Sometimes, you need to be willing to put yourself on an FBI watchlist for the sake of realistic fiction. You never know what mundane scene you’ll be trundling through when you realize you have no idea what your character’s sweater is made of or how soon they’re going to die from a head injury.
It’s that time of month again, kids. What are your most interesting (or most suspect) searches for the sake of writing? Here are some of mine.
“facts about brandy”
“how do lizards see color”
“dionne quintuplets”
“laplace’s demon”
“what are bus seat cushions made of”
“muslim profiling in andalusia”
“define applejack”
“define amberjack”
“define bluejack”
“what kind of flowers do you give an actress”
“blood tears”
(Had no idea there were this many kinds of “jack.” One type of alcohol and two types of fish. Huh. No word on the bus cushions.)
They’re made out of CHMR (Combustion Modified High Resilient) polyurethane foam. It’s requirement for mass transit (at least in the US) for safety reasons.
Honestly I google weirder things for work than writing. Writing, it’s like I’m googling kinds of trees and stuff about geography. At work I occasionally google things about shipping human body parts internationally.
*CMHR
God bless. That was exactly what I needed to know. I wish you all the best shipping body parts between nations. One of my greatest Internet adventures so far was determining if a fantasy fertility sect could make clay our of breast milk. The answer is yes (with limitations), but then I had to look up how to MAKE breast milk clay and fell down an entire rabbit hole of breast milk jewelry lines.
It’s a story about pirates. And yet online advertisements now all think I’m a proud babymomma. Go figure.
That is a craft I have never heard of. Yikes.
Also, do you have that published anywhere or is it WIP? or did you end up going a totally different direction?
WIP. It’s “Lost and Found,” fantasy-magical realism, about 200,000 words, which I am editing as we speak. I had to leave my very broken computer in storage while I was away, but I swiped the information off of it just yesterday. I am very, VERY happy to return to surgery on my first full child.
“The clay made in Eva’s temples was unique from all others. It was mixed only from very particular kinds of soil, harvested in quarries of the blessed and sacred, which only the Acolytes purported to know. The Acolytes likewise were highly secretive about the technique behind the forming of their milk-based clay, which honored the fertility of their Maiden.”
The hope is to have it published in the near future!
Happy editing! I’ll keep an eye out for updates, that sounds pretty interesting.
Mine was ‘can you made a sword from human blood’ for a short story. Turns out you can, but it’d take a lot of blood and some high tech equipment to remove the iron from it. Never did finish the story, but the research was interesting 🙂
Goodness. I am all over that, a sword made of human blood sounds like a fantastically ominous fictional weapon! Thank you for sharing.
“What does it feel like to be whipped?” was one of my recent searches.
Oof. That’s certainly exciting. That was for “My Life in Darkness,” wasn’t it?
Yes.