A Writer's Secret Life

By Photographer: Caroline Rogers, U.S. Geological Survey [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I joke with my friends that I hope a crime is never committed in which I am a suspect.  As a writer, when you hit something you do not have first hand knowledge of, you look it up.  Now, in this day and age there is a record of everything that you have looked up even if you clear your browser cache.  Only the top notch IT person knows how to really get that off your computer.  

So, if I was implicated in a crime I would probably be of great concern to detectives.  Yes, there are mundane researches that by themselves might not concern anyone.  Like, the picture above is from my research on hurricane holes.   It was researched for a location for Sordith to send the trading fleet during a large storm in Fallen Tiers.  This particular picture is a hurricane hole in the Virgin Islands.  Of course, if you are a suspect in a crime, it could also be a bolt hole.

That is hardly the most concerning thing I have ever looked up in my pursuit of writing. I have researched the most painful way to die, ways to poison someone and not be caught, effects of different poisons and poisonous  plants.  If I am a suspect for a poisoning, I am really in trouble. 

They say don't make an author angry or you might die in their next novel.  I know, therefore, as a writer I am not alone in the things that could implicate me hidden away in my histories of what I have read and where I have been.  By the way, I have yet to kill someone in my novels that has angered me in real life.   I have put a couple in the way of a compromising position, but I will never tell who.