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Posts Tagged ‘Research’

Writing A Sequel

We never realized how much harder it is to write a sequel. When you’re writing book 1, you can make things up as you go, but when you get to book 2, you have to make sure you don’t contradict anything from book 1, tell the story for book 2, and also drop hints and pieces for book 3. So many moving parts! Thankfully we have huge spreadsheets full of information so we don’t have to rely on just our feeble memories. And there’s always the search function in Scrivener.

We also use the spreadsheets for the layouts of buildings/apartments/offices, so we can visualize what our characters are doing. Each new setting needs a new diagram.

We have a page for forum characters, which we’ve found very useful. If we need a new character for a short story or Book 2, we have a pool of ready-made people to choose from. (We had a great time creating over one hundred forum characters in the first place.)

Perhaps the richest spreadsheet is the links page. It’s where we keep links from our internet explorations. Here’s an interesting one on how to disappear completely: http://www.wikihow.com/Disappear-Completely.

 

Hello Boston!

Hey everyone. Kyros here. I’m in Boston for the next week doing research for book 2, Running to the Past. Orion and I figured that since neither of us had ever been to Boston before, one of us should visit and find out a little more about the city. Especially since James and Diana are going to be spending some time here in book 2.

I’m staying in an AirBnB in the South Boston neighborhood (Go Southie!). This is a great neighborhood and the people I’ve met have all been really friendly. I had lunch at a local restaurant/bar and casually mentioned to the waitress that I was doing research for a book about some people from Southie. As soon as I finished eating she dragged me over to a table of local women who were having lunch, introduced me and told me to sit down. I learned more in that one afternoon about the neighborhood, the people, and the culture of that area than I have in the rest of my trip combined. Yay for fortuitous connections! I’ve got lots of notes. Can’t wait to put them into the book.

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:

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