The lengths to which some people will go

So, I’m working on this NaNoWriMo-fueled novel, which I won’t finish before the end of the month, but I’m 75,000 words in, so I think that’s okay. I’ve set the story in a part of the world I’m only loosely familiar with. A co-worker and I drove through the region once about 14 years ago. The experience stuck with me, and it seemed like an appropriate setting for this sort of book.

I did a ton of research. City profiles, maps, even satellite photographs to get the lay of the land and local details. Enough research to be able to lie convincingly. Or so I thought.

Here’s the bitter truth—no amount of vicarious internet research can hold a candle to being there. One of the first things that I discovered upon arriving at my destination was that the so-called “main street” is actually a pair of split one-way streets a block apart. Nothing in my research indicated that. No maps showed it. Secondly, a bar a chose for a meeting between a high-maintenance stuck up female reporter and my protagonist, which looks like a very respectable place from all my internet research, turns out to be a biker/cowboy bar with unfinished picnic tables, gravel floor, six pool tables (sign: Pool cues $10 each; break as many as you can afford and the $10 is crossed out with $25 written in above it). No way in hell my reporter would schlep halfway across town for a tete-a-tete at this place.

Of course, only locals would ever notice a little detail like that, but it’s the principle to me. I’d hate to get something like that wrong just because I didn’t bother to check.

Between Thursday morning and Saturday evening, I drove 1300 miles. That’s the length to which I’ll go to get it right! Texas is one of those states where you can drive 600 miles in one direction and not be at risk of leaving the state. I took with me three tools in addition to my PC and notepad: my digital camera, an analog video camera and a digital “tape” recorder. (What do you call them, anyway? There’s no tape. A digital silicon recorder? Digital voice recorder? I’ll call it a DVR.) The DVR was the most valuable of the tools so far. I recorded over 2.5 hours of observations, local color, details, thoughts, ideas, inspirations. I kept it in my pocket and whenever something occurred to me or whenever I encountered something that I wanted to describe (sight, sound, smell) I whipped this puppy out and said what was on my mind. (Vocal tic observation: in reviewing these recordings, I note with chagrin that about 80% of them start with the word “okay” as in “Okay, I’m driving down the street…”) The DVR is voice activated, so those 2.5 hours represent a couple of days’ worth of observations.

The video camera recordings I still haven’t reviewed. Six hours in total, much of it recorded with the camera sitting on the dash of the car pointing out to capture the surroundings. I also used it as a video diary, too, carrying on a running commentary about the things I was seeing as I saw them. I hope most of my commentary is audible. I didn’t check very often because I discovered that running the camera’s LCD ate up batteries like popcorn. I could record for nearly two hours on a single set of batteries and suck a full set dry in about 30 seconds with the LCD on. Today I bought a USB gizmo that will let me download the analog recordings to my computer so I can review them at the PC. Do screen captures of particular stills.

Interestingly, the least used of the tools I took with me was the digital camera. I don’t think I took any more than about 30 still shots. I wouldn’t have guessed that in advance.

So, the question is how I apply this research into the manuscript. Some of it is spot fixes. A certain location appears in the manuscript only once, so I go back in and “repaint” the scene with a new brush. Some of it, though, is complete renovation, which I think will have to wait for my first round of revisions. Rather than go back and try to inject local color judiciously throughout in a round of fixes, I think it will be better to essentially paint over the first rendition and start afresh with a new palette.

Should be interesting!