At least it's a crime if you consider my writing to be criminal. I know some do.
Tomorrow (Thursday 7/28) I'm leaving my campsite in northern Minnesota and heading south to the Des Moines area where I'll be camped through the weekend. I'm planning to do a couple of driving tours through the area that I set SWISH!, SPRINT!, COACH!, and CHAMP! in. I have been through Iowa before, but I crossed the northern tier on US 20. Most of the "Team Manager" series takes place more centrally and I can't recall having ever visited Des Moines or that region.
Bartley, Iowa, the fictional town of Dennis and the Bartley High School Angelines, was created from research I did on several small towns in central Iowa. I'm going to drive through some of them and try to detect whether I got anything right in my descriptions.
Then I'll be going south of Des Moines a little to tour the Div III college campus on which I loosely based William Salter University and the Crusaders. William Salter was a pioneer preacher in Iowa and started many churches and some colleges. I believe the most famous of the colleges he helped found was Grinnell. I hope to tour it, too.
Monday August 1, I'll be moving east across the Illinois state line where I'll camp at the Mississippi Palisades State Park for the week. From there, I'll be exploring the small towns of northwestern Illinois on which I'm basing the locale for my upcoming trilogy, Full Frame, Shutter Speed, and F/stop. Much of the latter two will be set in Chicago, So I'll spend a couple of days doing some research there the following week.
It's all in the interest of making my stories have a more plausible setting in which to enact my implausible plots.
And also the fact that I'm traveling eastward to visit a sister in Columbus Ohio. But research is on the way!