Now, this isn’t going to stop me from writing this book, because it’s impossible for there to be much more to research at all, but I wanted to stop writing for a moment and mention that I’ve just had to do some research for my newest novel. Which is weird.
Okay, so I invented this city, and I was getting into describing it and I got to a point where my main character asks it’s name. So I tell him the name of this totally invented place, I just made up out of my own imagination, totally fictional and never-conceived of before an hour or two ago. Except some part of me wants to look this city up online, so I do, and would you believe that I’ve just spent ten or twenty minutes researching a new, never-before-imagined city and it’s history online? It wouldn’t have taken as long, but I found I needed to draw a map of the place so I wouldn’t get lost as I wrote my characters around the different parts of the city. All the names of the places were right there, online, for me to find. Information about what the different parts of the city are like and even hints about the sinister underbelly of the city were all there.
Now, I know I’ve been saying for years that “everything is on the internet” and that you just need to know where to look, but this is getting ridiculous. It’s like google is tapping right into my brain and building websites based on what it finds there. I need to fill my head with robot.txt files so it’ll stop that. or do I?
Man. A map. What is this? Tolkein? How complicated does a fictional place have to be that the author of it has to draw himself a map? And the idea of researching something based totally in fantasy, not even connected to the realm of reality. Whose idea was that? I’m going back to writing. I’m at … 31,195 words right now, but I’m about to try to describe what I drew on the map out in agonizing detail. Did I mention that the writing on the map is not in an alphabet you can read? it all looks like some cross between elfin and runic letters. There’s even a compas rose on the map. My world doesn’t have North, South, East, OR West, but there’s a compass rose on my map that makes sense. Gha.
