Research and what it will get you

First of all, let me say that looking stuff up on line is not “research.” Scientists developing a Covid vaccine takes research. Archeologists uncovering an ancient civilization takes research. Translating Egyptian hieroglyphics from a recently discovered tomb requires research. Building, launching, and landing a Mars rover takes research. When I research a topic for my stories, I look things up (mostly online) and investigate so I don’t sound like a complete idiot when I write my FICTION about it. It doesn’t make me an expert on the topic.

That being said, I learn quite a lot. And I estimate that a percentage of what I learn is actually based on research. So, here are some things I “researched” for my stories this week.

“What are the best and oldest ski resorts within driving distance of the locale I’ve chosen in New York for the setting of my new work in progress, A Place Among Peers?” Working assumption at this time is Bristol Mountain near Canandaigua.

“When were their ski lifts put in operation?” Working assumption is mid-70s.

“What are the best/raciest/most popular classic French authors?” List includes Flaubert, de Laclos, de Beauvoir, de Balzac, and Sand. I add to that the expatriate writers Anais Nin and Henry Miller.

“Where can I get a butcher’s certificate like Jett Blackburn’s in my new Devon Layne WIP Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain 2?” Madison Area Technical College.

“What kind of paint is used for body painting?” A variety that includes makeup based paint, Kryolon Aquacolor, Ben Nye Magic Liquid Paint, airbrush paint, acrylic, and food dye and ivory soap.

“Is IGA (Independent Grocers Alliance) still active?” Very much so. With store franchises all over the world! Much bigger than I anticipated. Including Russia and China? And two within the market area I was searching. Wow!

“What are the duties of a high school athletics team manager that I’ll need to know to write the new Devon Layne WIP Team Manager?” Much like a theatre stage manager, a team manager is responsible for nearly everything but directly coaching the athletes. First aid, equipment, towels, warmups, schedule, scorers, parent volunteers, and everything else!

“How much do basketball uniforms cost?” About $110-125 for a full set of home and away uniforms, tear away warmup pants, shooting shirt, and 2 pairs of socks. Many toss in matching masks nowadays.

“Did you know a female wolverine is called an angeline?” No? Neither did I!

“How do you test for basketball tryouts?” That was as interesting as the duties of a manager. There is a speed, power, agility, reaction, and quickness test (SPARQ) with eight measurable exercises to determine how well prepared an athlete is to take the court. It ain’t easy!

“Is girls’ basketball in Iowa different than anywhere else?” I really got sucked into this one! Girls have been playing basketball in Iowa since the 1890s. But in 1925, the Iowa High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) (all men), decided it wasn’t appropriate for girls to play competitive sports and refused to sanction the sport. A splinter group (still all men) formed their own association, the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU) and immediately sanctioned teams in girls’ basketball. There are still two separate organizations over boys’ and girls’ sports in Iowa.

BUT… This is where it gets interesting. The men of the IGHSAU still felt girls were less athletic and needed special rules that included a smaller ball and six player teams (six-on-six basketball). The teams didn’t run up and down the court. They were divided into three guards and three forwards. The guards were responsible for guarding the goal against the other team scoring. They were completely defensive and could not cross the centerline! They had to pass the ball to a forward, who was the offensive player attempting to score. The forwards, too, were not allowed to cross the centerline from their end of the court.

This was girls’ basketball in Iowa until 1994 when the rules were rewritten to match the boys’ game. There is a great video produced by an eighth-grader at https://youtu.be/w2aPO7xZYbg that recaps the fascinating history of Girls’ Basketball in Iowa.

“Are there still different sizes of basketballs?” Yes! According to Spalding who makes the official tournament ball (TF-1000 Legacy), the basketballs come in several different sizes. Women’s basketball is played with a size 6 ball that is 28.5 inches in circumference. Even in the WNBA. Men’s basketball is played with a size 7 ball that is 29.5-30 inches in circumference. There are smaller sizes for junior high school and elementary school.

“Are teams divided up in 1A, 2A, 3A, and 4A classes?” Only if you add class 5A! Class 5A includes schools over ~840 students (and the largest is about 2200). Class 4A comprises schools with ~375-840 students. Class 3A is schools with ~210-375 students. Class 2A includes schools ~140-210 students. And the small school class, 1A includes 110 schools with ~25-140 students. In the 1990s, 75% of girls playing basketball in Iowa were from schools with fewer than 100 students. The FICTIONAL school I’ve chosen to write about is at the low end of Class 3A.

“Do I know any more about Iowa Girls Basketball?” You’ll have to read the book to find out. I certainly know more than I ever expected to know.

I also know the federal limits to the percentage of alcohol in moonshine, the Iowa State limits on distilling, bottling, and possessing distilled alcohol, and how to get hold of the DEA in Des Moines.

http://www.patreon.com/nathaneverett

http://www.patreon.com/aroslav

That’s a writer’s life for you. Absolutely nothing I’ve placed in this blog is factual based on real research. It’s only what I needed to know to write a convincing story. That allows me to create fanciful situations that we know would never happen, but they sound like they might actually happen. It looks real. And the more mundane the details are, the more reasonable the wild speculation seems.

Which is pretty much how we got QAnon, Proud Boys, Anti-vaxers, voter fraud, and all the other conspiracy theorists who almost sound like they know facts. In reality, they’re creating plotlines for stories that I could only dream about writing!

More books, please!

 

Sunrise over Puget Sound from my window.

Whenever I’m asked “What’s new?” I start the conversation with the single word, “Books!” There’s always something new in my world. Take today, for instance. I’m announcing the release of my newest Devon Layne novel, The Assassin.

The Assassin is a character-driven science fiction story. It’s part of Thinking Horndog’s Swarm Cycle universe and looks at what happens to the slave society started by the Confederacy to fight their enemy, the Sa’arm.

Niall Cho hates the Confederacy, which has become so pacifistic the races cannot even rise to defend themselves from annihilation. So, they recruit humans to do the deed for them, subtly making sure the humans cannot pose a threat to the Confederacy in the future.

A test is established that humans rush to take to determine if they are of suitable Capacity, Aptitude, and Potential (CAP) to join the Confederacy Armed Forces and immigrate to a new world. Each immigrant can take at least two people who did not score high enough to volunteer along with their dependents. The two “concubines” are, in reality, slaves to the sponsor and females are required to breed on a regular basis to establish the human race on a hundred different planets and provide the next generation of soldiers for the war.

Niall is caught in a pickup with his mother and two sisters and taken from Earth to the agricultural planet Tara where their sponsor works the family like slaves on his farm. Niall starts working on a list of people he wants to kill for destroying his family and taking him away from his father. Upon reaching his majority at age fourteen, Niall leaves the farm and joins the militia, an alternate way of becoming a free citizen. Then he plans to hunt the perpetrators of this crime against humanity and kill them all.

Along the way, Niall makes friends, rises through the militia ranks, establishes an alternate society of free slaves, gets his own concubines, and develops a friendship with his Tuull AI. But when, after fifty years, the opportunity comes for Niall to start getting rid of the villains, neither his target nor his methods are at all like he anticipated. Nor is the apparent reward!

Available at most eBook retailers. Check The Assassin homepage at http://www.devonlayne.com/assassin.html.

We’re all still attempting to recover from the pandemic. I’m due for my second installment of the vaccine in two weeks. But one of my writer groups posed the question “What did you accomplish in 2020?” My first reaction was “What a waste.” Then I started looking back at my files.

I discovered that I published eight Devon Layne books and three Nathan Everett books in 2020! Not bad for a year I considered a waste. Some of these were older books with a new market release, but still…

     See links for all Devon Layne books at http://www.devonlayne.com, including copies for free online reading!

See links for all Nathan Everett books at http://nathaneverett.com, including copies for free online reading!

So now I’m sitting back resting on my laurels. Not.

I’ve released seven “new editions” or completely new books so far in 2021, including The Assassin (listed above). Somehow, these other six books had never made it out into the public or onto my free reading website.

See links for all Devon Layne books at http://www.devonlayne.com, including copies for free online reading!

What does that make now? According to Amazon, I have 38 Devon Layne books and 11 Nathan Everett books in the market. My website shows 45 Devon Layne and 13 Nathan Everett books, because I didn’t release everything on Amazon.

So, go ahead and ask me what’s new! Thank you. Currently, I have two new books under development and I’m making good progress again after having an ablation on February 18. They restarted my heart in correct rhythm and I’ve begun to recover my energy and focus. I’m very thankful for my cardiologist, Dr. Christopher Fellows at Virginia Mason.

The first new book I’m working on is Nathan Everett’s A Place Among Peers. This is a sequel to December’s release, A Place at the Table. The series takes place in an alternate world America where there is an established formal class system and everyone is assigned to a class by age eighteen. In the first book, Liam and Meredith struggle to figure out their relationship while Liam tries to fit into his class as a Leader. In the sequel, Liam establishes a cohort of other Leaders attending his University and discovers what it means to become a leader of Leaders. All this, of course, while still exploring his relationship with Meredith and with others who would latch onto his leadership for their own purposes.

I’m working on a sequel to the Devon Layne novel, Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain. In the first volume, we are introduced to Jett Blackburn, an artist in his first year in college along with five of his closest girlfriends. Jett is a Digital Native, sometimes referred to as Gen Z. He has never known a time without a personal computer, a cell phone, or social media. He has, however, pursued his art in a very traditional way until he accidentally paints one of his girlfriends and discovers new ways of integrating a model into the art. But there is a dark side to Jett’s painting. People who view it—even the models and Jett themselves—are profoundly changed by the art. Sometimes fatally.

Volume 2 finds our hero caught up in financial difficulties as he struggles to pay for college, loses his job, and is stalked by a jealous classmate. And yes, like the rest of those who had to live through the past year, to deal with the pandemic.

My patrons of either  Nathan Everett http://www.patreon.com/nathaneverett or Devon Layne http://www.patreon.com/aroslav have access to the works of both authors, including free eBooks and (at the $10 tier) my developing works as I write them. You are cordially invited to join them!

Cancel Culture

I'm feeling much better now that a month ago and am pursuing my writing career with vigor. Unfortunately, I missed publishing to the blog here yesterday, so I thought I'd catch up today. And my topic is the popular riff of "Cancel Culture" being cried about by people who never thought about not having some things until someone said they couldn't have them.

I'm offended.

But also easily amused. In a world that seems to be obsessed with whether a copyright holder and publisher can stop publishing a fifty-year-old book and the gender of a plastic potato, I am obsessed with what they did to our keyboards. I loaded a picture of an old electric typewriter as my desktop wallpaper and started looking at it. Here's a change. I assume you spotted it. It's in the Return and Backspace key. Now known more commonly as Enter and Delete.

On the typewriter keyboard, the arrows point up and to the right while on the computer keyboard they point down and to the left. I'm incredibly upset about the cancel culture that did away with the correct icons for a keyboard!

Of course, there is a logical explanation, just like there is for every other cancel culture post I've read. In word processing, the Enter key moves the cursor down and to the left on the page. On the typewriter, the Return key moved the carriage to the right and the paper up a line. The Delete key moves the cursor left a space while the Backspace moves the carriage right a space.

Unless you read a language that reads right to left.

Please. I'm sure this is as important to be offended about as not being able to fly a foreign flag over our government offices.