Research Is My Life(she said as she got a stamp in her passport)

Okay, so I admit that when I got into the writing business, research wasn’t my strong point. Oh, all right. It wasn’t a point at all. What I realized when I began to hang around with more veteran authors was that I’d never learned how to really use a library for research. After all, I’m a nurse. Nurses don’t read about the topics they’re studying. They play with them. Not only that but after only 55 years I finally realized that I have ADD(which translates into “can’t finish a non-fiction book if it meant the fate of the free world were at risk).

I knew I could write(come on, you know all writers believe the same thing. If we didn’t, we’d fold the first time somebody criticized our work). I’d been writing stories since I was ten, for an audience since I was twelve. So I decided to rely on my strong suit of storytelling until I could figure out exactly how that research thing happened.

It really didn’t take as long as I thought. Simply put, I don’t read much non-fiction(for my suspenses, I have one of the most extensive un-read forensics library in the state). But I realized that people loved to talk about what the do, and what they loved. And I love talking to people. But more importantly, especially to my fulminate Irish wanderlust, I found that I could use the trips I was going to take anyway to stoke the creative furnace.

I would love to claim altruism and say that I traveled for veracity(after all, how can you know what color the soil is along the golden hills of Monterey, unless you run it through your fingers?) (by the way. It’s amazingly dark).

And, like talking to people, I love to travel. I want to know what the surf sounds like as it batters against the rocky coast of Ireland, or how to mount a camel in India, or what the Southern Cross looks like through the leaves of a tree in the Bolivian jungle. And I want to let you know, too. So, chances are, if I’ve experienced it, I’ll try and put it in a book.

Which is how my latest trilogy came about. I’ve traveled to Ireland, usually every other year, since the early 80’s. I can’t think of a place on earth I love more. And for years, I’ve wanted to share it. Then, about four trips ago, I stumbled over the most amazing thing in an out-of-the-way farm field. There I was crashing through hedges of fuchsia, when I almost fell nose-first into a thirty-foot-high rock burial mound ringed by a fairy fort(usually an old Neolithic earthen fort chock full of whitethorn bushes). No one had touched it. It was as if no one knew it was there but me.

And suddenly, I had this great story in my head about a field anthropologist who was all set to dig into the fairy hill of the Queen herself, when she kidnaps him instead(Dangerous Temptation). Enter her three daughters, who are all possible heirs to her throne, and who find themselves in battle against the dark fairy clan,( whom I invented while I was sitting atop that cairn in the rain), and I had a series.

It’s called Daughters of Myth(I was going to call it Daughters of Mab, but evidently no one in Toronto knew that Mab was Queen of Fairies.), and I got to use not only my visits to Co. Sligo, Ireland, but Yorkshire, England(I had a particularly great time in my second book, Dark Seduction, when I got to torture a poor Englishman with a fairy of his own), and back to Killarney, Ireland where the third book—did I tell you it just happens to be out now?—Deadly Redemption—is set.

I do admit that I have more trips than books. I’m trying to think of a book for my Italy trip, and my Bolivia trip, and my Prague trip. But I already have a book for the trip I’m about to take to India. Because I obviously have nothing better to do, I’ve decided that my evil twin Kathleen Korbel should write historical romance. I just finished the first book in my The Three Graces trilogy for Grand Central, which opens the night before Waterloo. And considering how many Englishmen(and women) spent time in India, I told my husband that we had to stay in a haveli(a traditional house) and a raja’s hunting lodge and a tent resort in a tiger sanctuary. Because I want my research to be as accurate as possible.

It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.