Tasting the Moment: the seduction of detail

by Anneke Jacob

I can’t find the link. Someone – I think it was Barbara Kingsolver – mentioned the importance of getting the details right. She said that when the second full moon appeared in the sky two weeks after the first, it was time to put the book down.

At least, I think that’s what she said. I can’t find the quote. And my urge for accuracy is playing me up, nagging at me like weeds in my neglected garden. I’ve now spent way longer looking for that quote than actually writing this piece about research. Which just might have something to do with why it took me five years to write my latest novel. It’s always easier to rummage through six pages of Google returns for an obscure factual detail than it is to grapple with your plot.

But it’s those perfect details – the right object, the genuine street corner – that draw us into the narrative. Sound and speech rhythms fall just so. Thick frost covers the Creamsicles at the corner store, and scrapes and burns our questing fingers. The texture of flesh fits our hand; we inhale its odours of secret sweat, sunscreen, a faint hint of cardamom.

A whole world can be imagined or hinted at with the right touches here and there. Language and sex are closely related: sound and rhythm, engaging both the tongue and the brain. It’s the sensory feasts, those moments I can taste, that I’ll go back and read again and again.

And just like bad grammar and typos, factual errors make readers stumble and fall out of the world into which we’ve carefully coaxed them. “Oh, yeah, right!” I hear them saying. “Nobody talks like that!” “No one’s body does that unless they work for Cirque du Soleil!” “Why, that equipment would be ruined if you treated it like that!”

Where was that site on leather care…?

Of course when the web isn’t enough you have to search for other sources. Expert readers are like gold. It was actually Dee Luvbight who pointed out that I was letting the leather get wet.

But try getting expert advice when you can’t explain why you’re asking. I write bdsm erotica. The dom in my latest novel, As She’s Told, is a builder. This meant our renovator neighbour answered an oh-so-casual question or two. Anders, the dom, is a Dane (okay, I have a thing for tall, rangy blond guys; can you blame me?) and getting the odd Danish phrase just right took some doing. I put out SOS cries for Danes on kinky newsgroups. Then I discovered a multiple language-help site, where I had to attribute my search for the plural of “thrall” to the writing of a historical novel. They also provided the truth about Danish sea shanties, free of charge.

Now, you might suggest that I was going overboard for the sake of an unlikely audience of a few Danes. Just a tad obsessive? You bet. “Enough!” I sometimes told myself. “How many readers from that small European nation do you think will come across your book?” But within a month of publication I heard from two Danish readers, and they weren’t complaining about word usage! Whew!

I wish Dick Francis had had at least one Canadian reader/editor before he published The Edge. (And by the way, I googled that title instead of walking upstairs to find the book. Is that research or what?) The book’s largely set in Canada, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a character whose every phrase ends in “eh.” But Englishisms like “plait” and “chap” just slide off Canadian tongues. It’s pretty funny. The book is still a fine one, but it would have been even better if Francis had done his homework.

A short turnaround time for prose must be hell for errors. Okay, I’ll admit it; five years working on a book is too long. But at least I had time to fix things. Visualize Maia, my poor frustrated heroine, teased to distraction, dreaming in a Toronto streetcar. She wakes up to find that the streetcar has short-turned down Bay and has taken her all the way to City Hall. She’s heading the wrong way! And she’s not allowed to be late! In a panic she gets off and runs north again.

Wait a minute. Do streetcars run on Bay? The next time I was in the neighbourhood I checked it out. No streetcars. It turns out they stopped running them on that part of Bay Street in 1975. Oops. I shifted the short-turn to Dundas and all its traffic, and instead of dodging suits on Bay, Maia dodges excruciatingly slow elderly shoppers on Spadina. In the end, an even better scene. And Toronto Transit aficionados are not pulled from the narrative to check the publication date and shake their heads.

In five years the quiet nighttime negotiation scene shifted locations three times, as the street I thought would be a fine space for private conversation filled up with rowdy clubs. City politics changed its flavour, so my background details changed, too. And I know far more about Danish Christmas traditions than anyone but a Dane should know.

Construction details can carry their own allure. Here’s an early scene from As She’s Told in which Anders gives Maia a tour of the work he’s doing on his own house:

The house all looked pretty deconstructed; I had a hard time visualizing the surfaces freed of their layers of old paint and linoleum and construction debris. His long, self-assured body kept distracting me, moving ahead through the splintery shadows, leading me with a hard hand on my wrist. The resinous smells of cut wood were powerfully like the smell he carried about with him, and made me want very badly to get under his clothes. There was a fireplace, or at least the outer portion, in amongst the lumber in the basement, a rather beautiful art deco design in honey-coloured wood. But the mantelpiece was missing.

“It’s by Roberts, out of a series of midtown apartments from the early thirties. Which were taken down in the seventies when they were flattening anything with character. Sooner or later I’ll find the mantelpiece, and then I’ll put it in. Look at this carving.” He ran his fingers through symmetrical grooves. Suddenly I could feel those fingers in my own grooves. He gave me a long look over his shoulder, and his smile stripped me bare. Slowly he stepped over to me and ran his hands down my body. I leaned my head on his chest, and let the moan loose. “You’ll be installed yourself, soon enough, girl,” he murmured. A glance at his watch. “You have work to do; let’s get you back.”

There really was a Roberts creating Art Deco in the early 30’s in Toronto. But not all my research reflects reality. Some of it is mined out of my head. My first book was set on another planet; if I needed technology I made it so. And according to one reader, doms are surely searching Home Depot even as we speak, in vain for the hardware that arose from my evil and inventive brain. Details can be so seductive.

*****

Anneke Jacob is the author of As She’s Told, winner of the National Leather Association’s Pauline Réage Novel Award (Pink Flamingo, 2008), and Owned and Owner (republished by Pink Flamingo in 2009). Visit her website: www.tpe.com/~anneke.

What Every Writer Should Know

Everybody has talked this week about various aspects of doing research for a story. History, geography, social customs and culture... all of these play an important role when writing a story that draws on factual information.

But what about after the story is written? After you've written your tale, edited it and polished it and you're ready to send it out for publication? Is it time to kick back and take a break?

Oh hell no!

This is the hard truth of writing. The research is never done. At every stage of the story -- before, during, and after the writing -- you have to be ready to go digging for those crucial facts. Not just the ones that determine the setting and costumes, the dialog and plot, but also those that determine the sale and promotion of your work. Let's take a look at just a few things every writer ought to know about, but quite possibly don't.

Let's start with researching available markets. You might think this was pretty obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many writers don't know this. The first thing you need to do before you send your story out for submission is figure out who's actually buying what you're selling. While there are plenty of publishers out there, only so many of them are looking for stories in your particular genre, and those publishers may only publish a specific sub-genre of what you write. For instance, I write sci-fi erotica, but not every erotica publisher wants stories with a sci-fi twist. Do a search online, using the words 'submission guidelines' and your genre to get a list of publishers you can submit to. Learn who wants short stories and who wants full length novels, who's taking poetry and who only wants non-fiction articles. It's not hard, and it'll save you a lot of time on the road to getting published.

Once you've got those guidelines, you might notice that the publisher requires your story be formatted in 10 point Times New Roman, with 1 inch margins all around and double line spacing. Great! But you formatted your story in 12 point Courier, with 3/4 inch margins and single line spacing. Do you know how to change the formating to what the publisher wants? Can you do it in a way that doesn't take twenty hours of your precious time and somehow completely screw up the document in the process? No? Time for a little research. Dig out the user manual that came with your word processor, or go online and see if there are any tutorials available to help you out. Because it would really suck if your wonderful story got rejected for bad or improper formatting.

Okay, you've got a market. You've formatted your story correctly and sent it off. And the publisher loves your work! They're sending you a contract! They want to buy your First North American rights! And there's this clause about a Right of First Refusal... uh, what the hell does all that mean? And how much is a 35% royalty anyway? What does Print On Demand mean? Does that mean the book will actually be available in bookstores, or not? The legalize that shows up in a publishing contract is probably the biggest area where good writers fail to do proper research. Do you know what rights to your work you're signing away? Do you understand what format the book will be published in? Or are you just so happy to have a contract, any contract, that you don't care about any of this stuff? You should care! Bad things happen to authors who don't understand the contracts they sign, so take a few days to research what the various clauses of your contract mean. Read the whole thing. Twice! If you don't understand what the contract says, look it up!

Once you've done your research on your contract, there are further surprises waiting for you. In this day and age of digital publishing, the author takes on the lion's share of promotion. Do you know how to do that? What are the tools available to you to get the word out about your book? Which is going to work better for you - a Live Journal page or a Word Press blog? Have you got a Twitter account? Do you know how to feed it into Facebook? Do you have a Yahoo group or a newsletter? Do you know how to set one up?

You might think I'm going overboard here, but I assure you, I'm not. Ever since I first set out to publish my writing, I've done constant research on all the things I've listed above. I've scoured the net for markets, devoured entire how-to manuals on my word processor, and I'm constantly learning how to deal with this gadget or that widget to help out with my promo. It's a never ending job, researching the business side of writing. But if you're going to be a professional writer, then it's something you need to accept, and even learn to like, to succeed.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I just downloaded some new blogging software, and I need to do some research before I try using it this weekend. And I've got a story I need to look up a few things on, and a contract to look over, and...

Oh, you know.

See ya later };)

Research

Research is possibly one of the most fascinating elements about being an author.

I’m not just talking about the fun side of research for erotic fiction. Obviously it’s satisfying to ask: so how many orgasm can a man have between cups of coffee? (The answer is 9. I’ve checked this twice). Obviously there is a lot of pleasure to be had from discovering answers to questions like: who makes the sandwiches during the intermission of a threeway? (It turns out that the man is expected to do this). Admittedly, the sexual side of research is endless fun. However, moving this topic briefly away from my genitals, I was referring to the more practical elements of research such as location.

Like others have said before me this week, research can be addictive and time-consuming. I’m a voracious reader and so I can spend too many hours (when I should be writing) happily reading about the place where my story is set. A part of me wants to believe that this is necessary research, and I’m absorbing the atmosphere of the story world through some sort of textual osmosis. However, whilst it’s possible that may be true, I always feel as though I’m really just goofing off.

Is this sort of research necessary? That depends on the writer and their intended reader.

I recently read the first 40 pages of J Carrell’s The Shakespeare Secret. This is not an erotic novel. On the back cover blurb it mentions a ‘deadly serial killer’ which had me wondering what other sorts of serial killer there were besides deadly ones. Cuddly serial killers? Jovial serial killers?

The opening of The Shakespeare Secret is set in London. I don’t know if it goes to a different location after that opening. I lost interest in those first 40 pages and couldn’t be bothered to read the rest. The book itself is not badly written, but the research is so intrusive it repeatedly detracts from the story. There are stretches of description that are little more than a list of street names. I don’t doubt that they’re the correct street names for that part of London and the journey that the protagonist is following. I’m sure J Carrell has researched this route thoroughly. But street names add sod all to a story and a list of them only ever belongs at the bottom of a map, followed by an appropriate reference number.

In contrast, I’ve read works that the legendary Lisabet Sarai has placed in Bangok and the UK. Lisabet includes description as a natural part of the story and so it never comes across as a forced list of street names or a glossary of important monuments/locations from a second-hand tourist guide book.

Perhaps the lesson to be taken from this is that it’s not about how much a writer researches but how cleverly they use it to colour the story world they create?

In my own work I seldom use specific locations. However, when I do, the research is always as thorough as my budget will allow.

For my trilogy of vampire stories I made the mistake of writing a proposal that said the stories were set in Rome, Paris and London. This meant I had to learn a lot about three cities that I’d never visited.

Visiting all of the cities was never an option. I’m a writer and some days I don’t have the bus fare to get out of bed. However, with a reliable internet connection and a handful of travel brochures I was able to find out more about the location of my stories. I then spoke to friends who had visited the three cities and asked them about the places. It is possibly the first time in my life I have ever said to someone, “Please could I see your holiday photographs?” Unless another research project comes up, it will certainly be the last time I utter those fateful words.

Was this second-hand information useful?

I spoke to one friend who told me about the Rome he had visited. He said the most remarkable thing he remembered from his holiday was the tangibility of the ancient artefacts. There were crumbling pieces of masonry, and the remnants of fallen pillars, standing by the sides of roads on the city’s outskirts.

Here, in the UK, we’re more used to such pieces of ancient heritage being in museums and locked out of reach. But my Rome-visiting friend explained that these were pieces of history that could be touched as you walked in the Mediterranean sun. It was a piece of background detail that gave me an overwhelming sense of the city’s history.

Another colleague told me that the thing she most remembered about Rome was the puzzle of the one-wheeled bicycles. On every street corner she visited, there were bicycles: chained to the walls but with their front wheels missing. It was a puzzle that perplexed her for the first week of a fortnight stay in the city.

Eventually, she discovered the cause of this peculiar phenomena. To keep their bicycles secure, it was popular during my friend's visit for cyclists to chain the cycle frames to appropriate fixtures but remove the front wheel.

Was this useful to my story? It’s neither erotic not a useable detail that could colour the plot. However, it added to the sense of strangeness I was wanting to develop – the sense of my characters being in a foreign and unfamiliar land. In that regard, I couldn’t think of anything more strange than to wander around a city of one-wheeled bicycles where anyone can lay their hand on a piece of ancient history.

All of which is my way of saying that research – whether it’s reading, surfing, making sandwiches at a threeway, or simply talking to friends – is an essential part of creating a credible story.

Rocket Men

by C. Sanchez-Garcia

Research? Research? Let me show you kids what research really looks like.

Dig this:

July 1944 Brandis Germany

Movie magazine pages lifted and fell in the breeze, spread out on the young man's belly as he dozed in a beach chair. His hand dangled down almost brushing the tarcmac of the airstrip with his nails. Next to his hand was a thick china mug of real coffee, with the butt of a cigarette, one of the rare ones still made with actual tobacco floating there like an insect. These special gifts were available only to the most elite pilots, an unspoken consideration to the doomed.

The air raid siren always began as a low growl, an animal coming awake, and by seconds rose into a devil howl of hysteria. The man's eyes popped open with a start, heart racing, waking from dream into nightmare. He was out of the chair in an instant, sweating in his green khaki flight suit in the summer shade. Like a fireman he jammed his feet into the thick flying boots next to the beach chair and buckled them as the radio man kicked open the door of the radio shack with a walking cane.

"Alaarmstart!" He ran out onto the tarmac waving a tear sheet, hobbling gamely like a three legged dog. The radio man had been a flyer on the eastern front. His wings had been broken during a scrap with with a flight of Soviet Ilyushin Stormoviks, when he'd had his right knee shot off for him by a couple of point fives.

Boot buckles latched. Flight suit buttoned. The radio man shoved the tear sheet into his hand. He glanced over his shoulder, and already Feldwebel Zeigler had the ladder up against the cockpit and was slamming the latch shut at the wing root after checking the ammunition belt. The young man glanced over the tear sheet. Four engined bombers. Dick Autos. Sheisse! The Ammies and a shit load of them. Maybe two hundred. Fighter escort. Probably those damnned little Mustangs that carry enough fuel and bullets to fly to the fucking moon and back. 28,000 feet. North by northeast, 45 degrees as the crow flies. Got it.

The little plane was small enough to fit into his mother's dining room, with space left over for guests. But the wings were enormous. It was all wing, with a fat squat body, as though a big penguin had gotten the notion to try to flap its flippers and fly instead of swim. On the nose of the plane was a tiny ridiculous propellar, like a cartoon airplane. Important visitors and new pilots looked at the propellar with amazement and it was big joke to try to convince them that its little six inch blades powered this, the fastest air craft ever made. A plane so fast, it killed more of its pilots than the enemy, mostly by explosion and fire.

The young man grabbed his parachute pack from Zeigler and slipped his arms through the straps, adjusting the length so that the pack reached exactly to his knees. He clambered up the ladder and over the side, stood in the cockpit and adjusted the pack so that he could sit down on it like a soft seat cushion.

"She's a good kite, Herr Leutnant," said Zeigler, "it's just the damn wing cannons. The belt motor jams if you hold the tit down too long. Short bursts, that's the way."

The young man threw the safety harness straps over his shoulders and buckled them into a saucer sized disc. The harness lock is unlatched with one hand, by pressing this disc hard with the heel of the palm and twisting down, counterclockwise. He's practiced this with both hands obsessively for hours. He knows someday he'll have to do this motion perfectly on the first attempt, probably at a moment when he will be bleeding from gunshot wounds that will have broken his bones, while the cockpit will be filling up with flames and poisonous chemical smoke. Even if he sees the war through alive, for all his life he'll be escaping that burning cockpit in his dreams, punching at his chest, waking his family in the night with his screams.

He grabbed his chemical proof gloves off the dash and pulled them on. Zeigler's head popped up over the edge of the cockpit with his helmet. While Zeigler jammed the fabric helmet down over the young man's head and adjusted it to get the earphones centered over his ears, the man did his instrument check. He twisted a small black knob under the Revi 16B gunsight clockwise, and a bright yellow dot of light appeared on the thick wall of armoured glass ahead of him. The gunsight is connected to a gyroscope that compensates for target lead. It was hard to see through the glass directly, which made enemy planes look like fish in a fishbowl. Usually he has to peer over the top of it. The gunsight was working. When the time came it'd be useless anyway. You knew what you're doing or you didn't.

A glance at the fuel gauges showed both fuel tanks had been filled. The tanks were situated on each side of the cockpit by his ankles. The right tank had methyl alchohol which burned so bright and clean the flame was invisible. The left tank was ninety percent pure hydrogen peroxide. If you got it on your bare skin it would turn your flesh into jelly.

Zeigler grabbed the radio jack dangling on a cable from the helmet, and plugged it into a port on the lower right portion of the dash next the fuel guage. The young man stuffed his feet under the straps of the rudder pedals and shuffled his boots up and down. "Rudder!" he yelled. Zeigler looked up and saw the tail rudder wave left and right. "Check." Because of the thick armour plate behind the seat, the man couldn't see his own rudder or anything behind him, including anyone coming up to kill him. He waved the control stick forward and back. Elevons waved up and down together near the wing roots. He moved the stick left and right, The long ailerons see-sawed up and down in tandem.

Zeigler handed him his oxygen mask and he fastened it over his face and plugged the pipe into a nozzle a few inches to the right of the radio jack and gave the gas knob a twist. The cool ozone scented air began to flow, a winter smell like fresh fallen snow. He turned up the volume on the Fug 25A radio set and his ears filled with static. "Systems check." he said into the mask.

"Squirrel one cleared." shouted the voice in his ears. The earphones were made loud, because in less than a minute it would be impossible to hear anything.

"Jahvohl!" yelled Zeigler and slapped his face. "Du Scheißkerl - Gute Jagen!" Good hunting you poor bastard.

There was this man he'd seen. A half blinded burn victim being lead by a nurse. It was at the railroad station when he went that time to visit Gretta's parents. The man was dressed in the blue gray wool of the Luftwaffe. His face was wrapped in bandages and peering out were red eyes like bomb craters. A flyer. Only a pilot or a tank man would be burned that particular way. Since then he'd been thinking of carrying a pistol in his flight jacket. If things came to it, it was better than ending up like that.

Zeigler slammed down the canopy, and the young man knocked the latches shut with his fists. Zeigler took the ladder away and ran towards the radio shack, as the young man reached down to his lower left and took a black knob on a quadrant, lifted it and placed it in the first stop. There was a gurgle on both sides of the cockpit, like toilets flushing. Reaching over his left knee he pushed a small black button on the dash and held it until it stayed. He pressed himself back in the seat, his heart racing.

There was a hellish bang! The seat back jolted into him as though he'd been kicked from behind. The fat bird hopped over the wooden blocks that had held the wheels and toddled forward like an infant. The tarmac moved slowly as though he were riding a bicycle, Suddenly it began to speed up. In seconds it was racing by in a blur, bouncing him in his seat like a galloping horse. He reached over with his left hand, holding the control stick for dear life with his right, lifted and dropped the quandrant into second stop. The braying racketing hiss of the rocket rose like a banshee wail as the fat bird hopped and jolted over the air strip. The bomb craters had been filled in by the women's corp (our latest wonder weapon? he thought) but last nights rain had settled some of the dirt fill so the craters had sunken slightly and become dangerous. If the trolly snagged the edge of one of those holes, he'd be gone in a flash like a magician's trick.

Until now he didn't notice it but he was shaking all over. Had to stop that. The nerves this little beast can get going in you. Air Marshall Goering, that fat bastard. Calling the fighters cowards, so that General Galland tore off his knight's cross and threw it at him. Sonovabitch! They didn't have viermots like these Americans have back in Fattie's day on the western front. Touch as shit. You shoot them to pieces and they keep chugging along like its nothing. The old fat man with his soft hands and high scolding voice has no idea of the kind of terror a man has to fight down to fling himself at one of those big whores when there's nine machine guns on each one, all pointing back at you.

The airspeed needle showed 60 kilometers per hour. Then ninety. Almost there. He reached left again, lifted the throttle quandrant and dropped in the last stop. Here we go boys - balls to the wall and eyes bugging out of your head. He could feel it through the rudder pedals and the stick, straining against the earth, like a great lead footed goose skipping across the water, trying to become a thing of the air again . One hundred and twenty kilometers. Right elbow braced across the knee to keep the grip on the stick steady. He pulled back gently with the control stick. It was a fine plane, it didn't take much. It practically read his mind once it got going. The bucking stopped and calmed as the trolley wheels left the ground. The altitude needle quivered and lifted but just barely. Fifteen feet, twenty feet. Thirty feet off the ground now. He reached down with the left hand, and yanked the lever next to the quandrant by his left knee all the way up and gently, and just a touch forward on the stick to prevent a sudden stall. A weight dropped and the bird gave a excited jump as it began to rise. The trolley had cleared and was dancing gaily across the field. He leveled off the stick and watched the airspeed. One hundred ninety kilometers.

Now.

He pulled the stick all the way back, almost pressing it into his balls. The plane tipped onto its back, and the green summer fields turned into blue sky as he rose on a screaming tower of fire.

He flipped the safety switch at the top of the control stick over with his thumbnail. A pair of green lights lit up the dashboard next to the gunsight. The wing cannons were armed. Hope Zeigler got the ammunition belt tight this time. Jesus Christ. Over there near the horizon were vapor trails in the high atmosphere, stretching across the sky like ghostly fingers, 45 degrees eastward on the dash compass. Now two other columns of fire were rising behind him, those would be Kelbe and Vollman. "Squirrel one, this is squirrel one, squirrel one to ground. Commencing first attack run." In two minutes, no more, he'd flash through the viermots like a shark at over six hundred miles an hour, cannons blazing.




In 1994 I was living in New York and working as a photographer. There was a computer in the office and a lot of down time. Like most people, my early entrance into computers was through games, and there was a game in particular I dearly loved. Published by Lucasfilms, this was a WWII combat flight simulation game called "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" or SWOTL to it's fans. It's pretty primitive by today's standards, but at the time it was state of the art. The fighter planes were based on historically accurate but obscure planes developed by the Germans during the last years of WWII which most people even today have never heard of. There was the Dornier Arrow, a fast fighter with engines on both the nose and the tail. There was the Horten Flying Wing, a huge jet powered boomerang shaped craft that could have become become the Nazi's intercontinental bomber dropping bombs on New York city. Most important of the wonder weapons was the Messerschmitt 262, the first operational jet engined fighter fielded in combat. But of SWOTL's planes, the one which most caught my heart was the squat, elegant Messerschmitt 163 "Komet".

The Komet was the first - and only - rocket powered plane fielded in combat. It went from standing still to the height of Mount Everest is less than five minutes. Fighter pilots flew in unpreassurized cabins at speeds of close to seven hundred miles an hour. It killed more of its own pilots than it did of the enemy.

In 1994 I had a notion I would try to write a book for young readers to bring to life the history of this Indiana Jone's wonder weapon and the men who flew it. So far at least, I've never finished this book, but I found out something about doing research - it gives you an excuse to talk to really interesting people who'd otherwise have nothing to do with you.

I studied all the books I could on the Komet. There weren't many. There were two men in particular I wanted to meet. One was Rudi Opitz, the test pilot who flew the Komet on the island of Peenemunde in its early development. The other was Wolfgang Spate, the commander of the Komet squadrons, and a renowned Jagdwaffe ace. I won't go into a lot of details, but over time I tracked Rudi Opitz to a small town in Connecticut.

Wolfgang Spate had written a book called "Top Secret Bird". Through the publisher I received his mailing address. The old pilots from the war were dying out fast, but he was still around. I couldn't be sure if he spoke English and I didn't speak German. In 1994 the Internet was barely out of the academic world and still very primitive to work with. I learned from my brother about IRC chat groups and found one that specialized in German language. I sent out a message asking for bilingual German and English speakers and got an answer from a kid in Switzerland. I sent him my letter to Spate and he sent it back translated into German. I typed it up and I was off.

Spate wrote me back. It turned out he spoke some English and would be happy to answer my questions. I had a lot of questions and he was an interesting pen pal. Spate had been a high ranking officer in the air fighter corp - the Jagdwaffe - and was one of the elite experten, with over 110 confirmed air kills. He had been placed in command of the experimental Komet squadrons, and over time had brought down four B-17 bombers flying from a rocket plane. Soon our conversation went beyond the technology of the Me163 and to the subject of war itself. I asked him many things, including the larger questions. How did he feel about flying for the bad guys, for the Nazis? When he wrote back, at first he said "I'm a German. Who would I fly for? The British?" Can't argue with that. But he made me realize something else. What you do in a war makes a difference. Members of the Gestapo and the SS are hunted, paranoid fugitives. The world wants vengence over their cruelties. But members of the Luftwaffe and the Kreigsmarine (U Boat submarines) are proud veterans who have a sense of having served their country, not Hitler. They're proud of their warrior deeds and have written their memoirs for all to read. They have nothing to hide. The death camps? There had been rumours of those things. Once he had a dinner with Hermann Goering in the mountains and the subject had come up as a joke but was quickly dropped. "Politics" he wrote to me, "is a nice thing to discuss when you're sitting by the warm fire at home. But men in combat never think of it. Your purpose is not politics but trying to survive, only to survive from one day to the next, and to keep the men next to you alive also until the thing is over. That's all. You don't think beyond the next days operations and trying to come home alive at the end of the day."

What about the old legends of the knights of the air? About chivalry in combat? "No!" he wrote, with great feeling. "Tell your readers war is the worst thing that can ever happen. In the beginning of the air war over Britain, when we were young warriors, Air Marshall Goering came to review a squadron I was in. 'What do you think men', he said 'they are saying we should not let an enemy survive when he has jumped from his plane. Should we shoot him as he comes down by parachute?' To a man we shouted 'No! That is not combat but murder to kill an already defeated foe.' It went against our warrior honor. He seemed pleased with that. But as the war collapsed around us things changed. I was leading a group on the eastern front. In the village two girls were machine gun strafed by an American in a mustang fighter while they were only gathering potatoes in a field. The whole town was in grief for them. The next week we were in a dogfight with a fighter escort and one of my men had to abandon his plane. As he came down by parachute a British fighter killed him. We gathered around the dead body, still in his parachute shrouds. Every man in my group was outraged at the deed. The very next day we were in a dogfight with a group of British spitfires. I shot one to pieces and the pilot jumped. I wheeled my Focke-wulfe around and put a cannon shell through him as he came down by parachute and felt nothing. That is war. You must understand this. Make your young readers understand this. The purpose of war is not chivalry or mercy. The object of combat is to kill, to murder the enemy any way you can. If you fail to kill him out of mercy, he will come back and kill you. He will come back and kill your friend. Never forget that. It is a cruel and monstrous business. You must lose some of your humanity to survive in combat. Never forget that."

There was a point, he said, when they knew they were going to lose the war. The war ended differently for Opitz and Spate, the way they described it to me.

In 1945, when it was clear the Komet would be a failure, Spate was transferred to a new group that was forming. It was stationed in Brandenburg and it had a wonder weapon also. The group was lead by the General of the Jagdwaffe, regarded by air historians as the greatest of all fighter pilots - Adolf Galland. The group was composed almost entirely of Germany's surviving elite aces, almost all of them to a man decorated with the Knights Cross. Between them all, they had accounted for more than a thousand allied planes. They flew the Messerschmitt 262, the world's first operational jet fighter. This was Jagdverband 44, the infamous "Mutineer" squadron. Galland and the cream of the Luftwaffe had been caught in a conspiracy to take over the Luftwaffe and change its direction by any means neccessary - including the death of Goering. Expert pilots were too rare to simply have shot anymore, so they had been assigned to JV44, the pilot's equivelent of a death camp.

Over time, Galland was shot down. Fuel and bullets dried up. The Americans were coming. Spate said he ended the war by simply packing a backpack, pulling up his lederhosen, pointing himself in the direction of home and walking. He walked off the airfield with a song and a whistle, and simply kept walking until days later he reached his family home.

For Rudi Opitz the war ended more dramatically. He had been leading Komet Geschwader 7 on the eastern front against the advancing Russians. One afternoon one of his pilots had cut his flight short and returned to the field complaining his rocket had cut out halfway to position. Opitz had the Me163 refueled and took it up. Sure enough, halfway to operational height the warning alarms came on. He cut the engine and began his glide down with half full tanks.

He realised he would never make the air field. He had to make a dead stick landing where ever he could find one. A farmer's field loomed up as he came down fast. He steered towards the barest patch and hit hard. The rocket plane skidded through the bean vines, smashing through a rail fence that sheared off the wings and came up hard against a stone wall. Opitz threw open the cockpit and jumped. A bewildered farmer was running up to see what the hell was going on, as Opitz ran for his life, waving him away. The plane exploded in a fireball. The blast threw him against the stone wall, breaking most of his bones.

A week later as he was laying in a body cast in a military hospital, an American army Colonel came to his hospital bed with a clipboard and some forms. "I require the formal surrender of your operations group, sir." Opitz, shrugged, or tried to. Why not. He signed the surrender and the man w ent away. The officer returned later with an offer Opitz couldn't refuse. The American Army Air Corps had an interest in his rocket planes. He could come to Ameria and teach them all about them, or he could go to a prison camp while his back ground was investigated for any possibility of war crimes. This was an offer being made to airmen and scientists all over Germany.

Opitz married the pretty nurse who took care of him in the hospital and together they went to America, where he taught the Americans everything he knew about about rocket planes. Elements of the Me163 later became fundamental to the United States X Planes program, which pioneered the way for the space shuttle. Later in life, he became a test pilot for Sikorsky helicopters and started a reknowned national gliding club for young people. He taught gliding to young Americans for decades until the end of his days.



Now -

that's what research looks like, baby.

Language, Location, Customs and Slang!

by Jude Mason

Readers might thing writing erotica or romance is easy. Yup, just come up with a sexy afternoon where hubby and the wife sneak off to the bedroom for some fantasy horseplay (ahem!) and write it all down. Want something longer, easy-peasy, extend the session into a long weekend and voila, you have a novel!

If only it was that easy.

Hell, if it was that easy, anyone reading this, or anywhere in the country, could create their own book and then where would I be? Gasp!

When I really took up writing as a career, it was almost that easy for me. I concentrated my efforts around the area here and wrote about things I was at least familiar with. The stories were fun, the plots thin, and the readership next to zip. Oh, there were a few friends who were kind enough to read the short stories and who commented kindly, but no real readers.

First publisher cleared all that up for me, in one hell of a hurry. I needed a plot. I needed to get into my characters. I needed to travel and do things--or my characters did. Some of it was still something I found relatively easy. I've always been able to fall into my characters, but actually getting a plot moving took a little time. Deciding on what to do, well that took even more time.

First novel, a pony boy epic that I had to research. What the Hell! I adored the characters. I loved the plot. I was gah gah over the genre. But, what would a backwoods Canuck know about pony boy or the training of them, or the gear? Not much.

Online was the answer. I mean it's not a topic you can just bring up with the local Fish and Wildlife Association is it? We might have an equestrian club somewhere in the area, but I truly doubted if they'd be able to help me with this. I actually knew a lot about horses and tack, but converting it to people was a challenge. I also found out that the horse fetish seemed to lean more towards women being the animal, men being the trainer. WTF! Google it, you'll see.

I did luck out and found one couple who would actually discuss it with me. He was her horse, and very proud of himself for it. He was one hell of a brute, but from what his wife/trainer said, easy to handle. *G*

That might not be the kind of research most authors do, but it definitely worked for me and has worked for other books. Not so much digging for the written page, but finding people who are willing to share information.

Years after the pony boy book, I delved into the vampire genre. I wrote two books of a possible trilogy before the publisher folded. The first book took place in the US and was fairly easy to write. I did little research, but the way the book unfolded it wasn't necessary. The second book was a completely different story. I was urged to take my vamps to Britain. Now, I'm of Brit decent, but I've never actually been there, and the place I wanted to take my vamps to, well, it's not a place I'd have visited even if I had traveled there. Sigh.

Yes, I did some Googling. A lot of it. I also have a very good friend who lives fairly close to the place I'd chosen. Truth be told, it was his idea to take my vamps there. Whitby has a rich history of vampires and ghosts. It was the perfect place. An old Abbey, some very cool ruins and a graveyard that'd make the hair raise on the back of your neck and a dark and stormy night... oh my! It was perfect!

I had my friend visit Whitby with his camera twice. I had him and his wife traipsing up the 99 steps and visiting pubs, measuring how big things were, naming streets for me, you name it, I put the poor man through. It was GREAT! I also found a forum of ghost hunters in Whitby who were more than happy to help me if I needed it. I did. I wanted to have my vamps chase along the top of the cliffs and needed to know if it was possible. They were only too happy to help. Seems people love to help out a struggling author. *G*

The book came out and I was ecstatic. It did well, for the short time it was out. The publishing house folded and I was done.

The story here is, if the book you're working on, and it doesn't matter if you're writing fetish, kink, love stories or the greatest epic every told, if you don't know something, you'd better be prepared to find out about it. If you fake it, chances are you'll be fine, but there's always the chance a reader will call you on it. I've heard of that happening to some of the big romance writers. The smart ones admit they messed up and thank whoever confronted them. The ditzes puff out their chest's and refuse to admit they didn't do their research well enough.

More recently, Jenna Byrnes and I worked on a series of changeling books. Both of us were fairly familiar with some of the lore, but not all of it. Add that we used three, then four different animals, and we needed to cover our butts by knowing something about them. We also had to make sure the flora and fauna worked, we didn't use plants from two completely different areas, things like that. Untamed Hearts has been doing incredibly well, our wolves, bears and cougars have gotten rave reviews and so far, touching wood, we haven't been called on anything we included in the books. In fact, they've done so well, our publisher is afer us to add to the series and we're now working on Stallion's Pride.

In one of my upcoming releases, I decided to go native, literally. I took my modern day hunk and dropped him into the local area before the white man's arrival. The research for this was incredible and I found myself easily side tracked and found websites where the language was actually spoken. Course writing it was an interesting challenge, but it was fun too. LOL Finding Home, will come out later this year and I'm really looking forward to seeing if I did my homework well. It's gratifying when you know you did well.

So, for those of you who think romance or erotica author have it easy, think again. We do the same kind of research as any novelist, plus we have to be able to take the readers into the most intimate places with ease. Perhaps the next time someone asks me why I don't try writing something more serious, I'll simply ask them to write a pony boy story, or even a sensual spanking. What do you think? Could you do it?

It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

By Jenna Byrnes

Research can be so tedious. Long hours spent on the computer, checking and double checking facts.

I digress... which I do easily, when I'm researching online. It doesn't take much at all for me to wind up looking at pictures when I'm supposed to be checking facts. Not just those pictures. Lighthouses, inns, prisons, small towns, names -- I love looking through lists of names!

I think back to the olden days when a person had to go to the public library to look something up. I used to digress there, too, wandering up and down the aisles looking for titles that piqued my interest. I stumbled upon Go Ask Alice at the library, and I must have read it a dozen times or more. What that has to do with this post, I have no idea. My mind associates it with the library, I guess. I continue to digress, and yes, I like that word.

Before we had the library, most of my research was done in the set of encyclopedias my parents bought--or should I say, started to buy. The version in my house ended when JFK was president, so I had to guess about anything that happened after 1962-ish. The books were better than nothing, and I remember thinking my family was lucky to even have them.

The internet has made 'research' more accessible to the masses. Of course, you have to know what to believe (If it's on Wiki, it must be true?) And you have to know where to look. Occasionally when I get a little too technical with my keywords, I open up a whole nother world of stuff I might never have known existed. Sometimes, I use that back button on the browser and scoot right out of there. But sometimes, like a train wreck, I just have to look. Before I know it, my writing time is over, and not a lot has been accomplished.

Bottom line, research is not my favorite pastime. I do what I have to do, but try not to get mired down in the muck.

*sigh*

Facts Are Not Enough

By Lisabet Sarai

"Just the facts, ma'am."

Research is an integral part of writing, even in fiction. When you're an author, you've got to get it right. Some readers take insane glee in pointing out gaffes and discrepancies. Have your ancient Roman characters drinking tea, your Elizabethans using the word “clitoris”, your Dom swinging a cane made of bamboo (I've been pointedly informed that bamboo is too brittle for a cane and that rattan is the preferred material), and you may find yourself ridiculed throughout the blogosphere. Even a more forgiving reader can be distracted from your story by some detail that just doesn't fit. Every author's goal is to build a fictional world in which readers can happily lose themselves. To the extent that this world is inconsistent or unbelievable, the author will fail.

If you write only about characters who share your class, ethnicity and culture, or if you set your stories in a non-specific contemporary locale, you may not need to do much research. However, as we've discussed in previous weeks (“In Someone Else's Skin” and “Setting the Scene”), this can get pretty boring. Thinking about my own work, I find that there are four situations that dictate the need for research.

• Geographic or location-oriented research: When I'm setting a story in a specific location (as I usually do), I often research landmarks, place names, or spatial relationships. I don't need to give my readers a map, but I may need one myself in order to write convincingly.
• Cultural research: If my characters are something other than white, western, and well-educated, I need to check on things like vocabulary, slang and tone. I also need to understand the characters' assumptions, the way they look at the world and how that is different from my own perspective.
• Sexual research: There are many sexual practices that I haven't personally tried (though you might not think that from some of my previous posts!). In erotica, it is especially important to research the details of the fetish or sexual subculture you are describing. I've read many BDSM stories that struck me as ridiculous rather than arousing because the practices described were inaccurate and reflected a lack of research on the part of the author.
• Historical research: Writing in a period other than the present probably requires the most intensive research activity. Every aspect of life depends on the historical period, from costumes, food, transportation and economics to language and world view.

Some authors adore doing research. I gather that for some authors, research actually distracts them from the writing process. They get pulled deeper and deeper into the worlds they are exploring, searching for the next level of detail, putting off writing as they gather knowledge that they might not ever use.

Personally I view research as something of a necessary evil. I'll spend the time I need to answer my questions, but I am always eager to get back to the story itself. I have observed that too much research carries risks—the author feels compelled to use all the nifty information she has uncovered, and ultimately, this distracts from the story. Normally, I'll let the story itself drive my research activity. Before I begin, I'll spend some time reading about the period, the people or the practices on which I'm focusing, but then I'll stop, only returning to my search when I have a question.

Geographic research is fairly straightforward, given the resources on the Internet. I also have two shelves full of travel guidebooks which I use extensively. I'm fortunate in that I've traveled quite a lot. Frequently I'll set a story in a city or country that I've visited. Even so, I will often need to check on details. “Prey”, for example, is set in Prague, but I wrote it nearly ten years after I visited that wondrous city. I spent quite a lot of time poring over maps and trying to reconcile them with my recollections. One of my current works-in-progress, Necessary Madness, takes place in Worcester, Massachusetts and its environs. I lived in central Massachusetts for more than twenty years, but I still find that I need to jog my memory. Of course, if a tale is set somewhere that I've never visited, like Guatemala (Serpent's Kiss) or Assam, India (Monsoon Fever), I have to rely entirely on external information, supplemented by analogy with places I have been.

Cultural research is particularly tough for me. Not foreign cultures—if I've visited a place, I usually have at least a rudimentary sense of the people and how they communicate. But in capturing the subtleties of other western subcultures, I have problems. The American south, for instance, has a particular flavor of discourse. Likewise the American west. I've tried to write criminals and mafia and stuttered badly. One difficulty is the fact that you can't search directly for the kind of cultural markers that make a character seem genuine. The best way to pick them up is to actually meet an individual from that culture. The second best method is to read other people's work featuring characters from the same subculture.

Sexual research is always fun, and not too much of problem. The 'Net overflows with didactic material on various fetishes as well as content that can serve as exemplars. My story “Body Electric”, in the Yes, Sir anthology, features electric play, which I've never personally experienced. I had no trouble finding information on electric toys and the effects that they produce. Even my BDSM critic (the one who chided me over the bamboo cane) did not find fault with the result!

Historical research, of course, can go on forever. About a third of my second novel Incognito takes place in Victorian Boston. The physical environment was fairly easy; I had lived in Beacon Hill, which actually hasn't changed much since that period. However, I spent considerable time, effort and money researching costumes (Victorian clothing was extremely complex, with lots of special vocabulary), transportation, and the differences between social classes. I also read up on Victorian erotica, which was the subject of my heroine Miranda's dissertation, using Steven Marcus' encyclopedic though annoying tome The Other Victorians.

Even a historical short story requires an inordinate amount of work. “Shortest Night”, set in Shakespeare's London, took me nearly twice as long to write as a normal story, because I was working so hard to be true to the period. After all that effort, my editor still picked up a variety of words that were too modern for Elizabethan times. (I was extremely impressed.)

It's tough to get the facts right. Unfortunately, even if you do, that may not be enough. To accomplish the objective of creating a compelling, believable fictional world, an author needs more than a raft of detail. It's critical to have what I can only call a “feel” for that world—an intuitive sense of how it works and how its denizens think, feel and behave.

It's never possible to answer every research question. Sometimes I have to rely on imagination. But this only works if I can understand the people and places I am trying to portray, at a gut level. How do you acquire this sort of intuition? You won't find it on Google. For me, building a rich, nuanced picture of the world where I'm setting my story requires more personal experience. Reading original sources, including fiction, from a period can help. Visiting a museum or the actual site is a possibility. Ultimately, though, I find the process a bit mysterious.

Sometimes no amount of research will help. Several years ago I toured the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. During the twelfth century, the city of Angkor had more than a million inhabitants. It was the largest settlement in the world. I was fascinated by the civilization that had built such impressive monuments, only to disintegrate back into a village culture, and I had an idea for a time-slip erotic romance set partially during that period.

I set about reading everything I could find about Cambodia and Angkor. I spent lots of money on books. I went to museums. I scoured the Web. Somehow, the intuitive sense of those people eluded me. I just couldn't picture them, understand who they were and how they thought. I could look up all the historical details in the many books I bought, but my imagination remained bone dry. I've shelved the project for the moment, hoping that at some point I'll have some experience that triggers the sort of comprehension and empathy that I need to be able to proceed.

Research the facts. That's the starting point, sure. But developing a sense of your world, to the point where you can trust your guesses—that's far more difficult. Ultimately, it's a kind of magic. Like creating stories in the first place.