IWSG 19: Strange Writer I Am

Wow! Has it been really a whole month already? Time certainly does fly when you're doing quadruple duty in the man cave because a story simply wouldn't unbury its talons. So, without further ado, it's IWSG time!

IWSG

The first Wednesday of the month is set aside for insecure writers across the blog-o-sphere to share all of our individual experiences, the gud, the baaaaaad and the plug ugly.

For today's post, we have a twofer. You have the option of either taking a stroll to I Are Writer!, where I talk about my latest insecurity (story titles), or you can stay here and read my answer to the very cool optional question, which is this:

"What is the weirdest/coolest thing you ever had to research for your story?"

For my very 1st (and so far, only) traditionally published novel, Line 21/The Inner Sibling, I had to do a ton of research for it. I'm not ashamed to admit the fact that I don't know much about what I write about sometimes. For one of items I had to research was how to drive/ride a motorcycle. I love motorcycles, but I've never actually ridden one. So a lot of research was done.

But by far the most weirdest thing I had to research for a story was for my primary character, Jeannie Mitchell. Prior to writing this story, I had written the bulk of my female characters like they were soft core/hardcore adult entertainment performers (you can insert insult here). So for obvious reasons, I wanted to write the character right.

So........this required me to ask some rather pointed & personal questions of my co-workers, friends and blog readers. What kind of questions? Well, here's a few that I recall.

1} Cup sizes. Yes, I really needed to know the difference between A/B/C/D sizes, mostly because my character was rather buxom.
2} Breast size. Yes, I really needed to know that the size of a breast actually dictates the kind of bathing suit one can wear (good friend of mine explained this as it applied to a bikini).
3} The difference between natural hair and unnatural hair. Yes, I really needed to know because my lead character was Black, and I don't know diddly about hair. A co-worker who has a lovely bi-racial child explained it all to me.

Those are just the questions that I can recall. There is one other aspect of that story that I had to research and until now, I never really told anyone about it, and that was business side/behind the scenes aspect of it. I did the research for it because I had written a moral dilemma into the story and the background aspect of working the adult entertainment industry was required. And we'll leave the exploration of that for another time and another place.

Have a sparkling month of May everyone and I'll talk to you soon.

(c) 2017 BOOKS BY G.B. MILLER. All Rights Reserved.