How much of writing is research?
I've been trying to get my supplemental materials in order for my "new" writing project, which is really me picking up a writing project that I set aside to finish writing Quantum Harry, which is now with two alpha readers. (If you're interested in joining them, let me know.)
I've been mentally changing a lot about the world-building since I stopped actively working on the project, so this has meant a fair amount of revamping my world's "bible"--a series of files with vocabulary, backstory, character profiles, family trees, schedules, etc. To flesh out some parts of the world, lately I've been researching, in no particular order:
- Phoenixville, PA
- Amtrak routes to West Virginia
- Cornish Hurling
- "Ba" (Orkney)
- Uppies and Doonies
- Harpastum
- Petanque
I've also been using Google Translate a lot to find terminology I like for various things. For instance, I put in a very simple word and found a slight similarity between the Welsh and Esperanto translations; after I combined them to create a new word, I asked Google Translate to identify the language, and it decided that it was Finnish! Even better, the meaning of the Finnish word isn't the original word I was translating, but an adjective that, to my mind, fairly describes the activity named by the new word. Win!
What this project ultimately means is that I can use a number of plot elements from my HP fics (the PS series) in these books (the planning is for four total) but with a lot of twists, to make it less likely that people can predict what will happen just by reading the fics. Hardly a case of filing off serial numbers. There are many things that I created for the fics that never showed up in the HP books (and some that did, under different names, after I wrote about them) and I don't want to give up on utilizing those in writing that I could potentially get published, but there are also many things that, though they weren't in the canon books, feel just too tightly bound to the HP world, so I probably won't be using anything that strikes me that way.
Back to work...
I've been mentally changing a lot about the world-building since I stopped actively working on the project, so this has meant a fair amount of revamping my world's "bible"--a series of files with vocabulary, backstory, character profiles, family trees, schedules, etc. To flesh out some parts of the world, lately I've been researching, in no particular order:
- Phoenixville, PA
- Amtrak routes to West Virginia
- Cornish Hurling
- "Ba" (Orkney)
- Uppies and Doonies
- Harpastum
- Petanque
I've also been using Google Translate a lot to find terminology I like for various things. For instance, I put in a very simple word and found a slight similarity between the Welsh and Esperanto translations; after I combined them to create a new word, I asked Google Translate to identify the language, and it decided that it was Finnish! Even better, the meaning of the Finnish word isn't the original word I was translating, but an adjective that, to my mind, fairly describes the activity named by the new word. Win!
What this project ultimately means is that I can use a number of plot elements from my HP fics (the PS series) in these books (the planning is for four total) but with a lot of twists, to make it less likely that people can predict what will happen just by reading the fics. Hardly a case of filing off serial numbers. There are many things that I created for the fics that never showed up in the HP books (and some that did, under different names, after I wrote about them) and I don't want to give up on utilizing those in writing that I could potentially get published, but there are also many things that, though they weren't in the canon books, feel just too tightly bound to the HP world, so I probably won't be using anything that strikes me that way.
Back to work...