You get to visit far-away places that you'll never get to visit, and in my case, see things I'll never get to see. Researching a novel 100 years ago couldn't have been nearly as engrossing as it is today. It is one of the reasons I am so happy and grateful for modern technology, like Google maps, where I can see a satellite view of possible settings for parts of my story... I can see mountains I'll never climb, and frigid towns I'll never set foot in. It's so amazing!
Specifically, my story needs a couple of remote, icy cold islands, so I decided to look in the northern reaches of Canada and stumbled upon two uninhabited islands: Coats Island, in the Hudson Bay, and much further north, Prince Charles Island in the Northwest Passages. My story is fictional and extremely fantastical, so they'll be getting some fictional beef-ups, but I always like to try to ground my stories in something that is real and tangible, if possible. I'll never set foot on either of those islands, but I can research their climate and general topography and determine how long it'd take to reach one of them under various circumstances.
Character work is going extremely well. I have been using some of the pieces of this blog as they existed before, so some of that work is done for me, but I am transforming all of it into the groundwork for my NaNoWriMo novel, which I'll be starting in just about a week.
RE: my last blog, I have received a number of different messages from people encouraging support for trying to do what's right by me, and I just wanted to thank everyone for that here. Back at it later tonight with our latest podcast to edit, so I'll be splitting time once the words stop coming. Speaking of words, re-purposing some from the blog that used to be here and writing new ones, my outline for NaNo is now over 6,000 words. I can't believe it! I'm finishing up major character outlines and I'm going to sketch out a rough plot outline later this week. I've also done some outlining on the settings, but that isn't done just yet.
Happy writing!
Nicholas Haskins
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