Say
what you will about us writers; we were readers first. Most of the writers I
know got into it out of a love of the written word—sometimes a desperate one,
as in my case. I began writing my first novel at the age of eight because I was
burning through the children’s room at my local library entirely too fast, and
I was afraid that I would run out of books to read if I didn’t start making
some of my own, stat. So reading comes naturally to us, and we love it.
Which
is a good thing, because ye gods, do we have to do research.
Masks is set in modern-day Los Angeles, my lifelong home, so a
certain amount of the research is done for me. I know what the hills look like
in summer, how a Santa Ana wind smells, where to find an abandoned aircraft
hangar or an empty flood-control channel. I have a working vocabulary of curse
words in four or five languages spoken by the locals. I can describe the subway
without pausing to look anything up, and I know what it’s like to be packed into
a Rapid bus hurtling down Wilshire Boulevard at foolhardy speeds.
At the
other end of the spectrum, the world of The Novel is completely made up. I’ve
devoted many hours to figuring out how the weather patterns work, and the
literacy system, and the technology, and even what kind of birds you’d find in
certain bushes. And I’m the ultimate authority on all of that. All that
information is sitting inside my head or in my notebooks, and because no one
else has lived in my fictional world, no one can correct me unless I get the
real-world science wrong—make the rain fall up instead of down, put the wrong
kind of birds in the wrong kind of ecosystem, that sort of thing.
In the
middle falls the Street of Bakers project, and an awful lot of research.
While
Street of Bakers has strong elements of science fiction and fantasy—it is steampunk—it’s also firmly rooted in
a real time and place. Victorian London really existed, and modern London exists
today. Millions of people have visited or lived in the places I’m writing about,
an ocean away from me, and know millions of details that I don’t. I’ve never
been out of my own country—I didn’t even have a passport until I was in my late
twenties, and I’ve never used it. (This isn’t the American snobbery you’ve
heard so much about, by the way—I don’t actually ignore other countries, or
assume I wouldn’t get anything out of visiting them. I’ve simply never had the
money to travel for pleasure, and I never get more than a day or so off work at
a time, which makes it tough to travel to anywhere other than Mexico. Someday,
though …) So I do research.
I
haunt a nearby university library for books of maps so I can build up my
knowledge of London’s geography. I’m reading my way through Liza Picard’s Victorian London, learning about sewers
and velocipedes and corsetry and whatall. And then there are the websites—costumers’
sites for fashion tips, archive websites for street-level maps, even a botany
website that can find me a white willow tree in modern London at two in the
morning. (An early plot point requires Watson to get hold of some willow bark
in a hurry.) It’s a good thing I’ve got that writerly love of reading;
otherwise I’d never get through all this.
In
some ways, though, I’m glad I’m doing it. I probably haven’t read this much
reference material since I was in college, and I’m rediscovering the quiet joy of
reading books I never would have discovered on my own. Ever since I was little,
I’ve enjoyed stuffing my brain with seemingly useless but interesting
information, and this project is giving me a magnificent excuse. I’ve recently
discovered an urgent need to re-read Harry Houdini’s book on stage magic; how
often can I pass that off as work? And that’s not even counting the sheer joy
of Sherlockiana—from a deep re-reading of Doyle’s canon to modern pastiche
collections like Michael Kurland’s Sherlock
Holmes: The Hidden Years to outliers like Anthony Boucher’s The Case
of the Baker Street Irregulars and Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File. How many people can legitimately say
they’re doing research by reading a novel about Sherlock Holmes teaming up with
Dracula? I haven’t had this much fun since I regularly had to study smallpox
vaccinations and ancient Greek statuary.
And it
seems to be paying off, at least a little. Recently a beta reader on an early
chapter of the project complimented me on my portrayal of a completely made-up
part of the London Underground; even though the design of the car was entirely
fictional and the line I described didn’t open until a couple of years after
the story is set (I added a historical event that moved up the opening date),
she was impressed with how clearly I described the sounds, smells, and
sensations of a short Tube trip. “How long did you live in London?” she asked
me.
I just
smiled.
