Gah! You blasted Brits with your blasted alternate spellings of words! I just spent 10 minutes trying to find a book with the word aluminum in it, then I realized it was spelled by the Brit spelling, with aluminIum! Gah.

All done now.

HA! Connie, I offer Barenaked Ladies (Canadian, not British):

Aluminum to me, aluminium to some
You can shine like silver all you want, but you're just aluminum....

Hey, all, Spent the morning finding Phoenix history in order to be my town's Barry Levinson...hope I can use this stuff. And I need to call the detective again...what should I tell him? I think I blew the message last time. I got thrown by all the "Let me transfer you..."

erika, explain what you're writing about, tell them you don't want to do the department any possible disservice by messing up the terminology. If they offer you a shot at coming down and watching, and you can actually take them up on it, do it. That's the best way ever to get the flavour.

I am one happy puppy, speaking of research. Courtesy of the Royal Engineers bomb disposal unit website? I now have the basis for the prologue of "Cruel Sister", at least the tricky bit: 1948 is the year to use. The characters in question would be members of the Bomb Disposal Units (BDU), Royal Engineers, (RE). HQ was in Ashley Gardens, in Victoria; they would have been members of Company 21, stationed in London.

Damn, that cuts my work down to tiny little bites.

All this research talk is making me very, very happy for some reason. I love it when I research something and find a solution to a plot problem that I didn't even know I had, if that makes any sense.

I just had to look up some dates re: Napoleon and Waterloo just to appease the nitpicker in my head regarding a throw-away line in a fic. I'd be disturbed with myself if I weren't so pleased.

Oh, this is only half the issue - the biggie is the difficulty my brain seems to be throwing at me, in terms of visualising Isle of Dogs. But this was niggling, and it had to be done, and now I can really buckle in and get the setting sorted out in my head.

Such a nice thing, with names and commanding officers and places and details. And if you go to the site, and click on any of the photos, some amazing stuff comes up.

My habit is to do just enough research to start writing and then sail in, while simultaneously doing more research as I go along. I'm too impatient to get started. It does, however, make for more rewrites as I discover that assumptions I've made are wrong. I had to change Sebastian's regiment and backstory when I discovered that none of the cavalry regiments who were at Corunna went back to the Peninsula anytime soon. And after I was so proud of my research on how a certain number of enlisted men's wives per regiment were selected by lot to accompany the regiment to war, I was brought up short and had to discard a minor secondary character I was rather fond of upon discovering that General Craufurd wouldn't let any wives accompany the Light Brigade (95th & two other infantry regiments, either the 42nd & 53rd or the 43rd and 52nd, and if I can ever remember which without looking at one of my sources, I'll be amazed).

The thing is, I keep stumbling upon this stuff by accident. I hope I don't make any horrid glaring errors just from not managing to stumble upon something critical until an outraged reader brings it to my attention.

Susan, if you do, you can correct for future printings. No real big; it happens all the time.

I can't sail right into the book this time; the prologue is too specific in its requirements. And I'm organic enough as a writer that I simply can't and won't do something like "On the fourteenth of September, (insert ranks here) Jameson and Willits drove their (insert proper name of equipment lorry here) down (insert name of street name here)."

Susan, insent.

I love research. I've been doing research on Gilded Age Manhattan and the phenomenon of penniless British nobility marrying American heiresses near the turn of the century for years, and the book I have in mind is one I probably won't write for years, if ever. But then, the reason I had the idea for the story in the first place is because that era fascinates me, so it's more of an excuse to do the research, if that makes any sense.