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ckret2 · 5 years

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So a lot of care goes into your writing (I assume) and it seems like you do a lot of research. I was wondering how you conduct your research, what kind of sites you look for, how you narrow done what your looking for, etc, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

It honestly depends on what I’m looking for! Like, I work better when I have specific examples, so I’m gonna ramble to you about one thing I looked up today:

When Ghidorah hooked up to a radio station, I wanted it to be an actual real world radio station so that I could listen to the station online and go “yeah, here are the songs they’re listening to.” Because that’s a lot better than me, whose sum total of Spanish knowledge comes from a couple years of very spotty Duolingo practice, trying to guess what kind of songs play on actual Mexican radio stations.

Based on prior research I already knew that the fictional Isla de Mara is basically straight out east from the Rio Grande, next to the state Tamaulipas, so I got on Google Maps, scrolled around to where the Grande dumps into the Gulf, and looked for the city nearest the coast that looked sizable enough to have a radio station (i.e., the one closest to the coast that has a big name). And that ended up being Matamoros:

Here’s a pro tip: if you’re trying to find info about something in a non-English-speaking country, you’re probably going to find a lot more reliable resources a lot more easily if you actually google for that info in the language that’s spoken in that country. If you don’t know the language, Google Translate it. When you find the page you want, Google Translate it back. Yes, you’re gonna lose some nuance and some of the translations will be wonky, but it’ll still probably give you better info than if you’re googling for English pages about something in, like, Indonesia or wherever.

(Can you tell Indonesia is also on the list of places I’ve been researching! Do y’all wanna read the best myth I’ve ever read in my life? It features a snake named Stupid Boy and a misunderstanding worthy of an Abbott & Costello skit. I love it and I’ve only read a Wikipedia summary of it. And a Google Translated version of the Indonesian Wikipedia version of the story, which is 20% wilder. This has absolutely nothing to do with what I was trying to research.)

So I plugged “radio station” into Google Translate, got the Spanish, googled “estaciones de radio matamoros tamaulipas,” and clicked on the very first result because it’s a streaming site, and look at the options. All the FM stations are out. All the AM stations that don’t have genres listed, I’m pushing to the bottom of the list because I don’t wanna listen to each individual one trying to find out if they actually play music or not. The station that gives its genre as “noticias” I ignore because I’m not here for news, I’m here for music. There are two stations that have “balada/grupera/mexicano/ranchera” listed for their genres, and these I do know are music genres due to Prior Research, because yes I had to do research to find that out because I don’t know crap about Mexican music genres but I’m sure gonna learn.

And also while I’m at it I look up “balada” and “grupera” on wikipedia because I don’t know what those genres are, and now I know that “balada” is just Latin ballad, and more significantly I know from one single line on Wikipedia that balada is partially distinguishable from the bolero genre it spawned from because ballads usually have more direct straightforward romantic lyrics whereas boleros are generally more subtle/metaphorical, which, okay! What am I going to do with this information? I don’t know! Possibly nothing! But because I read the Wikipedia page it’s now a fact that lives inside my head! Ballads are straightforward about the romance! That’s a distinguishing feature!

There’s pro tip #2 on research: when there’s a subject you need to know, seriously, just go to wikipedia and read up on it and start clicking on all the links on the page you’re on and absorb the knowledge. You might use none of it, or it might end up super important. The fic Mafic exists because when I was writing Gold Gilt on Molten Basalt Ghidorah licked Rodan and I needed to know what he’d taste like, so I looked up igneous rocks to find out what minerals are in them, and “feldspar” was on the list, so I said he tasted like feldspar, and then I kept reading the page and found out there was a difference between intrusive and extrusive igneous rock, with “extrusive” meaning the rock formed on the surface rather than inside/under the volcano, and it said “basalt” is common extrusive rock, and well okay then obviously any rock that makes up Rodan’s hide is going to be extrusive, and “basalt” is a word which I have heard before which means readers have probably heard it before, so bam now he’s made out of basalt. … And then doing more research on volcanoes in subsequent weeks I find out that basalt is a common extrusive igneous rock from volcanoes with mafic lava, which are typically short dome-shaped volcanoes that ooze rather than tall pointy volcanoes that go boom, but Rodan’s volcano is definitely tall and pointy and goes boom, and whoops I hecked up. And now because I looked up mafic and felsic volcanoes, I made up a whole-ass goddamn set of Rodan subspecies, and my worldbuilding is richer for it, even though mafic & felsic lava wasn’t relevant to the info I was looking for when I found it out. And these are things learned gradually, over several weeks of looking up one tiny volcano detail for Rodan at a time and then reading three more Wikipedia pages in the process. Do I understand 70% of what I read? I sure don’t, because I’m neither a chemist nor a geologist. Do I make use of the 30% I do understand? I sure do! And that makes it worth it.

So back to the radio.

So there are two radio stations on this site that play music, so I click on the first one. And what do you know, I get a radio stream and it’s playing music! That’s it research done I got what I’m looking for. I bookmark the station and listen to it from time to time to like, absorb the sound, so that I can describe it in fic when I need to. (Admittedly, when I finally did describe it in fic it was “confusing noise???” because I was writing from the perspective of a couple creatures that have never heard human music before—but as they adjust to the sound any descriptions of it will, like, reflect what it actually sounds like.)

So that was a week or two ago. Today, I’m trying to write a fic where actual humans are hearing that same radio station, which means they can probably like, actually understand what songs are playing. So I listen to the station and try to pick out lyrics to google so I can find out the titles of the songs. (I am told by Google Translate that the Spanish word for lyrics is “letra,” but I seem to get about the same results whether my search term is “lyrics” or “letra.”) But the thing is, I suck at picking out lyrics in English, which I actually speak, and duolingo does not prepare you for the challenge of picking out individual words from balada as they’re singing and you’re trying to parse two words inside your head when the next three words come and you forget the first two words and then you forget the whole phrase and fifteen seconds have gone by and the only word you picked out was “mañana” and that’s not enough lyrics to google. So I recorded 20-odd minutes of the station so that I could listen to the same lines over and over until I picked out a few words well enough to google. And I’ve now picked out… two lyrics that let me identify two songs!

Pro tip #3: research is slow sometimes.

pro tip #4: if you’re trying to decipher spanish lyrics from a live radio station maybe like ask if any of your friends know more spanish than you and don’t have anything better to do with their evening than help you google lyrics.

So uh the tl;dr is research is a lot of Google and a lot of Wikipedia. If I was writing, like, an actual novel or something that I planned on publishing or putting before an audience bigger than… *checks notes on fics* a hundred people, then it would also be a lot of books and a lot of finding people from the actual cultures I’m trying to write about to ask them about whatever subject I’m writing about; but eventually you’ve gotta balance out the effort vs the rewards, and hauling ass to the library to spend five days doing research for a fic I’m gonna write in two hours and post the night I wrote it is a time sink that my ADHD and I lack the coordination and attention span to manage.

But hey here’s my last pro tip: assume you don’t know things, unless you know that you already know them. Like, if you’re going to drop a fish in a volcano, you probably assume that you know what that smoke is going to look like, because, generally, you know what smoke looks like, don’t you? But unless you’ve already seen a fish fall in a volcano, don’t assume that. Assume that you don’t know what the smoke of a lava-cooked fish looks like. Look it up. If you can’t find a result, look up a fish in a fire instead because that’s the next closest thing. Some smoke is whitish and some is black and if you want to describe that smoke you’ve gotta have seen it to know which it’s gonna be.

And here’s where “assume nothing” gets really important: if you’re gonna have a giant pteranodon make glass in his volcano, you’re probably going to assume that the volcano will be hot enough to actually melt the glass, because volcanoes are literally so hot they melt rocks. So it’s def hot enough for glass, right? Don’t assume that. Look it up. When you do you’ll find out that lava is actually approximately 500°C too cool to melt sand into glass. You’ll also find out that lava is too cool to melt the very rocks that go into lava, and you’ll spend four hours obsessively googling lava to find out how the hell magma is formed if it’s not actually hot enough to be liquid. (The answer: water mixed with the rocks lowers the melting point; and the drop in the extreme pressure when rocks move upward in the mantle also lowers the melting point; until the melting point is reduced to the actual temperature of the rock. I found this out while trying to write about a pteranodon making glass.)

And that’s it that’s how I do research. To answer your specific questions: I don’t concern myself with “what kind of sites” I look for because the sites that I’m gonna look at are the first results that pop up when I google a question, and if the first results don’t have the answer, then I click on the next results, and the next results, until I find the site that’s got it. I don’t “narrow down” what I’m looking for—if anything, what I do is the exact opposite of “narrowing down” what I’m looking for, I start with one question and then I broaden it to read about a half dozen tangentially-related concepts because that tangential info will probably be useful and I won’t know that until it’s in my brain percolating. If you want to know One Specific Fact and you look up that One Specific Fact and immediately leave, then you fail to learn the Fifteen Related Facts that are super important to the overall topic you’re writing about but that you never knew to ask about because you were only looking for that One Specific Fact.

Feel free to ask for clarification. I went stream-of-consciousness as hell on this ask.

#about my writing #anonymous #ask

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vradmic · 6 years

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And I also got tagged by the master of all the beans, @beanmaster-pika ! Thanks, pal!

Rules: Answer the questions, then make your own and tag people.

Questions:

1. If you could live in any themed bedroom, what would it be?

No preference, really. I would prefer calm and lighter colors, I suppose.

2. What’s your favorite time of day?

*shrug emoji* I honestly don’t know. Probably night as that is when it isn’t so hot here, but eh...

3. Would you rather never have to do laundry the rest of your life, or never have to do dishes?

They both can get very dirty... I honestly don’t mind doing dishes too much, so I have to go with never having to do laundry.

4. If you could meet any fictional character, who would it be?

People will probably expect me to choose Saten Ruiko, my choice is actually Yamabuki Saaya. More specifically, I want to go to the Yamabuki bakery! and not because that means I have a good chance of running into some of my other faves of the franchise

5. If you were a mythological creature, what would you be?

Wy...vern...? I guess...?

6. Do you have a favorite planet?

Does Earth count? If not, I think I have to go for Neptune.

7. What’s your favorite Greek myth?

*shrug emoji V2* I honestly have no idea ^^’

8. Are you more of a nighttime person, or a daytime person?

Nighttime. As said earlier, it’s cooler during the night which makes all the difference.

9. What’s a food you could never give up?

Probably pancakes if I have to be honest here. They’re great, they’re nutritious, they’re easy to make, and they are easy to eat.

10. What are you most looking forward to about today?

Breaking past 22k of NaNoWriMo I suppose XD

1. Do you have a weird guilty pleasure?

*shrug emoji V3*

2. Tea or coffee?

Tea please

3. Do you have any pets?

I don’t, but this house does have five cats so we got that going for us I suppose.

4. What’s the first thing you do in the morning?

Honestly, checking my messages. Timezones and stuff, I get a decent amount of messages while I’m asleep... so I need to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important

5. Favorite sleep position?

*shrug emoji V4*

6. How many languages do you speak?

Let’s see... English, Dutch, Indonesian, Mandarin, a decent amount of Japanese is what I would like to believe... that makes five, and I have signed up for a course on Spanish in the upcoming Spring semester, potentially bringing the number up to six.

7. Favorite food?

I honestly don’t have a favorite food ^^’ I’m not a picky eater ^^’

8. Do you have any plants in your home?

We don’t inside the house, but we have a small patch of ground that acts as a small garden outside.

9. What’s the greatest thing that could happen today to you?

Good question... I was going to say “getting good scouts in my gacha games”, but then I remembered that I won’t be scouting in any of them today... probably get close to 23k words for NaNoWriMo?

10. Favorite song?

“telepath ~ Hikari no Tou ~” by Misawa Sachika, an insert song used in the Toaru Majutsu no Index: Endymion no Kiseki movie that aired in 2013.

1. If you can bend elements like in Avatar Last Airbender which element would you choose?

Water

2. Cat or a dog person?

I already said that we have five cats in this house, so I guess that answers the question already...?

3. What is the strangest thing you believed as a child?

... I honestly can’t remember.

4. What’s something that amazes you?

That there is still good in this world, whether it be good people, good places, good news, despite all of the horrible things that are happening.

5. What is your strongest sense? If you had to give one up, which would it be?

I kind of want to say smell... and I’d rather give up my sense of taste; contrary to the belief of my classmates in high school, we don’t technically “taste” our food... we “smell” it.

6. What’s your favorite season?

Fall. It’s a nice season...

7. Favorite pizza toppings?

I’ve been away from the world of pizzas for so long that I honestly don’t know XD I know I like mushrooms on my pizzas, so I guess that’s my answer?

8. What would your chosen superpower be?

Teleportation all the way~ it’s been my favorite superpower ever since, Raildex has made me love it even more, and it just has a lot of great utility in a lot of different scenarios. It’s one of those superpowers that is relatively basic in nature, but has almost unlimited possibilities.

9. Favorite activity?

For now, I suppose that would be writing XD

And then my own questions...

10. What would you tell the you of five years ago if you could talk to that version of yourself right now?

1. Solar eclipse or Lunar eclipse?

And I’m tagging @reiriniverse @dapokemonmadster @shawn-and-aiden-frost-9 and @xadhoom-xado

#beanmaster-pika

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