Research...

I love doing research for my books. There's always a slight worry that my Google searches look very dodgy, but on the whole, I absolutely love doing the background work for my books. This could be general research (like my scrapbooks - looking for the perfect location for a book, or images of people for characters etc) or it can be more of the nitty-gritty (what is the exact wording of a police caution?).

I've seen a couple of posts recently about writers using mood boards (see here and here for a couple of examples). In essence, the scrapbooks I make are like mood boards, with pictures pasted in and notes scribbled all over them (I wrote here about my scrapbooks). I sometimes keep electronic versions using OneNote, but not as commonly as I have physical versions. I've found that printing things off, either on to A4 printer paper or on to sticker sheets and sticking them into my notebooks works the best for me.

That kind of research all happens near the start of a book. What I've been researching recently has been a combination of of fine details about things (sunrise and sunset times on particular dates; castles in Cumbria; geology of various rocks), and looking for images of long leather coats for men that you could conceal a sword under (that don't look like either the Gestapo coats from 'Allo 'Allo, or something from The Matrix). Today's slightly random search was for "blank autopsy body diagrams". A couple of weeks ago it was "sociopolitical repercussions of Spanish flu" & "what colour boxes are used for paper recycling in Cumbria?"

Every day is a school day...

What's everyone else been up to recently?

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