back to my roots in my fan fics and started writing about actual people instead of fictional ones. I had the idea in my head for awhile and it wanted out, so I let it out. Yeah, you might think it is rather teenybopper of me, and I think it is, but I like the two OCs I created and if I REALLY wanted to, I could change the names of the famous people, change the names of projects, etc and it'd be orignal. So, I guess you can say I'm just too lazy to change the inspiration. (10p technically started out as a fan fic, only I changed the main romantic interests name, then his profession, thus, it's not. See? No...that's fine.)

Anyways, I've become somewhat fixated with where these two people WERE. I don't care where they are right now, I care where they WERE. I get caught up in trying to figure it out, till I suddenly realize what I'm doing and I laugh.

I'd be worried if I hadn't done the same thing when I was writing some of my original works. Granted I cannot scurry the internet to figure out where my characters were located, but if you saw the pile of paper I carry around for RAB, you'd see I'm rather keen to know every detail.

It wasn't always like this. Once upon I time, I just made stuff up and called it a day.

(Except that one time when I was in high school and I drew a map of the town RAB takes place in just so I could name the street's D used to get from one end of town to another. I could have just made that up, but...I didn't. I made an entire map. On lots of paper. I still have it and use it too. Well, I did have it...I'm not sure where it got off to now that I think about it. Hopefully it survies the move.)

Vivid Imaginations Are Not Always Good

Those indeed are my feet. And they do not actually look that small in person. It's the camera angle and pointing my toes together. I took the photo myself with my iPhone. Because no one helps me photograph things in this family. (Hence why the last photos of me that were taken were at Christmas.)

In other news, I'm NOT dying!

(There was about an two hours this morning I assumed the worst, panicked and had to medicate myself. Pilot Boy, of course, abandoned me for the first time since we left AK, so clearly, I'm going to wind up dying in the hospital or something...or that was my thinking. Clearly, I'm not in a hospital or dying.)

Why am I excited about the whole not dying? Because I've been in very minor pain (read, most people would have completely ignored it, but I am me and I HATE pain) for a few days longer than I thought normal, so finally I dragged myself in a mild panic to the phone to make an appointment. Last time I had similar pains, I wound up in the hospital for four days and had some guy cut me open and remove my appendix. And that wasn't the worst thing that happened whilst I was there. But, that is not a story y'all want to hear. Trust me.

Anyways, after suffering a panic attack, I downed those one of those little happy pills I picked up in Alaska for moving and felt...a weird combination of calm and panicked. To came in waves. I'd panic, then clam down and feel sleepy. Then I'd panic again. It was an annoying cycle till I had to leave.

When I first got the pills, due to the fact I read the warnings, I refused to operate a car whilst on them. However, seeing as Pilot Boy flew the coop, I had no choice but to drive myself and seeing I'd taken a pill on Sunday (I was thinking the pain was part of an upcoming panic attack, which I was having due to the prospect of being out in the sun for hours around hoards of people--which wound up not happening because Pilot Boy can't read the date on his iPhone correctly and the air show/car show wasn't going on when we got there) and managed to watch Iron Man 3 and pick up on things Pilot Boy failed to notice, I was like, "I can drive!"

So, I did.

It wasn't really until I actually got into the clinic did I become super loopy.

First, I went the wrong way to Flight Med. Luckily a nurse pointed me in the right way. (I might have scared her with my huge smile and cheery thank you while looking like death warmed over-- which I look like usually, as I am the palest thing in Texas. And I was super pale today, as I forwent my usual makeup in fear of being shoved into the hospital.) After going back the way I came passed the coffee bar (yeah, the clinic's got a Starbucks), I arrive at the correct place and handed my ID over and waited for the paper work.

"You can sit down," the woman said, handing my ID back to me.

I stared at her, cocked my head and sat down.

Without any paperwork.

I sat with some babies who were getting shots till they called my name.

Fifteen minutes early. (I was super early because I thought it'd take me longer to get there and I knew I'd get lost. I still refuse to use the highways here unless I have to. So, sometimes I wind up somewhere I've never been before.)

I wandered after the nurse to the exam room, sat down and began to laugh. I was also shaking, twitching and just all around acting strange. I quickly explained my issues and added the fact I'd taken some anxiety pills that morning.

She knew which one I had taken and I hadn't needed to drag the bottle out to tell her.

In fact, she knew everything about me from the past five years. (Medical wise, she failed to know that I sit around writing, making up my own words, and singing songs about my dog.)

The computer worked. My records had transfered.

I kind of died of shock at this point. In the past five years since I "joined" this whole military thing, no one has ever known anything when I've gone to the doctor because the computer never works and my chart never says anything past my name (though something they don't even know that and call me Pilot Boy). Hence why I simply gave up trying to solve my allergy issues whilst in Alaska because the last doctor they'd shoved me off on used GOOGLE to look up what drugs to put me on. GOOGLE. I use GOOGLE to figure out what drugs I want to take. (Well, when I research that type of thing, which was once. Google failed me, so I began asking people I knew who were on the same thing. It yielded better results.)

But today, they knew EVERYTHING. They had all my blood pressures, all my medications (they frowned as it'd clearly not been updated in some respects. There were a few things I'm not on any longer that were still on there as if I were taking them) and basically everything I'd ever written a million times on that damn paper they always hand me first thing!

It was so shocking I almost passed out.

The best thing, though, I got a prescription for Zyrtec. I could write odes to that pretty little pill that allows me to kind of breath and not die from the fact Russia likes to live in my head right between my eyes.

Anyways, the pain I was in there for turned out to be strained muscles from over zealous Pilaties crunching. So, no core working out for four to six weeks. BAH. Just as I was getting back into it. At least I'm not dying, they do not have to cut me up to drag something out of there or give me another vile cat-scan. (You do not want to know.)

Moral of the story: for the first time ever, I'm actually somewhat impressed with the medical wing. They had their stuff together. Or I happened to catch them on a good day. I only was at the pharmacy for maybe a half hour-- if that. I didn't pay attention. I was reading and coming down off my panic high. (Trust me, I'm feeling it now...and this one was bad...I haven't ached like this since I got the happy pills. I can't imagine what state I'd been in without the meds....eek.)

In other news that has nothing to do with my health, I finished book four of my Potter series. I also began posting my newest obsession. Links to all can be found under the tab with a list of all my stories. I'm trying to get my act together and get something posted on Wattpad-- something original. I was thinking of posting Elle, but I think she needs some more editing. Mostly because when I looked, I couldn't figure if I'd put the edits in or not. Or if I had been in the process of editing it on my Kindle. Basically, I got confused. Not unheard of.

Well, I have one last read through on the next part of the New Obession. Since I posted one this AM, I figured I'd post this in the PM. Get more readers in the afternoon than morning.

Laterdays.

I'm Alive!

My mother told me my blog is outdated. There is an array of reasons for this, one being: Nothing has really happend in the last two months that inspired me to ramble at length. I've been mostly reading and writing...something I haven't written in over ten years. It's just BURSTING out of me and I'm HIGHLY annoyed with it, yet not at the same time. I'm only posting it here because I plan to actually post it else where someday. So, here ya go: Misplaced in Time.