Interesting/Unusual/Boring/Horrible/Other Research

AlexH

AlexH

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I thought it might be fun to have an accompanying thread to the work in progress one. Not that my research has been fun today, but we could learn new things from such a thread too.

"What does an infected wound smell like?" to start with. I'll leave that one.

Also today, volcano-induced deaths, which I came across when looking into the effects of breathing in volcanic ash (bleeding from the eyes - keep a particulate mask to hand if you're in an active area!):

"there [sic] science behind volcanically induced fatalities are weirdly fascinating. If you fall into a lava flow, you don’t just sink in – you slowly turn into a piece of exploding leather. Pyroclastic flows don’t just scorch you; they can cause your organs to explode. If you fall into a geothermal hot spring in certain parts of the world, you dissolve like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Lava bombs are like cannonballs, but they’re molten."
Source: This Is What Happens When You Breathe In Volcanic Ash

I think I have another volcano story after that...
 
I once got so involved with research into the use and forging of swords, ( the latter in theory lol) that I ended up owning these two beauties.
new swords 2004 015.jpg
 
@AlexH - thanks for that - a lot - genuinely. Totally didn't know it, and funnily enough it was something I meant to look up long ago out of pure curiosity.
@Susan Boulton - adore those swords. For a long time I had the ambition to own a swept hilt rapier and didn't have the budget or the wall space. Funnily enough, for this thread, I just went to look for pictures of what I meant, found them and learnt I could have a swept hilt rapier in scabbard for just under £100. English Swept Hilt Rapier & Scabbard - S5779. Umm. I think that ambition might be back again.....
 
Where do I start? All of it. Everything. From the route the Three Kings may’ve taken, to the Cistercian and Benedictine monks, ergot poisoning, the Underground Railroad, Isambard K Brunel, architecture names and windows. Basically it’s killing my mojo and I’ve strayed so far from the initial path I might as well restart.

Research on current day life is something I enjoy and doesn’t affect my writing creativity. Historical stuff has me unable to move for fear of mistakes.

Horrendous. But I don’t want to write anything else.

pH
 
Phyrebrat said:
Where do I start? All of it. Everything. From the route the Three Kings may’ve taken, to the Cistercian and Benedictine monks, ergot poisoning, the Underground Railroad, Isambard K Brunel, architecture names and windows. Basically it’s killing my mojo and I’ve strayed so far from the initial path I might as well restart.
Click to expand...
That sounded interesting until the last sentence! Is there some sort of middle-ground? How true does historical fiction have to be? This came first in a Google: How true should historical fiction be?

It is fiction after all, hence "based on" etc. Apologies if you've had this discussion elsewhere on the forum.
 
AlexH said:
That sounded interesting until the last sentence! Is there some sort of middle-ground? How true does historical fiction have to be? This came first in a Google: How true should historical fiction be?

It is fiction after all, hence "based on" etc. Apologies if you've had this discussion elsewhere on the forum.
Click to expand...

Well that’s the thing; it’s supernatural horror. A chronicle of the atrocities that were committed on an ancient burial site throughout history and how they have a cascade effect.

My history super-genius highlights faults in logic everytime they read it and so I’m constantly deleting and re-arranging. In the end I figured it’d be best to ‘just write it’ and deal with all that later but it’s 130k and just a mess. And a drag.

I’m now seriously considering reducing them to interludes of about 2k in omni as I’ve realised that horror works much better now in omni. I can’t, for example, write of things the POV characters can’t see. As in things happening behind be them or Point-Off-view.

ETA: nice link; thanks Alex!

pH
 
I started researching the Texas-Comanche War to sketch out a bit of background for a weird western short, which I mentioned in the what you're working on thread.

There's a ton of great story fodder in that conflict and those surrounding it. The Red Wedding-esque treachery of the Council House Fight. The massive Great Raid of 1840, which razed the second largest port in the Republic of Texas. Almost legendary figures like Iron Jacket (named for the coat of Spanish mail that protected him from small caliber bullets and arrows). The fact that the Comanche turned back the Spanish, crippled settlement of Mexico's northern frontier, and caused problems for Texas and the US until the coming of repeating firearms.

With all that material, I'm thinking of doing a fantasy novel inspired by the conflict. A nice departure from typical fantasy settings and my own work.

Oh, I also learned the Tonkawa--long time allies of Texas and the US--were cannibals. When the aforementioned Iron Jacket finally died in battle at Little Robe Creek, the Tonkawa warriors with the Texans ate him. Kinda surreal, since I spent a lot of time growing up not far from a town named after them.
 
I've visited genocide sites in the past while travelling in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Poland, but didn't have my own story in mind at that time. I have an idea for a story set a hundred years after such an atrocity, on an alien-world, that links back to the time of a genocide. I went to a lecture today by Caroline Sturdy Colls, Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigator. An hour wasn't long enough for the subject really, but this quote stood out as something to aspire to:

“I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere." - Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor.

In Poland some are trying to pass a law that would make it illegal to accuse Poles of complicity in the Holocaust.

The lecture helped my fledging story too - thanks to modern technology, clues and mass graves have been found at sites that were previously considered completely absent of evidence.
 
As my world is basically the Afterlife with lots of ghosties and ghoulies and all sorts of supernatural creatures and spooky phenomena linked to hauntings, death etc, I routinely spook myself out while researching all sorts of paranormal cases.

Still probably less scary than subjects researched by @Phyrebrat ?
 
AlexH said:
I've visited genocide sites in the past while travelling in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Poland, but didn't have my own story in mind at that time.
Click to expand...

A friend at uni did a similar thing on a regular basis, to the extent that she called herself a "genocide junkie". I immediately adopted that as the name for the band I was in at fhe time. The German guitarist hated it.

On a more serious note, I like the statement by former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who wrote in regard to genocide and war crimes, "In a world where monsters exist, we must struggle to be human." (not exact quote but pretty close, I think)
 
The kind-of seasonal nature of my job means that the summer is the quiet period when I do all the big content work for the year ahead (Now is the summer of writing content, I say ;)). The thing that becomes my big project is the research and writing of the 365 page On This Day calendar — it ultimately ends up taking so long because I get sucked into so much history and at the end of each day it’s genuinely like coming out of a historical fog. Really enjoy working on it.

Other bits that are mariginally interesting are writing about the Flying Scotsman, the Amazing Planet facts that I do, some of the animal stuff I write for WWF and I even get to be a bit creative for the National Trust, while chatting on about their sites and work.

In terms of my own personal writing, the only thing I’ve been researching lately is information about retirement. However, back in the day when I was doing my Masters degree, we had an entire module on research and we had to put forth an idea based entirely on something we’d found through research — I did about the Fox Sisters, who basically started the whole spiritualism movement and communicating with the dead through knocking, only it eventually turned out they’d faked the whole thing by popping their toe joints (some of the research I did during this was watching people doing this on YouTube!) For my Masters dissertation, I wrote a film that was loosely based on the famous Enfield poltergeist incident in the 1970s. I still often read the book containing the account of the whole thing, I find it endlessly fascinating.
 
I recently had to research flesh eating fungi. That was nasty.

I was researching swords for my urban fantasy series and ended up doing longsword lessons for a year...

I watched a ton of YouTube videos on flash floods in canyons and white water rafting for a novel once. The rafting videos were lovely.
Edit: I have been ww farting a couple of times, but wanted videos set on a specific stretch of a specific river.
 
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