Lazy but Lucky

I admit it. As a writer I'm a lazy researcher. For example, I need to include soap making, candle-making, etc. in my new novel, but I am content to find the directions on the internet and not test it out.

On the other hand, when a character had to drag a corpse up a hill in my novel Running From the Puppet Master, my poor daughter became the corpse to see if it were possible.

If it is history I am more apt to read more deeply rather than commit a gaff, but sometimes there are things I don't check. TWA flew out of Miami in The Card although someone told me after the book was published that wasn't one of its routes. I hadn't even thought to check that one.

My character Abigail had been a student at Le Rosey in Switzerland. I chose it based on my neighbor, Hiram Manning's experiences there. I needed just a few sentences and in the back of my mind I was thinking of going to one its two campuses when I was in Geneva for the last two months, but kept postponing it, as I've postponed meeting with the expert on the last witch in Switzerland for another novel I'm researching. I'll get to it..., the witch expert that is.

This morning, as I was making my rasberry-cinanmon-oatmeal pancake, ARTE had a program on Le Rosey...I have my sentences without any effort. What luck.

This happened once before when I was writing Triple Decker, still trying to find a publisher. By setting it in my old neighbourhood, the Triangle of Roxbury Crossing and Mission Hill, I did not need to do research to know the sidewalks were brick and what the triple deckers looked liked either inside or out. However, when it came to the church, the church where I attended midnight Mass on Christmas Eves, I couldn't remember what it looked liked.

Lo and behold, it was the time the Pope died and CNN broadcast from inside the church on some of the issues on the errant priests. I had my brief description without asking a friend to walk around the corner to check it out.

That's why I say I am a lucky researcher...and yes, a lazy one, too. But that doesn't mean I don't want to be accurate, but I'll celebrate any bit of luck that comes my way.