Down the Research Rabbit Hole

I'm still firmly ensconced in Ancient Greece right now; I've decided that the best way to tackle Research Fatigue is to pretend I don't have that much to research! If I can give myself tunnel vision, and focus on one item on the (Self-Inflicted) Research To-Do List For Crazy People, I don't feel nearly as, well, fatigued. I recognize that 1) this makes for less diverse and probably less interesting blog posts, and 2) it requires an advanced amount of self-delusion, but hey, I'm up for being dull and nuts if it gets the job done!!

This week, I followed my typical research pattern, which looks like a small child's hand-drawn map. You know, nothing is really in scale, there's no sense of perspective or distance between points, and more than one road goes meandering off into nowhere...

Here's an example: today, I set out to learn what the daily life of a shepherd in Ancient Greece would really be like (the other soul, Apollo's lover, is a shepherd, so this is grade-A important info.) Responsible-writer-cap firmly on my head, I went to JSTOR (thank you, Crystal!!), and started reading semi-related articles on animals and animal husbandry in Greece and so on...but nothing really answered my question.

I didn't want to give up, but I was getting frustrated, so I sort of pushed the responsible-writer-cap a little bit off my forehead - just so I could scratch my head - and found that I was searching on wikipedia instead of JSTOR.

Hmm. How did that happen? Oh well, I thought; I'm here, I might as well look into general shepherd-ry while I'm at it!

Except, that cap was getting kind of uncomfortable, so I took it off - just for a couple of minutes - and put it on my lap.

That's when I thought: wait, do I REALLY need a lot of information on a shepherd's daily life? I mean, the story is going to start when Apollo sees this shepherd and decides to take him away from his shepherding duties.

Yup, not important!! It was much more important for me to have a firm grip on this guy's character. I did some great work on Apollo's character last week, but Acaeus - that's the shepherd's name - was really underdeveloped.

So I abandoned wikipedia, opened up my trusty character analysis document (knocking my responsible-writer-cap off of my lap and onto the desk in the process), and dug into Acaeus. I started brainstorming and writing, and decided that his mother died in childbirth (an all-too-common occurrence in Ancient Greece.)

Wait, I thought, if she died in childbirth, did he need a nurse to, um, nurse him? Would a poor recently widower-ed shepherd dad even have access to a nurse? How did Acaeus survive?

Artemis must have killed his mom and saved him! She is the goddess of childbirth, and the Greeks believed she was responsible when mothers and/or infants died in labor.

But was there a nurse? And why did a virgin goddess care about childbirth, anyway??

Back to the internet! I looked up Artemis and childbirth, which led to much digging into maternal death rates, which lead to attempting to read about the lives of lower class women in Ancient Greece, which got even more frustrating because, like most historical reading, there's a whole lot of information on rich people's lives, and little to none on the masses'.

I brushed my responsible-writer-cap onto the floor in impatience, and decided that what I really needed was to research Ancient Greek names so that I could name Acaeus's mother and father!

Ooo...traditional names and their origin in myth...cool... *buries self in mythology*

Wait, what was I working on? Oh yes, Acaeus's character! I knew Acaeus had some narcissistic tendencies, although not a personality disorder, so I turned again to the internet and started looking up some basic psychology on narcissists.

I read three or four information-rich, thought-provoking articles, and then in the process of searching for more, I found a weird yet compelling website on reincarnation, and thought, OOOO! Why not? I mean, my book is about reincarnation!! So I started reading all about the 5 Levels of Souls and the 35 Stages of Souls and the 7 different Types of Souls and....

...and then I disappeared down the rabbit hole.

Whoops. Sorry about that. I'll try to dig myself out in time for next week's post...

When Research Changes Plot, Or What To Do With A Vengeful God

I've been digging into Edith Hamilton's Mythology this week. No, I'm not indulging some bizarre nostalgia for my early teenage school years (I am not one of those insane quirky people who wishes she could go back to the halcyon days of high school, probably because I would never even think to call them 'halcyon' days, not that I hated them, because I didn't, I just found them full of growing pains and awkwardness and I'm going to stop this run-on sentence now); I'm doing research.

Granted, I'm supposed to be looking into (to quote myself, here) "Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo", so technically I suppose I'm also procrastinating. See, I do have a book on the "Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks", but 1) it's duuuulllll, 2) it's written for teens, and is therefore a bit oversimplified, and 3) while it's absolutely chock-freaking-full of information about the daily life of Athenians, it's got all of about two wee paragraphs on the daily life of goatherds and/or shepherds and also priests of Apollo, which is what I really need. What I'm saying is that the book has a misleading title and it's irritating. Not to worry, I do have a list of other books to look into (thanks to a certain brilliant and generous librarian friend of mine); I just don't have them in my possession. Yet.

So I'm taking a break from said irritation, and reading Hamilton instead. And happily, like other research, it's a useful and fascinating procrastination. I've got this little story planned out for a brief, possibly violent, and certainly tumultuous love affair between Apollo and a mortal youth, so this particular reading is actually part of my character development for Apollo. And like most research, it's changing my story.

The thing is, since Apollo does exist as a well-known mythological figure, I need to walk a fine line between meeting certain expectations for his behavior, and also crafting my own version of him. I did start some development for him, which mostly entailed combining what I remembered about Greek mythology with what I needed for the story I'm creating. I then used that combination to help me come up with a basic plot structure for this particular lifetime.

Well, it turns out I missed a few important things.

As I've said before, research is character is plot. In this case, I forgot a few things: namely, that the Greek gods can often be cruel bastards with a marked indifference to human suffering. Not all of the time, of course, and actually Hamilton points out that Apollo is one of the more beautiful and less crude of the pantheon, but he stills does stuff like have his sister kill his unfaithful lover, and rabidly pursue an unwilling maiden until she begs for mercy and gets turned into a tree (one that's sacred to Apollo, just to add insult to injury).

I also learned - and this I don't think I ever knew - that Apollo is the God of Truth and Light. Hamilton puts this quite beautifully, actually, saying that "he is the god of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips." Apollo really cannot tell a lie, nor can anyone lie to him.

Both of these things are important facets of his character, and they change what I'd been planning. I was thinking about having Apollo's mortal lover be unfaithful to him, and get away with it. Well, now I need to reconsider. I can disregard parts of his mythology that don't suit my purpose (thank you, artistic license), but these pieces are so interesting and so full of potential for great conflict that I don't really want to discard them. Now, if his lover is unfaithful, I need to think about how Apollo finds out (because he always finds out), how he reacts, and whether or not he tries to have this lover killed - or even whether he kills him himself.

I'm not sure yet what exactly is going to happen, but I won't be giving much away if I say that both Apollo and his lover will die somehow. After all, I'm writing a book about the various lifetimes of two souls, so in order to move on to another lifetime, the current one has to end.

This is one of the great things about research: when you find something that really does shift the story. What could be better than figuring out what a vengeful, all-powerful god might do to punish his faithless lover? I'm rubbing my hands together gleefully even as I write this...

Insecure Writers: Shaking Off the Rust

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember, it's an online group created by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers. Most of whom are insecure. So, we support each other from the safety and comfort of our desks. 

Hello, everyone! Happy New Year! I'm fresh off of a two-week blogging vacation, as well as a short but amazing trip to Iceland - which is every bit as otherworldly, spectacular, gorgeous, and, at this time of year, dark and cold and wind-driven as you might imagine - and I have to admit that my hands and my brain feel a little bit rusty. I'm back in the saddle today (or, OK, at the computer), but I haven't quite gotten my sea-legs yet. Which you just might - might - be able tell by my ridiculous mixing of metaphors in the previous sentence.

Isn't it funny how extended time off can make you feel like a beginner again?

Or, wait, is that just me?

Anyway, I'm not really a big fan of New Year's resolutions - I'll save you the long, wind-baggerish trip down Curmudgeon Lane and just say they're not my thing - but I do feel like I should mark the new year somehow on this blog.

So...since it's IWSG Wednesday and all...I'll admit that I'm starting the New Year by shaking the rust off of my hands, and I'm doing it with more than a little trepidation. When I took off for Christmas, and then Iceland, I left my new project smack dab in the middle of a looming mountain of research. So imagine my surprise and dismay when I returned from my travels only to find that no one had done any of that research for me while I was gone.

Can you believe it?? It was Christmas - a holiday positively brimming with elves - and I went to Iceland - a country whose people overwhelmingly believe in elves - and not one little elf came by and did any of my research for me! How irritatingly realistic!

Sigh. Lack of elves aside, the real IWSG revelation here is that I'm having a hard time facing down this Research Mountain with a positive attitude. I usually like doing research, and the fact that I'm sort of dreading it right now is worrying me. Did I take on too much? Has my idea moved so far beyond my original concept that I've lost the excitement I once felt about it? Do I need to rethink, and make some semi-drastic changes?

It's possible, too, that this is all just part of the post-vacation, post-holiday blues, and that in a week or two I'll feel very different and realize that I may have been overreacting. I hope this is the case. It's frightening, though, to think about all of the time and energy I've invested in work that I might need to throw away. I know getting rid of stuff is part of writing, but it sure isn't my favorite part.

For now, though, I really don't know. So I'm starting the trek up Research Mountain, anyway, backpack of reference books strapped on tight, and hoping that it's the right path to take. Only time and work will tell...

Wish me luck?

And in the meantime, I'll leave you with a couple of Icelandic visions of beauty:

Þingvellir National Park, where the Icelandic parliament Alþingi was founded in the year 930 AD

 The gorgeous black sand beach of Reynisfjara, with views of the Reynisdrangar basalt pillars 

Swimming in the natural geothermal pools at the Blue Lagoon

The charm and loveliness of Reykjavik

A Little Light

This is my beloved little table-top tree. This understandably raises a few questions, so let me answer them, here: No, I don't celebrate Christmas. Yes, I'm Jewish. Yes, this tree may have been the subject of a few minor disagreements in my household.

I know, I know, it's a little odd. But I love Christmas trees. I always used to envy my friends who had them growing up. They're beautiful and festive and each ornament carries its own story, and they smell wonderful (when they're real, anyway, which this little guy is) and make the whole month feel like a celebration.

They also, true to their pagan roots, are a light held up against the encroaching dark. In these, the shortest days of the year, when the sun makes the briefest of appearances, and the whole world is brown and bare and covered in snow, and spring seems like nothing more than a dream, the evergreen tree helps us to hold back the long, dark hopelessness of winter.

So, I hope the same for all of you, no matter which holiday you celebrate or which religion, if any, has your faith: may you find some light to hold back the darkness. May you have hope and joy and peace this holiday season.

I'll be off this week and next, and back for IWSG (and visiting all of your blogs!) on January 8th. 

Research is Character is Plot

Ok, first: THANK YOU INTERNET!! (And by "internet", I mean all of you beautiful people who came, read my plea, and left a comment last week with fantastic research tips.) I got a heretofore unimagined wealth of great, helpful information, which I am now using. Like, right now. Right this very second. Oh yeah, I'm a multitasker-extraordinaire.

Ok, fine. Not really. BUT I've been using your ideas already, and I'm spending a day at my local library this week, so that sort of counts.

I want to take a step back, though, and answer a question no one has asked. Why? Because I need a lead-in to the body of this post, obviously. Duh.

Last week, I wrote out a veritable laundry list of research needs for my new book, and explained that I needed these items for, well, really important writing stuff. Which begs the question, Ancient Greece and Tibet and the British Raj and Australian sheep and my good God what the heck is wrong with you?? Are you trying to give yourself a brain aneurysm???

Oh no, wait. That's not the question I was going to answer. Sorry. It was this one: Why exactly do you need this research to create a plot? You say character is plot; why can't you just use the characters instead of doing this utterly psychotic amount of research?

Ahhh, sneaky me, using my own words against myself! Well, smarty-pants, let me give you an example.

So, I had this idea to have one of the lifetimes for my souls take place in a remote village in Tibet, around 500-600 CE. When I came up with the idea, I thought of writing it from the POV of an old man on the day his next door neighbor, an old woman, lies dying. Without giving away too much, this little story revolved around the idea that he was supposed to marry this woman - as in an arranged marriage - but instead, he married someone else.

Cool. Workable idea. Then I did some very preliminary research into Tibetan culture...and found out that Tibet is one of the very few areas in the world where polyandry was widely practiced. For those of you who don't want to click on that Wikipedia link (and really, you should; the article is freaking fascinating), polyandry is "a form of polygamy whereby a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time."

Yes, you read that right. One lady, many husbands.

No, this isn't some form of ancient feminism. I had to read quite a bit more to wrap my head around this concept, but the basic idea is this: in a place like Himalayan Tibet, where there is very little arable land, it becomes critical to keep a family's land intact and not divide it up among all of the children (or, ok, sons) into small, unsustainable plots. To that end, the eldest son is considered the head of the family, and the heir. So this lucky guy finds a gal who is absolutely NOT from his clan, and marries her, and then, by proxy, all of his brothers are automatically married to this lady, too. Whatever children she bears, no matter which brother is the actual father, are considered the children of the eldest brother. And all of these people - wife, multiple brother/husbands, children, and any remaining members of the previous generation - live together, usually in one large house. (And thus you can see why people aren't allowed to marry within their clans; they really are all related to each other.)

It's a creative solution to some difficult problems, when you think about it. In addition to dealing with issues of inheritance, polyandry was also thought to help control population - again, important in a place with limited resources - as well as increase the likelihood of children surviving to adulthood. Really cool, from an anthropological standpoint, but a major problem for me and my cute little idea.

As you can guess, this information threw my seed of an idea on its tiny, undeveloped head. Maybe I do have an old guy with a wife, but are there other husbands, too? Or did he go off on his own and break all acceptable tradition, and marry one lady for himself, thereby losing all right to his family's land?

And anyway, what is the concept of a village in ancient Tibet? Is there even such a thing as a next-door neighbor, or are there just these clans living together in isolated pockets? If so, can our old man even have a neighbor who is dying? And are these marriages arranged, or not?

So, you see, in this case, the research informs everything. This is often the case with a society and culture that I'm unfamiliar with. I can come up with some nice ideas, but until I learn something about the time period and place, those ideas are fairly useless.

Which means... that I really do have to do all of that research. I know, I'm crazy. But if I can pull it off, it might just make a really effing cool book.

Confessions and Pleas (and PLEASE)

It might seem like a weird intrusion of the real world into imaginary life, but non-fiction research really is an essential part of the process of writing a novel. Unless I'm going to make up my own entire world, I need to be able to create believable descriptions of fictitious characters living in non-fictitious places - and time periods. Otherwise, people who read my books will spend a ton of time saying, "Hey, there weren't any Ferrari's in 10th century Egypt! What the hell kind of book is this?!" rather than getting involved in the conflict and the characters, and generally doing things that mean they're going to keep reading.

I've mentioned briefly that this new book I'm working on is shaping up to need a whole lot of that research....which isn't going so well.

Ok, I admit it: the internet age has ruined me. I no longer remember how to do traditional research.

I really don't know what I used to do before some dudes invented Wikipedia. I mean, I have these vague ideas that I read encyclopedias and books and stuff, but I don't even know if physical encyclopedias still exist. These days, when I need to do research, I spend my time wading through mountains of Google results for things like "British colonial era in India British family life", or "Tibet mountain villages ancient culture gender roles".

Yes, I know; my Google searches look like stream-of-consciousness exercises. This is what happens when you try to get quick answers to complex cultural and historical questions on the internet.

Clearly, this reliance on these new-fangled interwebs isn't working too well for me. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia when you need to quickly find out how many people live in Botswana, or what the state animal of Montana is (for the record, it's a Grizzly bear.) But if you need to understand why a British family might have moved to India in the 1890s, and to get a clear picture of their lives there, as well as understand how an Indian woman would have viewed and interacted with said British family, then Wikipedia isn't going to be super helpful.

This wasn't really an issue when I was doing research for Cloudland. That's one of the benefits of making up a land in the sky: no research required. The rest of what I needed to look into was fairly simple, and pretty easy to find. Want to know what a school social worker does? Great. Interview one. Want to know how kids process death? Perfect. There are giant piles of child psychology books on that one.

My new project, however, is going to be heavily reliant on good research. Right now, I have ideas for six lifetimes for my two souls... none of which take place in present-day New England, which is the only time and place I'm qualified to talk about without doing some research first.

This is, as I said, a bit of an embarrassing problem. As my Google search terms grow ever longer, my actual tangible results wear thin.

So, internet friends, I'm going to do something silly and embarrassing and rather odd, and ask for your help. I need some reminders of where to look, and how to research, any or all of the following:

• Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo;
• Day-to-day life, religion, culture, and gender roles in villages in ancient mountainous Tibet, 500-600 CE; 
• Information on the indigenous peoples of South America in pre-Columbus times (around 1200-1300 CE), specifically in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and the details of their culture, religion, and daily lives;
• The lives and work of the British colonialists and their families in India around 1890, as well as the lives of the Indian people, with specific information on Hindu religion at the time, and any rebellions being mounted against the British. I'm also specifically wondering how these two cultures viewed each other;
• Life as a sheep farmer in southern Australia in the 1960s or 70s, including day-to-day running of the farm, climate and weather patterns, as well as motorcycle culture during that same period;
• And finally (for now), the day-to-day life of a preeminent bio-geneticist doing cutting edge research, in the present day. 

I'm not expecting anyone to give me information on the topics above, of course. I'm ready and willing to roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work; I just need a little, eensy, minor bit of help remembering how. I'll take any advice you've got. Please?

Insecure Writers: Be Brave

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember, it's an online group created by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers. Most of whom are insecure. So we support each other from the safety and comfort of our desks. 

I've been thinking about this particular post for a while. Not the content, exactly, but the fact that it's an IWSG post, and what that means.

I have to admit that I've mostly used IWSG Wednesdays as an opportunity to vent about my most recent and pressing set of insecurities. Occasionally (ok, once) I used it to share an inspiring idea.

And there's nothing wrong with any of this; that's part of what a support group is all about.

The thing is, I don't really want to do that this week. I want to try something new.

It's been a rough week. Not bad, necessarily, just tough. A lot of ups and a lot of downs, which, as I'm learning, is part of being an author. Some people will love your work, and some will hate it, or, even worse, just not care much about it one way or the other. And somehow, through all of the conflicting feedback/responses/reviews/etc.,  I have to learn how to keep my head on straight and not pay too much attention to the criticism or the praise.

That's not easy. And that's not specific to writers, either.

Anyone who has ever cared about anything they produce, in any deeply personal way, has to struggle through this, too. Artists, yes, but also any person who loves and cares about their job or their cooking or child-rearing, or whatever that thing is, that thing that motivates and inspires and drives each of us to work and work more and hone and perfect and sweat and curse and laugh with sheer joy. That thing that comes from somewhere inside us, somewhere intensely personal and, I think, profound. It could be a presentation at work, a novel, a painting, a research study. It could be anything.

It's different for each of us, but sharing it with the world is universally terrifying. We take a part of ourselves, a piece of our being that we value tremendously, and offer it up to the rest of the world for judgement. It could be incredible, everything we've ever dreamed of, but it could also be a disaster.

No wonder so many of us choose not to take that risk. This is why people write books and then put them in drawer to sit and gather dust for thirty years, or create an innovative business plan for a start-up and then shelve it forever.

Here's the thing, though: it's terrifying and risky, but it's also vital. I can't help but think that it's better to try, and possibly to fail, then to never share the best part of yourself. It's a cliche, but it's true - if you never try, you'll never be able to succeed. You'll never know how amazing it could be, to realize your best and deepest dream. If it doesn't work, I have to think it's better to know that I tried, that I did everything I could, than to spend the rest of my life filled with regret, wondering, "what if...?"

So that's what all of this preamble is about. That's what I'm trying to say: it's normal to be afraid, but don't you dare let it stop you.

If you need more, there's this, from Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine... It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same...”

And this:



Whoever you are, reading this right now, feeling terrified, I hope this helps, in some way. You're not alone at ALL, and all of the rest of us can't wait to see what you have to share. Please share it.