Nuts & Bolts
I used to say I don’t do a lot of research for my books.
And that was true for my first four novels, all of which to varying degrees touched on aspects of my career as a federal drug agent. They weren’t about my career, just carried the DNA or fingerprints of thirty years of criminal investigative and undercover work, nearly half spent on or near the Southwest border.
I was working in El Paso when I wrote my debut, The Far Empty. The extent of my “research” was to take the family go on a nominal research trip under the guise of a “vacation” down to the Big Bend region, only a couple of hours away, basically just so I could take some pictures of the area for later reference.
But when my later books moved farther afield—literally, figuratively—they subsequently required more “real” research. For The Flock I did a deep dive on cults and the histories of several of them (which I then threaded through my fictional Ark of Lazarus); in Call the Dark, I brushed up on West Virginia rural legends and geography, advanced prosthetics, and military technology and terminology.
The Black Light Club (on submission now) centers on a young woman who died and then was revived after being struck by lightning, and how her path ultimately crosses with a female detective on a frantic country-wide hunt for a killer and struggling with a condition I coined as “eidetic apophenia.” I read up on the traumatic and lingering effects of being struck by 50,000 volts of electricity, lightning strike survivor support groups (LSSGs), homicide investigations, and various locales, specifically Ajo, Arizona, where much of the action takes place. A screenplay I’ve been working on necessitated identifying articles about biohacking, genetics, and artificial intelligence, and the book I’m now writing—Black Horses—is set in a rural Kentucky community, against a backdrop of horse farms and distilleries.
Nowadays, most research can be done from behind a keyboard; the world really is at your fingertips. From a practical standpoint, I use Evernote to clip, safe, and organize articles, websites, and just about anything else I think I’ll reference while writing a novel or screenplay. In fact, the ease with which we can summon so much information, makes it all too comfortable to slowly slip down the rabbit hole of constant research rather than actual writing; research as a formof procrastination.
The other issue with the staid nature of keyboard research is that—despite the nomenclature—it lacks a certain tactile reality, a lived-in familiarity. Even though all these worlds are at your fingertips, they’re still at arms length. I think my Big Bend Trilogy was better for the fact I was living in that area when I wrote those books.
That brings me to yesterday, when I was able to visit the Willett Distillery in Bardstown, KY and have dinner (and bourbon) with some wonderfully accomodating folks deeply involved in the bourbon industry.
Frankly, most of the facts and figures—the nuts and bolts—of distilling won’t make their way into Black Horses, nor should they. The book isn’t a treatise on the bourbon industry. But having the opportunity to spend time with people both knowledgable and passionate about what they do, to soak in the atmosphere and take some pictures, means all that setting, tone, and color will become part of the DNA of the book, no different than how my DEA career influenced my Big Bend Trilogy.
This is not to say you can’t write amazing books about space travel or the Dark Ages or deep sea exploration without ever having done or experienced those things. At the end of the day, fiction is imagination, and you only have to make any of it as “real” as you want or need. But it’s nice to be able to push away from the desk yet still “be writing” in some measure, and honestly, this is just the sort of opportunity I wouldn’t have been able to free myself to go do while I was still working full time as a federal agent.
And if you get the opportunity, definitely pick up a bottle of Willett’s Noah’s Mill or Johnny Drum!
As always, feel free to—