On Research and Middle School

When I was in middle school at my illustrious private school my parents paid a shit load of money to send me to we had to do a big research project. It could be on whatever we wanted. It could be on baseball stats, pop music, rocket science, whatever. The point was to get us off our lazy video game addicted asses and get us to learn how to research things the proper way.

Now me, being the worst behaved of the lot, wasn’t about to do any damn research. Hell no to that. I needed a way out. And my way out was to make up a scientific fact. I declared for my project that the color of the planets attracted heat from the sun. The darker the planet the hotter the planet. Like if you wear black you attract heat.

If that wasn’t insane enough I fortified my scheme by making up scientific journals and books. Most I made up reinforced my bullshit. But I was shrewd enough to make up a few sources that disputed my claim. I presented my work before classmates and their parents and was given a standing ovation. But that was mostly because I was cracking jokes the whole time.

I tell you this, good friends, because now as a writer I have become, out of necessity, something of a master researcher. Nearly every page of Splendificent has some touch of research behind it. For instance, I don’t live in New York (I’ve been plenty of times) so I had to use google maps and google earth to get a good view of the sections I haven’t been to or aren’t familiar with. Then I had to go deeper into Yelp, or mostly Youtube to find what the residents thought about this area. Honestly, I’d have preferred just to go myself and write there. But health doesn’t permit me that luxury.

I had to do a lot of research on Norse mythology for Splendificent. A big boon to me were the videos of a Doctor Jackson Crawford on Youtube. Just the pronunciations alone were good enough to help. But he went in-depth on the stories of the myths, the gods and other beings, and even better, how worshipers practiced the religion. I was able to use the old ways of the Vikings to shape how the country of Golden Land thought of spirituality and religion.

Another major boon to me, one that I couldn’t have written this book without, was the book Encyclopedia of Norse and Germanic Folklore, Mythology, and Magic by Claude Lecouteux. This book saved my life. I could not have written Splendificent or any future Splendificent books without. It inspired me to give Tristabelle a religious role for a pagan deity, it gave me an idea for a demon to torment the girls in Splendificent 2, it gave me ideas for the mystical weapons the Elvrinas use to fight the evil of the world and outer worlds. Evil that was also helped shaped in my mind by the contents of this book.

Personally, I find research to be loads of fun.  I get something of a research high when I find something really good. I mean a legit high, I’m gone off that shit like I popped some Xanax. That’s how much I adore doing research. To think this is coming from someone who made up one of the most illogical scientific theories in world history.