So I was going through the editorial
comments for The Biker’s Wench this week (which is why I’m
starting this sentence with a preposition, of course – and also why
I’m leaving it there), and my editor had commented that it seems odd for
my heroine to take a bus all the way to Salt Lake City, UT from Reno,
NV when her final destination (when she starts, at least) is Las
Vegas. Editor Carol gets out her trusty map and sees there’s a
highway running straight from Reno to Vegas that would make much more
sense. And she’s absolutely right – it would make far more sense
to take the more direct route through Nevada.

Except for one minor little detail.
There are no buses traveling that lonely stretch of Hwy 95, or not
that I could find, looking at the online bus schedules for the major
Greyhound bus line. In order to ride Greyhound from Reno to Nevada,
you have to go all the way over to Salt Lake City between the
two, according to their web site. I was kind of amazed, really, and
as a nod to my readers who don’t live in Nevada and might scoff at
the fact, I even have my heroine make note of how odd it is.

Why did I look that up? Because I knew
that somewhere in Nevada, a reader might read my book and go, “wait,
does the bus even go that way?” and I wanted that rather large and central
detail to be realistic so the setting of that portion of the book
wouldn’t get in the way.

Now little details, I’m fine with
just making up. In Salt Lake City, there’s a bus depot (we’ve
established that, I think). I didn’t look at pictures of said
depot, but I needed a planter there that sits on top of a raised
stone platform. So I put one there, for my personal storytelling use.
Will readers who live in Salt Lake frown and think, “I don’t
remember that being in front of the bus depot…”? Absolutely. But
for some reason, it doesn’t bother me as much to add/inject objects
like that as it suits my purposes, whereas the bus route needed to be
true in my mind.

One person who reviewed Tempest
caught few things I should have researched better – or
really, just known better, logically. There are a couple of
procedural items regarding how my hero handled things that when
pointed out by the reviewer, I smacked my head with my palm and thought “duh!”
Had I bothered to work through it from a law enforcement/bodyguard
point of view, it would have been very easy to fix. I try not to make
those mistakes often, to be sure, and perhaps if I’d researched FBI procedure a bit, I would have done better there. Write and learn…

For the most part though, I try to
write in a way that I don’t really need a lot of research. It’s
not that I mind research, necessarily, I just would rather not spend
a lot of time on it. The research I needed to do for TBW took all of
about an hour (because after researching bus routes, I had to
research regional FBI office locations (this is why writers are
worried about being on watch lists, people). If I’m writing and
write myself into a spot that might require more extensive research,
I’ll admit, I’ll often rewrite it to something less detailed to
avoid the research. Because I’m lazy like that, and I write
fiction, dammit.

Incidentally, that’s a big part of why I “created” Fantasy Ranch out in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to have to research any particular city or place in great detail, I just wrote my own instead. 

How do you feel about research? How
much time on average do you spend researching a book? Do you take
“artistic license” with things if needed, or do you try to stay
true to “real life” (assuming you’re not writing fantasy or
your own fictional setting)?

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