I'm absolutely chuffed to bits to be able to welcome Jane Lovering to Books with Bunny today. I read and enjoyed Hubble Bubble a few years ago, and since then I've had the pleasure of talking to her via twitter and am we're both members of the Yorkshire Terriers chapter of the Romantic Novelists' Association too. She's great fun, so I highly recommend following her on twitter @janelovering. Jane's very kindly written a guest post today about how she researches her novels.
Over to you, Jane...
People often ask me how I
research my books.
I have no idea why they
do this, since the most cursory glance at me should tell them that I am the
person least designed to do research. The fact that I quite often forget to put
on my trousers should be a bit of a clue, and a person who can’t even dress
themselves satisfactorily is hardly one that should be allowed in the vicinity
of careful, detailed exploration of plot points, unless chocolate is
involved. Even travelling is dubious, I
can get lost within a five mile radius of my own home, and once (this was quite
a while ago) I managed to lose an entire
supermarket. Which is why I write books set in and around the North
Yorkshire Moors. They are big,
impossible to lose, and, since they are practically right outside my door, hard
for me to get lost in.
The moors are also prone
to weather. Not just ‘weather’, like you
get in towns and cities, where it might be a bit damp or a bit chilly… no. Up there the temperature can be five degrees
less than in town, the wind gets inside your clothes and commits various acts
of indecency, and when it rains it comes at you from all directions at once. Up
on the moors the weather really means it.
So, you have setting and atmosphere fitted as standard, which is helpful
because it only leaves me with characters and plot to worry about.
For How
I Wonder What You Are, I also had to delve a little bit into the world of
the astrophysicist. Now, I’m not a huge
fan of Brian Cox, the man is way too smiley for it to be natural, but I do work
in a school with a physics department, and we did happen to have a tame
astrophysicist lounging around while I was writing, so at least I can be sure
that those bits of the book are accurate. Not sure if it really counts as
‘research’ when you are sitting and eating cake in the Science Office, but it
was quite useful, plus a chance to eat cake, which is an underrated part of
research, if you ask me.
Which really only leaves
us with plot research, and, while I don’t mind going outside and/or eating cake
in the interests of accuracy, I draw the line at lying naked on the moors (as
Phinn is when Molly finds him) or throwing myself into rivers in spate. I mean,
I don’t mind suffering for my art, but only when the suffering takes the form
of having to eat carrot cake because they’ve run out of coffee and walnut. So
the painful bits of my book are made up. So, sadly, are the glamorous bits,
because nobody is prepared to fund me a lavish lifestyle, not even for a little
while, even in the interests of research.
Spoilsports.
Book blurb:
“Maybe he wasn’t here
because of the lights – maybe they were here because of him …”
It’s been over
eighteen months since Molly Gilchrist has had a man (as her best friend, Caro,
is so fond of reminding her) so when she as good as stumbles upon one on the
moors one bitterly cold morning, it seems like the Universe is having a laugh
at her expense.
But Phinn Baxter
(that’s Doctor Phinneas Baxter) is no common drunkard, as Molly is
soon to discover; with a PhD in astrophysics and a tortured past that is a
match for Molly’s own disastrous love life.
Finding mysterious
men on the moors isn’t the weirdest thing Molly has to contend with, however.
There’s also those strange lights she keeps seeing in the sky. The ones she’s
only started seeing since meeting Phinn …
Buying Links:
All research should come with cake attached. There should be a law or something.
ReplyDeleteYou made me laugh as always! I had to smile at the part about not taking research too far as my mother-in-law read one of my books where the heroine goes on a jet ski and genuinely thought I must have done that myself at some point because it sounded real. One look at me should tell anyone that's an impossibility and I told her that's why it's called fiction :) Angela Britnell
ReplyDelete