I’m in the midst of the beginning of The Fear and the Flame and I’ve created a sort of support group of women called The Dagger’s Daughters. These women revere Lady Rinnea, Our Lady of Knives, Patron Saint of Righteous Anger. Lady Rinnea is worshipped as a guardian saint for those seeking justice through rage. The women in the group are all dealing with their own version of anger, and all of them seek to use those feelings to obtain justice of some kind for what happened to them, or justice for others who may not be able to defend or avenge themselves. The women not only share each other’s stories and learn coping skills, but they learn to fight (with knives and daggers, Our Lady’s specialty), and they learn self- defense.

The thing is, I don’t know anything about self-defense, knife fighting or knife throwing, or anger management. So…this organization that seems like a really cool idea to me will be hard for me to convince others it’s cool if I have no idea what I’m talking about.

They say authors should “write what you know.” However, I write things I don’t know about all the time. I didn’t know about how corpses decompose in water for The Name and the Key until I researched it. Same thing with being thrown off a horse. For Son of the Siren, I did a research deep-dive to figure out how a three-legged deer would be capable of moving, and lo and behold, found a YouTube video someone shot of a three-legged deer walking (with difficulty), running (with surprising ease), and hopping a fence (a little awkward but easily done). I thought a three-legged deer would consistently limp and not be able to do anything, and the video proved me wrong, so I was able to do way more with the character than I anticipated, which was great. Hooray for research and people filming everything!

I usually research while I’m writing and not beforehand. This is because I don’t exactly have a detailed plan before starting, and I’d rather hit things as they come. Right now I’m going to take a short breather from The Fear and the Flame draft to watch some videos of self defense, and see if I can learn about knife-fighting and knife-throwing. This will come up specifically for my characters Lily and Adanya, and it’s really important Lily learns this stuff for later when she’s fighting off some demons. Spoiler-not-spoiler.