Read Around the Rainbow: Weird Internet Searches

This month’s theme for our Read Around the Rainbow group involves our weirdest internet searches – and we’re all authors, so you know that might be an…interesting…topic!

Honestly, though, mine probably aren’t too weird – I don’t write a lot of crime or suspense or mystery romances, so I don’t generally end up with the “could you REALLY kill someone with an ice bullet?” or “how long DOES it take for a body to decompose in a tropical bungalow?” sorts of questions. I do write a lot of historical and historical-adjacent fantasy, though! So most of my internet searches fall into that realm.

Let’s see, for the Character Bleed books alone, I’ve definitely looked up…Napoleonic-era sailing ships, Italian desserts involving cheese, steampunk-inspired bathrooms, historic hotels in England, fancy-but-not-too-fancy wine, calligraphy pens, healing from bad bruising, interesting bread types, good filming locations for last-minute Mediterranean island epilogue scenes, and medieval drinking songs (that one’s actually for Leo’s spin-off novel, so you haven’t seen that scene yet!)…and that’s not an exhaustive list, just what I can recall at the moment!

For some of the Regency-set stories, for instance the One Night in London collection, we did a lot of looking up of townhouses, correct titles and forms of address, food that might be served at a ball, and stylish men’s fashion. (And pictures of Alan Rickman. Maybe that one was just me.) For Spells & Sensibility (and the upcoming sequels), with K.S. Murphy, we’ve been layering magic into the immediately post-Napoleonic setting, so we’ve also looked up a lot of herb-lore, legends about specific English counties and manor houses, Aleister Crowley and John Dee, alchemy and magical societies and the occult, and calming teas with magical properties. (For my Wes & Finn short stories, it’s not so much internet searches as it is existing knowledge and books on my medievalist shelves, for all of Wes’s research! And a few fellow medievalists have made appearances, not by name…)

(Hmm. Perhaps my search history suggests that I’m secretly a nineteenth-century occultist with an interest in medieval drinking songs, good cheese, and bread? Which, to be fair, isn’t that far off…)

I am going to have to look up something crime-related soon, though, I think – because the plan is to get back to the third (final?) Kitten & Witch story, which is tentatively titled The Warlock Affair, and starts with the finding of a body…of course, magic’s involved, so it doesn’t have to be entirely realistic! But it does have to be believable, and also to happen in a locked and empty room…

Writer and reader friends, have you looked up anything weird or fascinating lately? *chinhands*

For more Weird Authorial Internet Searches, absolutely check out the posts by my fellow Read Around the Rainbow authors, and see what we get up to: