Researching Otter

You know, I swore I was never going to do another historical novel. (I mean, look at the trouble the last one got me into.) With historicals, you're always needing to know little things -- like what buttons were made of in 1920 (ivory nut), or the colour of the sedative Sodium Amatyl (blue). Most of the time you don't even know what it is you need to know, and when you learn it, it sometimes spins the story off in an unexpected direction. It's another dimension of freedom (as the physicists say), another variable in a system that's already beyond control, beyond reduction, beyond prediction, driven by the spin of the characters, the spin of the words. (Nope, I don’t outline.)

So anyway, I swore. But now there's Otter. Of course, she's not historical; she lives in that artisan/agrarian world that many fantasy novels are set in (which I seem to have absorbed without noticing, though mine has a North-American flavour that I think is fresh.) But while I've made pretty free in inventing my own rules and systems of magic, I still find myself needing to read up on things to create a convincing world.

So far, I've covered hand-looms, hand spinning, natural dyes and mordants; the relative merits of sheep and flax; woodworking and smithing; food crops native to North America; wildflowers and trees likewise; buffalo; curing leathers and skins; superstitions regarding knots and string; the origin of the game Cat's Cradle; storing food before the days of canning; funerary practices of the Sioux; taming wolves; superstitions about ghosts and the undead, particularly with reference to running water; watershed patterns in South Dakota; and trade-goods of the Pacific Northwest.

Now, some of that is just texture. But most of it was something I had to know to write the next paragraph. Last night I found myself unable to move my story forward without knowing whether silver is hard-rock mined, or whether you can pan for it, or extract it from slurry, like gold. (A question I haven't answered yet, if anyone happens to know.) And how are silver-and-glass mirrors made? Is it hard? For that matter, how is glass made? And etc.

Argh! But today, I think – this is great. Once, I wanted to be a student forever. Later I discovered graduate school is a sort of Purgatory, without the climbing closer to God part. Today I think being a writer might be one way of being a student forever. Poor and peculiar and separate from the world. And with the closer to God part.