Thursday, January 26, 2012

{the dream} Writing the Book

I just emailed a stranger to ask him about an old landmark in San Francisco, which he visited as a boy in the 1930's, and told him I was doing some research because I am writing a novel.

I actually wrote that, to a stranger. So now its not just you who knows. Strangers know. Or at least one will, when he opens his email. If it didn't go into his spam folder.

Actually, if you like history and humor, you should take a look at his website. He is an 89 year old gentleman and writes about life in the 20's and 30's--and he's pretty funny. I'm really hoping he writes me back.

Its been kind of funny, the things I've looked up researching just random things for this book--its not going to be a great work of historical fiction or anything, but I find that I am writing things a little out of my scope of knowledge. And I want to be right if I can, because someone somewhere with a much broader scope of knowledge might pick it up, and I don't want them to toss it aside because I use a poor metaphor or give some bad information. Here are just a few of the things I've looked up, book related:

caves breathing (like this one in Australia)
English cucumber tea sandwich recipe (like this one)
How to type French accents on a Mac (keyboard shortcuts)
the top baby names of 1951 (here are the top 100, if you're wondering)
Betsy-Tacy books (they have their own society!)

So, can you guess what its about?

Actually, most of these are not at all related to the plot--they are the background stuff, but I feel like a lot of times that is what makes a book feel real. It has been pretty fun, actually, learning new things like this. Sort of at random. I haven't focused on learning a lot of non-parenting/marriage/household new things since I've been out of school & not formally working.

And now that I've looked through my google search history, I'm a little disturbed by how much of my life gets typed in to google. Hmm...