This is number 154 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I JUST NEEDED to check the dates of D-Day vs. VE Day. That was two hours ago. Now there are twenty-seven tabs open in my browser. I’ve discovered the names of ranks in the RAF, have a file that won’t finish downloading, have a virus alert and a screen that repeatedly insists I prove I’m not a robot, and I have a video of a P51 Mustang supporting the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Somewhere, The Beatles are singing, “the British army had just won the war.” I now know how much uranium was used in “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima. I have a page on Americans flying for the RAF in WWII, and four different aircraft pages. One tab is about Rhodes Scholars, and another about Hitler’s suicide.
And I forgot what I was searching for in the first place, or why it was important.
That’s called “research,” right?
I still remember how back in college—1968-1972 at Indiana Central College—I spent hours with a notebook sitting in front of the library card catalog, jotting down the names, numbers, and other information for books on a subject I was researching. It’s something we’ve lost in the computer era. Yes, all the same information is available in the computerized card catalogs, but there is something missing.
I could look at my handwritten notes after I’d located the book and found the quote I wanted for my paper. Everything I needed for my footnote and bibliography was there. Now, as soon as I follow the link from the card catalog to the electronic copy of the book, I’ve lost all the bibliographic information I might later need. I have to go back through the same search process again to recover that information.
My current work in progress, My Name Is Vengeance, involves a 10,000-year-old demigod who transmigrates into the body of a 30-year-old scholar/businessman in 1950 Boston. I lived in Indiana and was only born in 1949! I needed to have a clear picture in my mind of Boston in that era in order to write an effective period piece.
I know there are only a few readers who have experience living in Boston at that time, but an amazingly high percentage of them will read my story and comment about how wrong some of my atmospheric statements are if I’m incorrect on any aspect. I know this for a fact just based on the fifty-some comments I received regarding the reach of WLS in Chicago in 1966 in my novel Full Frame. The debate was intense.
So, my research needs are immense.
There’s very little political in this period piece, but the academic environment, business practices, labor disputes, and Mafia involvement in unions are almost overwhelming. Then there are the ordinary things about family and home life.
I chose this period intentionally. The biggest cultural revolution of modern America (IMHO) occurred in the sixties. Prior to that, male and female roles were more rigidly adhered to. Race and class influenced all of social interactions. This was before Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began his campaign against organized crime and its influence in labor unions.
Moreover, there was little or no concept of personal computers—even in science fiction!—or of cell phones, though Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio, upgraded to the two-way wrist TV in 1964. People used payphones for only a nickel. Making a long-distance international phone call from the US to Europe was more expensive than sending a telegram. Commercial airlines were flying propeller aircraft; the first commercial jet went into service in January 1951. Commuter trains and subways ran to all the bedroom communities surrounding a major metropolis.
The tallest building in Boston in 1950 was the Custom House Tower at thirteen stories. It was built in 1915! Legal Sea Foods was established as a family fish market in 1950. It wasn’t a restaurant and had only one location in Cambridge, MA.
MIT had a sailing pavilion and developed a single person sailboat called the Tech Dinghy. Harvard Business School didn’t take over the Radcliffe Training Course in Personnel Administration (for women) until 1954 and didn’t admit women directly to the MBA program until ten years later.
How is a 10,000-year-old demigod supposed to respond to all this?
My Sausage Grinder Patrons have begun reading the unedited first draft of My Name Is Vengeance today with the first three chapters. It will not be available as a pre-release until January of 2027. You can join the adventure by joining my Sausage Grinder Patrons.
On many of my books, I’ve estimated that the first draft requires two to five hours of research for every hour spent drafting the story. I think the record is Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose on SOL) The Gutenberg Rubric, which took over twenty years of research before I started writing it. I filled notebooks with research. I wrote training programs on the history of printing. I taught typography and book design.
And talk about rabbit holes! I read a book titled 40 Centuries of Ink. Another called 100 Years of Offset Printing. I read a scholarly paper titled “Non-Destructive Microanalysis of Cultural Heritage Materials.” And dozens more.
I compiled my own analysis of how the Library of Alexandria might not have been utterly destroyed with recorded movements that could lead it to the heart of Turkey and the creation of the monument at Mount Nemrud. I literally printed—on a Gutenberg era printing press—facsimile pages from The Gutenberg Bible at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany.
And all of this was done before I used a computer for more than word processing!
The Gutenberg Rubric by Nathan Everett is available as an eBook from ZBookStore. The 15th anniversary hardcover Signature Edition is available from my Ingram Spark page or most vendors.
All of this is to say that Lewis Carroll’s famous rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 is still waiting out there for any adventurer contemplating a journey into the wonderland of historical fiction—even if it is a paranormal transmigration story.
And it’s not all a bad thing.
The most important thing about ‘doing your own research,’ whether for a novel or to prove vaccines cause autism or other fiction, is to maintain an open mind. You can’t just search for things that support an opinion you have already formed—even when you’ve already written part of the story based on it.
I was sure I could have my hero flying a P51 Mustang on D-Day as part of the RAF. I’ve discovered there could be several problems with that premise. So, do I continue insisting that was what he did, or do I change the story a little to be more in line with the historical evidence?
It probably won’t be resolved in the first draft, but now that I know the problem, it will affect how much emphasis I place on something I know will be changed in the next draft.
Now I just have to find the web page where I got that information!
Enjoy!