And then zoom, off into space.

[mrissa]

So I'm doing this thing.

Well, okay, I'm doing a lot of things. I'm a Mris; even when one of the obligatory things is resting (and oh, is it ever), I'm still doing a lot of things.

But there's this thing coming on the horizon. I feel it like a storm, and now papersky knows how you can feel a storm coming days and days away across a prairie. This thing is large, and it's science fictional, and it's mine, my precioussss.

But this thing is not close enough that I can see the sheets of rain and the individual bursts of lightning and the bits where the sun peeks through. No. (I like storms. This is a positive metaphor.) This is far enough away that I'm only starting to get the shape of it.

So I'm working on other things, and those are going well, and for this thing, I call what I'm doing cantilevering. It's how I write SF at the small scale; for something this big it's...daunting and exhilarating and lots of fun.

So when you have a cantilever, you go leaping on out into space anchored at one end, right? We do that! That's what we do! But you have to have a darn good anchor at the end. You have to know where you've been to know where you're going. You'd think this was called doing research, but doing research is when you say to yourself, "My book is going to have all kinds of geology in it! I will read up on geology!" Or else, "My book is going to be set in Ukraine! I will read up on Ukrainian history and culture!" When I am cantilevering I am trying to figure out what the heck. And so I am just taking in data and taking in data so that I have the best deep-sunk foundation I can get. I just start grabbing nonfiction and kind of humming to myself and turning it over and seeing where it fits and whether it fits.

Eventually some of it starts to look like it's more important than others of it. Here is what I know I need more of so far: 1930s, worldwide; science of sense of smell and perfume chemistry; neurology; cultures on very large rivers. Here is what I do not need a lot of: major central large war-type military history. The entire rest of, um, whatever I might get my hands on? I do not know. We'll see what proves useful. I will keep just getting things from the library and seeing what they tell me. And some of the things they tell me will be very interesting things that go into other stories or just go into my brain for later. And some things will not show up on the surface in any way that anybody else can identify for this book, because it's not like I'm writing historical stuff here, where the 1930s are going to be useful that way. It's...patterning. It's having good footing for taking a leap.

Or possibly it's just very comforting to the parts of my brain that go whirrr while they're trying to figure out the bits of a very large project. Either way. Whirrrr. Hee. Whirrrr.

Comments

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

Are the other bits related to "1930s, worldwide", or are they separate? That is, are you looking for science of sense of smell and perfume chemistry in general, or as they would have been thought of in the 1930s? (As far as I can tell, science of sense of smell seems to be a topic without a whole lot written about it out there.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Separate. It's not research for something set in the 1930s, I'm looking at patterns from the 1930s.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

science of sense of smell and perfume chemistry

Mmmmm. Mmmmmm. And more appreciative mmmmmmms of happy anticipation.

(Yes, you said it's a prairie away. But I am patiently happy and happily patient about some things.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

In your very large rivers, have you happened upon anything good regarding rivers in deserts that were not the Nile? Because I could use more bits like that...

Whirrr is good, particularly when you can feel it going. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have not gotten very far with that bit yet, but I will let you know if I do.

[logovore.livejournal.com]

Does "cultures on very large rivers" mean a good excuse to ogle large quantities of Chinese landscape paintings as a form of diligent research?

Although very large rivers are surprisingly different one from the next, now that I think about it. Even the Yangtze and the Yellow saw very different histories, never mind the Congo or the Mississippi.

(Ooh, might there be portage in there somewhere? Ever since I found about the Vikings doing portage from the Dvina to the Dnieper en route to Constantinople, I've wanted a book with Exciting Portage Scenes. This may be an unreasonable demand. I am not altogether sure that Excitement and Portage can occupy the same room without unfortunate incidents.)

I am actually now reading Since Yesterday (the America-in-the-1930s history book). This post has me trying to imagine flitting back and forth between the New York of the speakeasies and the Shanghai of the thousand spies and war fears. So far my imagination fails. The 1930s, it contains multitudes. Even more so than your average 20th century decade.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't even need the excuse of cultures on very large rivers. At this stage of the game I can just go, "Chinese landscape paintings, let's see if that fits anything," and go wandering off.

There will not be portage scenes. The river cultures thing may or may not be a metaphor, but since Our Heroine will be at various points in the Oort Cloud, on Mars, on Ganymede and in the Canadian Rockies, just in the places I know of so far, your Exciting Portage Needs will have to be attended to elsewhere. The boat that gets her between those places: it is too big to carry on her head even if she has her cousin carrying the other end on her head. (More to the point, it is someone else's boat for most of the book.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You want 30s books recommendations?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

William Shirer, US journalist, spent the twenties and thirties in Germany and then France and then Germany again. He has a personal Germany book called Berlin Diary and a history of WTF went wrong with France from 1870-1940 which I found immensely useful, called The Collapse of the Third Republic. Anne de Courcy is a biographer. She's especially interested in women -- 1939: The Last Season and The Viceroy's Daughters are really interesting but almost all her work is around the thirties. The first volume of Churchill's history of WWII, The Gathering Storm is relevant and readable. The first two volumes of Orwell's Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism are brilliant, and you might also want to look at The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. There isn't a good modern Spanish Civil War book, unfortunately, which I find really weird, and the in print bio of Franco is really turgid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I was starting to come around to thinking that myself about the Spanish Civil War, and I was wondering if there was some weird political thing around it or what. It's annoying, whatever the cause! Spanish Civil War: one ought to be able to read about it coherently and not just sidle up around the edges!

[logovore.livejournal.com]

YMMV, but I thought Hugh Thomas' Spanish Civil War book was serviceable.

[vcmw]

Now my brain is itching with that "can't quite remember something" feeling. 7 or 8 years ago I read a long weird bio/pop science thing specifically about a research scientist perfumer who had some non-industry-standard research theories on smell. Even if it wouldn't be helpful from the science, it was a fascinating character study, and it had good bits on how different theories get fought out on a funding-and-pub level in the perfume world. And I can't remember book name or scientist name. I will see if mad googling tonight can help. Though you may have read it already.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Was it about Luca Turin?

[vcmw]

It was! Thanks. I still didn't remember his name when you popped it up, but that made the Googling much shorter. I must have read Emperor of Scent, then. It came out at the right time - a year or so before I did my round of reading on smells. I remember liking the book but feeling I didn't have the science to judge the contesting claims.

[toadnae.livejournal.com]

For perfume science, and to a certain extent, the sense of smell, I would also recommend The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr. It's a bit pop culture-y, but a great read and a good intro. He follows the development and introduction of two designer scents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Just finished that from the library!