In addition to bakery fire burns, bruised jaws, and deep gashes, I can now add printing acid injuries and goat injuries to the list of bodily traumas I’ve had to Google in my Stars Fall Out research.
I found a site called MoonConnection.com in my Stars Fall Out research. It seems like a nice enough site, but what a waste that it’s just lunar information and not a werewolf dating site.
Research rabbit holes: I had to look up the name of a mapmaking tool for a character who is an amateur cartographer, and now I, too, am an amateur cartographer.
When you Google “goat injuries” for book reasons because you need to get a guy out of an animal pasture so his wife can talk to her would-be-lover about some perjury they’re going to commit…
…and then a week later you still have six browser tabs dedicated to goat injuries, even though you decided not to go all plot devicey like that.
That’s writer life.
What to Say to the Bride Who Doesn’t Want to Be at Her Own Wedding
What can you say to a reluctant bride besides “congratulations?” To answer this question for my current draft, I read some terrible wedding advice.
Asking better questions about parenting and child leashes
There haven’t been a lot of studies done on child leashes. In lieu of science, the internet served up a chunky stew of thinking errors, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks. It’s time to ask better questions.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-bilingual/201108/emotions-in-more-one-language
This article discusses the myth of bilingual people reverting to their native language when expressing strong emotions. From what I’ve read, it’s not necessarily untrue that this happens, but there’s more nuance than automatically reverting to one’s earliest language, and more variables than time.
A couple quotes I found interesting:
When a childhood in one language lacked affection or was marked by distressing events, then bilinguals may prefer to express emotion in their second language.
When bilinguals are angry, excited, tired or stressed, their accent in a language can reappear or increase in strength. In addition, they often revert to the language(s) in which they express their emotions, be it their first or their second language, or both.
I read the article as part of my research for Stars Fall Out, and it’s not totally applicable in my case, since I’m writing a multi-lingual character who starts slipping out of an assumed accent. But this is still useful information to have it mind.
For more of my Stars Fall Out research, I started looking up historical forms of birth control for something I can bend to fit my story. This is not that thing:
During the 16th century, Canadians began using the combination of beaver testicles with moonshine. They ground the beaver balls to fine powder and then added very strong alcohol to the mixture. People would then drink this, with the alcohol helping to forget that they were drinking beaver testicles.
15 of the Craziest Birth Control Methods from Ancient Times
I’m the lightest lightweight ever, and it would take an entire jug of wine for me to forget I was drinking beaver testicles. This is because no amount of alcohol would make me forget drinking beaver testicles; you’d need to straight up smack me over the head with the wine jug and concuss me for me to forget that.
Here are a couple things I’ve learned about while doing worldbuilding research for Stars Fall Out:
The Roman month of Mercedonious. Learning more about the history of intercalation (inserting extra days into the calendar, such as in a leap year), provided the inspiration for me to fix a story problem. I have a section of Stars that, timing-wise, felt weird in relation to the rest of the story. I decided to run with the weirdness; I made them intercalated days called for on the authority of one of the Grand Oneiromancers. One of those “can you believe this law is still on the books?” kind of things.
I also learned how to convert between different number base systems. I’ve always thought it would be cool if we had a base 12 system rather than base 10, so I gave one of the cultures in my story a base 12 system, and another base 9. Now I’m trying to make it as hard as possible for them to change currency, which is adding some nice color to a scene in the bakery when a guy comes in with imperial money.
Also, history of the number zero. Unrelated, for my purposes.
Researching… spy psychology
The internet contains about a billion articles on the morning routines of CEOs, boring stuff that starts with waking at 4:30 to work out. But what about the morning routines of spies? What do those look like? Wake up at 4:30 to go to the gym, then LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU ARE FOR THE ENTIRE DAY.
I searched for the morning routines of spies partly on a whim, and partly because such information would be directly useful in my research for Stars Fall Out. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find much.
Instead, I ending up reading about the field of spy psychology. I’m a few articles into this research, and so far am incredibly disappointed that no one has used the term “spychology.”