
"But I'm an author, your honor. All that stuff about stabbing someone through the jaw and then eating their brains was for a project. I swear. It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"
For my latest WIP, I research a lot about guns, rifles, and swords. I need to know the style and names of those kinds of weapons back in the wild west days, and how many bullets such a weapon can hold before needing to reload. I've researched this a lot. Sometime my research takes me to websites that I'm fairly certain are run by white supremacy groups or run by government haters. It's happened. BUT, I quickly get out of there as fast as I can. EXCEPT, now those sites are logged in my history. (You can delete your history, but the police always have a way. They do!).
Then add on top of that the research I did to learn how to skin and gut a rabbit (it wasn't nearly as bloody as I imagined it would be. As long as it doesn't stink, I think I could do it) AND add to that the research I did to find out if it was at all possible to kill a man by jamming a 6 inch knife up through the bottom of their jaw and into the roof of the mouth. Would it touch brain? Could a person survive? This little piece of research took me to many, many sites--some very helpful, others, as you can imagine, not so much (very scary).
I've had to research the rate in which a body decomposes, what a dead body smells like under normal circumstances, what it smells like when it is burned, and whether an arrow can pierce a skull. All good stuff to know, by the way.
So yep. I'm in a heap of trouble.
And this is only for the current WIP. Let's not even go into the research I had to do to find out if a veterinarian had the tools to amputate a human hand.
It's bizarre the things authors are forced to research due to the direction our WIP takes us. I've researched things I NEVER thought I would have to.
So I'm curious, what bizarre things have you had to research for your novel/novels? I'd love to know I'm not the only one perusing strange sites that can land me jail :)
Just to make things even more interesting, as I researched a picture of something WEIRD to add to this blog, here are a few pictures that came up when I did so. See? Even searching for a weird picture is going to get me in trouble. Enjoy.