A Glimpse Into Our World.
We’re hard at work on Book 2: Running to the Past. But we thought we’d share a little behind the scenes of what it takes to write a book like Dreaming of Xeres.
First, you would be amazed at the research we did during the writing of the book! Sometimes we’d spend days researching (aka: down the rabbit hole!) before we had all the pieces we needed for a scene or chapter. Some of the areas we researched were:
- Police arrest procedures, uniforms, stations and buildings of the Santa Clara and San Francisco, CA Police Departments.
- Travel times around the San Francisco bay area, as well as methods of transport. We found pictures of BART cars and routes, then situated various locations along its path.
- Various hotel and room layouts in Seattle, Las Vegas, and Santa Clara, CA.
- Restaurants in various cities. We didn’t use any one place, as is, but changed some things to make each our own.
- Buildings styles. We even created detailed floor plans for the characters’ apartments and offices.
- Past life regressions and hypnotherapy in general. We probably spent the most time looking into the different methods and styles for both. Who knew there were even sample sessions on YouTube?
- San Francisco waterfront, looking for a place for a character to put a houseboat, as well as the surrounding neighborhood and ambiance.
- Astronomical websites for information about other planets.
- Website creation. Lots of time was spent researching and building both this website and the (now defunct) Reincarnation Beyond Earth Forum to get them up and running.
- Wine country in California and bicycle tours.
- Handicapped accessibility issues.
- Lots of research in the /reincarnation subreddit forum.
- Online name generators. We had a lot of fun on various name lists. Here’s a fun link: http://www.pompousnames.com/
And this is just what we researched to write the book. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of what all we had to research to be able to publish the book. But that’s a post for another day….