Sometimes, Squiders, I’m thankful I’m a fantasy author. Well, a lot of the time. But, in this case, I get to avoid some of the more macabre searches that mystery and other genre authors probably have to do.
Luckily, in this day and age, your search history is between you and the NSA, and you don’t have to, I don’t know, make friends with police officers or surgeons or undertakers to get information or whatever it was people did before the Internet existed.
But we still need information, and in order to make stories interesting, sometimes we need really strange and disturbing information that would make people think you were a serial killer if you brought it up in normal conversation.
I imagine mystery/thriller writers have it the worse, what with having to come up with new and inventive ways to kill people. But I’ve had to make some odd searches myself from time to time.
There was the time where I did a ridiculous amount of research on blood to see whether it was possible for an intelligent life form to have blood that was not oxygen-based, only to have one of my betas point out a fatal flaw in my evolutionary logic anyway.
There was the time I needed to figure out if being stabbed in a certain location would kill someone.
I’ve done a lot of research on stabby things in general.
Also with setting people on fire, and drowning…
Okay, I take back the earlier comment about it being better to be a fantasy writer.
Ever done any especially disturbing bits of research, Squiders, that it’s probably just better to never tell anyone?
