Well, I wanted to write, soooo

So...I'm a research hog. I LOVE researching for my stories. Adore it. I want everything, down to the smallest details, to be spot-on. Personally, I feel like an eye for detail is important.

But I'm not overly detailed. For instance, I wrote a sort of flashback scene for Spark (it's neat, seriously) that occurs on a Tuscan villa. I've never seen one, especially not in Renaissance Italy since my time machine only goes back to the 1800s, so I googled. And I studied pictures. I got the terminology down. Then I wrote the scene.

And I didn't use half of what I researched. But I wanted to feel like I knew what I was talking about. It still enriched the scene.

Similar scenario for the fights I wrote for Duality. I researched the hunting habits of the animals I used--imagining them put to use in hybrids took some brainpower--and their typical appearances. I willing researched spiders and snakes to make scenes as believable as possible, and I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE spiders. Snakes I'm okay with. Spiders, I am not. But I looked at wolf spiders (which are kind of adorable in the scariest way possible), got the idea of their coloring, those horrendous fangy things that make them scary, and the way they hunt. The whole shebang. I didn't sleep that night, but I got the details. And the small changes I made to a character (I'm demented, I'll tell you that now) made her absolutely terrifying. At least in my brain. It's amazing what a little research can add to your scenes.