Bittercon: Research--Finding the Hard-to-Find Details

[pameladlloyd]

This panel is about researching those little details that will make your story's setting feel real. Particularly research for a time and place that's not easy to find specifics about online or in one's local library.

This idea was sparked by my difficulties in finding information about 17th century Wales that will distinguish it from England during the same time period. Also by the experience of having my first published story, set in modern-day Chicago or a facsimile thereof, reviewed critically for its failure in this regard. (Not that it would actually have been difficult to research, but I got carried away and sent it out without doing the research that would have made that one telling detail work. Mea culpa.)

Experts, historians, librarians, and anyone else with awesome superpowers of research will be served virtual chocolate and very real accolades.

The official start time for this panel is Friday, but since we're online please feel free to drop in whenever you want to.

Comments

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

I think the strangest source I used was when I was trying to determine the historical accuracy of a particular rose being planted in England at a particular time. I found a fantastic website that listed hundreds of different varieties of roses, had pictures, and gave facts like where it was originally grown and what years it came to certain places (sometimes).

And I was SMART, and put a link to it in a place where I will almost always have access provided that LJ doesn't blow up):

http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/main.html

So in case anyone else needs to know about roses . . . have at it.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Cool link. Thank you.

I used to have a bunch of botany links, for trees mostly, and herbs, but they got lost when all my links got corrupted a while back (both IE and Firefox files were corrupted), and then again when I had computer problems; luckily, I'd downloaded a bunch of information, which I can use (with a bit of effort) to rediscover many of these links. A couple of links I've still got are Dendrology at Virginia Tech (http://www.cnr.vt.edu/DENDRO/dendrology/main.htm) and Trees for Life - Restoring the Caledonian Forest (http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/).