Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

This week’s progress was slowed by a few issues.

First, Season 4 of Bosch dropped, and that simply had to be dealt with.

Second, I had some serious pain due to a nerve regrowing in my big toe (long story) and that made it impossible to concentrate on anything for about thirty-six hours.

Third, I was still on-call, and the weekend was punctuated with several job failures, including two early morning alerts that came to me in error. (Thanks, guys. Who wants to sleep in on the weekend anyway, amirite?)

With this as preamble, it wasn’t surprising that, once I finally got underway with chapter two scene one, my lack of concentration let me slip my lead and run down some research rabbit holes.

Usually, this isn’t a big problem. Whether writing longhand or composing at the keyboard, if a scene needs a detail of which I’m not sure, I simply insert <?> into the text. It gets me quickly around the obstacle and back to writing without losing focus. That <?> is also an easily found character-combo; I can search for it later and supply the proper details, so I’m usually pretty good at avoiding this trap.

Usually.

Usually, because, once I’ve arranged all my fiction-writing ducks in a row—setting, characters, plot points, what-have-you—these quandaries generally crop up one at a time. Like, was Lagavulin available in 1930? Were ashtrays a common household item in 1885? What is the name of the hostel at the corner of Pike and 1st? The questions arise, I give them my <?>, and move on, confident that I’ll get the answers later in rewrite.

Since my WIP’s chapter two scene one is set in a place I visit often—Pike Place Market—you’d think I’d be able to sail through the descriptive parts of the scene without many hurdles, but that didn’t happen. I mean, I go to the Market several times a year, so my memory of it is clear, vibrant, and full of sensory input, but since Pike Place market is a real place (as opposed to most other settings in this book, which are imagined) and especially since it’s a place that a lot of readers may have visited, I have to get the details right.

Questions began to pop up all over. What shops are on the corner of the Sanitary Market Building? What’s the relative position of that fruit-and-veg stand to The Athenian? At which corner does the piano guy always play?

Once these sorrows began, they came “not single spies, but in battalions,” and the hold I had on my fictional world went all hugger-mugger. To regain my grip, I needed to nail down at least some of these details; not all, but enough to give me a solid purchase on the setting again.

And therein lay the danger. What constitutes “enough?” Where is that line drawn?

In all likelihood, it should have been drawn somewhere after I quickly found the answer to “Where does Pike Street switch from brickwork to asphalt?” but well before I went down into the warren of “What’s the difference between an American and European cantaloupe?”

Yes, these are real questions that have real (fictional) application, and while I found the answer to the latter question fascinating, it was part of a larger whole that really bogged me down.

I’m wending my way back to the surface now, using this blog post as a way to break the call-and-response cycle of my research-loving brain.

Hope it works.

k