The Trouble with Research

...is that it is volatile. I spent three days (well, I was doing other things, too). But three days just to track down a particular piece of art.

See, I'd seen it. I made a note to myself that I might want to use it. But that was when I was early in the development of The Early Fox and didn't know quite where it was going to go. So I read three or four books on nuclear New Mexico, on Navajo miners and Downwinders, as well as on ranchers and eminent domain in White Sands and on the hill that became Los Alamos.

No matter how much I take notes, and highlight passages, I just can't remember the stuff I end up wanting to use. So I try, these days, to parcel my research efforts out. I read just enough to make sure the plot points are plausible.

And I wait until I'm actually writing the scene before I read any further.

One downside to this is it is almost like cramming for an exam. In this current book, the geology of the playa plays a crucial part in the plot. But I already wrote the scenes that are heavily about that geology. I risk having forgotten too much when I come back to it for the final clue.

Another downside is a lack of front-loading. My new Nuke Museum sequence is going to take some absorbing of Los Alamos in the Trinity Test days. Ideally, I'd stop and watch Oppenheimer and do some more academic research and I'd let that sort of cook until I could basically write a short historical-fiction excerpt.

And...oops; Manhattan just dropped on Prime free. Of course, the same book I discovered the Noel Marquez painting in, is SCATHING about the Manhattan mini-series...

I don't want to lose steam so I'm skipping over the museum to do Penny's meeting with Jackson and Sanchez, and the end of Part II. Which is what I'm doing with Egtved anyhow. But I do worry that the stack of plot changes is reaching critical mass. At some point I need to go back and rewrite before I forget that what a Christie Pit is got moved to Chapter 8 so needs to be taken out of Chapter 4...

Also research-wise, the desert stuff especially makes this a very visual book, and that makes it better to do at home on the dual-monitor setup. I really do love writing in a cafe over a long brunch, but the phone screen can only handle blocks of text. I can't have pictures of the rocks and sand spread out at the same time.

I only got five hundred out today, but I still have a little time after dinner and -- now that I'm about to hit the "Test Bed," it is going quickly.

Good thing, too, because I've got shiny new idea syndrome. Ran into another article and I want to do the boat one, and the viking one. But no vikings in boats. For how lightweight these damn Athena Fox stories really are (and for how low the sales are on them), I really should be punching them out on a four-month basis.

Oh, yeah. And started the home folder and dropped a 500-word proof-of-concept on my "words about writing" book.