Discussion: What Weird Research Have You Done for Your WIPs?

Photo credit: catherinecronin on Flickr

So some fellow Sweet Sixteeners (2016 debuts part of one of the debut groups I’m a member of) are blogging about weird research they’ve done for their books, and that sounded like a fun topic I haven’t really covered here, so! Weird research.

For Beyond the Red, specifically, I did have a lot of scattered research to do here and there while I was writing, and while some of it is spoilery and thus I can’t really blog about it, much of it is not. Including:

• Temperatures, wildlife, and flora of deserts around the world.
• Variations of different languages, both written and spoken, fantasy and real. 
• Variations of beliefs and rituals of major religions around the world. 
• Different kinds of (primarily sparring) weapons. 
• How certain nomadic people survive in the deserts. 
• How to calculate population growth over the course of several generations. 
• Tattoo styles.
• Different styles of dance, especially…
• FIRE DANCING

And finally, most recently, I found my Linguistics class—particularly the bit about how language evolves—quite useful when revising the book last week.

Granted, most of those aren’t weird except maybe fire dancing, which is more epic than weird, but nevertheless those are some of the things I researched while writing Red. What research have you done for your books?

Twitter-sized bite:

What fun or strange research have you done for your WIPs? Join the discussion on @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)