Isn’t this writing business just great.
In what other field could I spend the afternoon re-watching the great Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile, and still call it research?
And by the way, the movie is from 1978, not 1974 as the trailer caption puts it.
And yes, I might inflict my opinions about the movie on you, one of these nights.
Yesterday I decided I am stupid, and it’s all right like that.
You see, I was handed a book for review purposes; the thing’s printed by a major Italian publisher and touted as the Second Coming of adventure writing. So yes, I was curious.
Pity the research backing the action was probably limited to re-watching a pair of old movies to get the fake accents right – there’s mountains smack in the middle of the greatest floodplain on Earth, there’s a lot of made-up archeology and anthropology that do not even try to look plausible, there’s a main character so derivative even his name is second-hand. The book apparently is selling in cartloads.
All of this, and I’ve been spending the last week looking for the floorplans of the Cairo Museum in the ’50s, to get the opening scene of my new Corsair story just right.
So yes, I felt stupid, but I decided it’s all right like that. Continue reading
I think I already told you this, but one of the fun bits of writing pulp stories, to me, is the pleasure of doing research on weird subjects.
For instance – right now I’m working on a story tentatively called The Mark of Cortazàr, that I hope I’ll have out by the end of January/early February 2016.
Not only I had the fun of going back to my old Victor Von Hagen books, but I had the added bonus of doing some research on the subject of shrunken heads.
Now, isn’t this awesome?
How did I spend my winter holidays?
Looking up headhunters and shrunken heads. Continue reading
The building you see in this photo housed the Italian Consulate in Shanghai in the 1930s.
The climax of the first part of my book happens here. Continue reading
I’m doing a quick post, here, to point out to interested parties three excellent resources I found about ancient (and not-so-ancient) combat.
Swords.
But also shields and daggers and polearms.
I believe in plausibility when writing my stories – plausibility over overkill.
I’m not writing handbooks, I’m writing fiction – and I want my stories to be believable without clobbering my readers with too much detail.
One thing I learned is, listening to someone passionate about a subject is often better than going through arid web-pages and treaties.
And mind you, I love doing research for my stories, but as I said in the past, there is such a thing as too much research.
So I apply the old Doc Savage methods for becoming an instant expert. Continue reading
I said it, I’ll repeat it – for me, one of the best bits of writing fiction is doing research.
After all, it means digging up strange facts and reading great books and have a good excuse for it.
I’m doing research for my next book
Sounds cool, too.
AND it’s a great way to decompress after a whole day spent writing.
Now, ok, working in scientific research should be the same – and it used to be just like that: you get paid to learn, experiment and discover new things.
Pity nobody’s paying researchers anymore, not in Italy, anyway.
On with my writing projects, then.
Massive list of online research resources for authors, from the blog of Anne R. Allen.
Karavansara 