Reasonable Research

I lead a very adventurous life. No, I’m not an Olympian or a soldier. I’m an actor with a bad case of wanderlust, a willing husband, and a love of writing. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job that allows me to travel for work all the time. I’ve spent three summers in Alaska, toured the country on a bus, and right now, I’m performing down in Southwest Florida.

Being able to travel has always been a huge source of inspiration for me. My husband and I managed to run away to Thailand for a few weeks in January, and I came back bursting with so many ideas, I now have the rest of my writing year planned out. But what do you do when beautiful scenery meets an epic idea and the details need to be perfect? Research.

For The Tethering series, the research I did was mostly travel times from one place to another, geography and topography of specific locations, including a nice (and slightly brutal) hike to the top of a mountain, and looking through a lot of legends of magical creatures. Perhaps a little extreme with the hiking through the wilderness, but standard research.

For the ballet novella I released last Christmas, I was able to draw upon the years I spent in pointe shoes and leotards as well as my experience as a professional music theatre performer. And the gaps I needed to fill I pulled from a college classmate who is now a professional ballet dancer.

But the new project, the one that complicates it all, is a little more difficult. I needed to learn about plants, and greenhouses, and conservation, and a dozen other things. Not that I want to describe to my readers exactly how to pollinate plants in a closed environment, but it’s little details like that that solidify world building.

I’ve been to atriums, bio domes, and even the greenhouses of Disney’s Epcot, trying to make sure that the smell is right and the light feels right in the book. And I’ve loved all of it. I will never be a botanist or an architect, and I’ll probably never create my own underground irrigation system. But getting to learn the details of creating suitable environments for exotic plants is so cool! And now I really want to build a vertigrower and grow plants without soil just because it’s possible.

Maybe somewhere deep down I already knew that sustainable living within a bio dome was a fascinating subject and that’s why the story came out. Maybe greenhouses are just super cool. But having the opportunity to research a new field or world is one of the greatest things about being an author. Even if it’s just a fantasy, I can create a greenhouse for my characters to live in. And I have a new obsession that may eventually turn edible-hobby to boot!

The Christmas Crunch

It’s that time of year. Holiday lights are hanging, Christmas trees are being decorated, and in the bustle of the season all I want is to sit down and read a good book. Something to give me the warm, fuzzy feelings of Christmas.

When I was growing up, my mother would give me a book for Christmas every year. And once we had finished opening our presents on Christmas morning, I would curl up in the corner with my new book. Sometimes I would finish it that day. Sometimes it would take me until New Year’s, but it was one of my favorite parts of Christmas break: sitting down for hours and reading a story that I wanted to read.

I didn’t realize until much later that once I hit about fifteen the books my mother was giving me were actually sweet adult romances. Nothing naughty in them, of course, but the characters were adults. This month my very first Christmas story was published, and it is a sweet adult romance, built to give all the warm fuzzy Christmas feeling with a little bit of daring humor thrown in. With ballet and taxidermy how can you go wrong?

I’m usually a YA author, but for Christmas I was automatically attracted to writing about adult characters. So I started doing a little research, and there are, in fact, a good group of YA Christmas stories available. And not even like Harry Potter I-mention-Christmas-for-a-few-chapters. These are real Christmas stories.

But I’d never heard of any of them.

I suppose that’s one of the problems with writing for a specific season. Your window of opportunity to publicize and sell your book is remarkably short, so finding traction to create a huge reader base would require a miracle of Lifetime Original Movie proportions. Especially in YA where being new and hot feels even more important than in adult romance.

I know by now you’re probably thinking that my point is clearly that anyone who writes a Christmas story is insane and should never be published. But it’s not. Expectations need to be tempered, and promotions need to be done with even more intensity than a normal project. But I think it’s worth it. To be the author that put someone in the holiday mood, who gave a reader that warm and cozy feeling while they curled up with your characters, is worth the stress of releasing during the holiday season.

And who knows? You might just become a Christmas tradition.

So tell me, what’s your favorite Christmas story?