How I do research

I've been asking indecent, confusing, or simply creepy questions since I was a small child, butting into a phone conversation my mother had about my brother. She said "He's changed extremely," and I, being something around nine years old and having heard of "extreme right" and "extreme left" political views, couldn't contain myself and asked her which extreme my brother was changing to.
It is this kind of inappropriate questioning that has led me to the best research opportunities since then.
I don't do story-related research that much because it's draining. Opportunistic research is more my kind of thing. This means, I write down every word or description I don't yet understand, go online and find out what it's all about. Sometimes I stumble over some interesting fact or a piece of research that inspires me, sometimes I end up on youtube and ultimately spend hours watching cat videos, but more often than not, I actually do learn something that sticks in my head until at one point I can use it. A few examples:

• Triploid chromosomes - Did you know that plants with triploid chromosomes are especially resistant to damage from UV-radiation? If you ever want to live on Mars, triploid plants are the way to go about it.
• Spetsnaz - Russian Special Forces. Their training is bat-shit crazy stuff.
• Bushido - An orally passed down, Japanese moral code that is often misinterpreted and glorified, but ultimately gave me an interesting insight into loyalty to family or monarchy to the point of self-mutilation.

Why do research at all?

When you start your literary career with reading best sellers and highly praised novels, like I did, you often get the impression that to be an author, you have to be creative to the point of reinventing the wheel on a molecular level. How do those big authors get their ideas? How the bloody hell did they come up with this much great stuff, and how can you yourself ever reach such heights? The gap between you as a young, inexperienced, blossoming writer and those old dogs seems almost impossible to bridge.
Then, like me, you take a look at the works of other budding author novices, and you start to get a feel for what writing actually is. Most of those stories are horrible, if compared to professional work, but some do actually fascinate in that 'raw diamond' kind of way.
I have read about, phew, 500 and more stories written for nobody in particular. If you read that many short stories and novels, you start to really understand a few not so popular facts about creativity-- namely that it spews the same shit over and over. There are no real 'totally new' ideas. If you thought of it, somebody else has already written ten pages of potential crap about it and tried to make it work. Which it didn't. Don't feel bad about finding your 'totally creative, new idea' already worked over like a 10-dollar-hooker in someone else's story. There are more than nine billion people on this planet, there ought to be at least someone who already thought the same thought.
Point is, just because someone else had the same thought as you had, that doesn't mean they were any good at processing it. Just look at '50 shades of grey', I mean, can you even imagine how god-damn-many BDSM romance stories I've read that were way, waaaaay better than that crap? Having written it doesn't mean it was done in a way that made it interesting to the broad mass of people. Either the time wasn't right, or the story was too long-winded, or too badly written, or any of a thousand other reasons why it wasn't received well, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that you can write something that has already been written, but better, with enough subtle differences to make it work and look 'new' to the broad mass of people. Your own spin on a topic already broached.
Much more important is the way you write it. Make it realistic. Make it informed. Be sure you can write about it in an informed, non-psychopathic way. Answer all those questions people like me would ask themselves when reading. Don't go down the well-trodden Hollywood road where the same stupid shit is recycled over and over (and with loads of mistakes in it), because you want interested readers. You want to show them that you didn't flip a coin to pick the genre you're writing about, because that'll look like a cheap effort to make money. Of course, we authors want to be able to live from what we're writing, who wouldn't? A surgeon should love his work just as much as an author, but he'll get paid either way, so we should be, too. Especially since we always love our work.
Love your work, research. Find out what that part of society is all about, find out what your protagonist might struggle with, get a feel for their surroundings, what they might live with, what they might face. 

An Example:
If you want to use a hacker in your story, puh-lease don't forget how many hours, days, stupefying amounts of dreary coding it takes to hack anything at all. They do have two or more screens and fancy keyboards and all the thingemagogs, some of them do listen to music, but coding isn't something you can do in a crowd with loads of people making noise, partying or crawling all over you. By all that is holy, please don't, don't ever make a hacker a hip kid with a hacker's club and loads of cool gadgets and sexy girlfriends/boyfriends. Hackers are often socially awkward, rather quiet, and have little interest for gatherings, but they did start to drift into the sports world as of late. I know a lot of rock climbing and bouldering hackers, stuff they can concentrate on and do alone or in small groups to balance out those hours and hours of sitting around and waiting for their tools to finish their work.
Don't take your own computer skills as a basis. There actually is a big difference between iOS and Windows, Linux and Unix when it comes to coding. Coding on a MacBook (or to hack MacBooks) is vastly different from going after Windows users, and most hackers I know have an unhealthy relationship with Linux. I'm talking objectophilia here, people.
Think about what kind of targets your hacker might specialize in. Is it big businesses? Then go with Windows or Linux for his hacking ware. Does he do cyber terrorism? Then he probably will add Unix to the mix, or even specialize in it. Most big, important systems (power plants in particular, but also rocket silos) still use Unix, because damn, that shit is ancient and incredibly hard to hack. Does he specialize in information and 'reaching the common folk'? Then he probably will use iOS, because smartphones.
Don't make your hacker into a "hacks everything" kind of guy. A medical doctor who specializes in all fields probably sucks in all of them, same principle can be used for hackers.

Eh, what now?

Soo, research. Do it to fill your tool-belt with useful stuff. Research to get a better picture of the world, to get a feeling for the topic you want to write about, to make scenes more realistic, to capture your audience with little bits and pieces they might recognize. That idea that you had and someone else already used? Still yours. You can still do it, you can still make it work, and research is your way in. To use the hacker example, if you want to write about a hacker being hunted by the FBI-- you can probably count off at least three books or movies that would fit that description--, use a different modus operandi (m.o.). There are so many little known reasons for the FBI to be after a hacker, you could write another ten stories just with that set-up, and still have a totally new story each time. But you'll first have to research it, and I mean really get into that stuff, ankles-deep and all.
And no, watching TV-series does not count as research! As I mentioned, Hollywood does get some of the facts right, but more often than not, they don't bother with that much research and just fill in the blanks. If you see something you consider using, please just grab the key words and google it yourself until you can be absolutely sure you understand it right.
That's the key to writing something awesome, right there. You're welcome.

Something fun for you to google as a parting gift: Try to find out why TV-series with policemen pointing guns leaves real policemen in almost physical pain.

I'm looking at you, Totally Bound Publishing!

Sooo... I've been looking at my options for getting published. Of course, I've done that for years, always trying to decide if I should post this or that story on Gay Authors first, or directly go to a publisher, so I've done a lot of looking, and very little doing.
Since every author has his idols or favorites, I zeroed in on the publishing houses providing me with all the hot and fizzy stuff I gulped down over the years, and finally settled on Totally (e-)Bound Publishing. What can I say, I just love their style of rating books, and they seem open to a lot of different types of fiction :)
I'm still fighting the good fight to finish two or three of my 'almost done'-stories, but I'll take the jump then. And if they don't like those stories, well, more material for GA!

If you have experience with that publisher, and would like to share, please contact me.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 3

‘Knock, knock,’ said the spider, rapping on the cocoon wall. ‘Argh, grah, gah,’ said the fly, slowly disintegrating inside.

~

The marble floors came to my rescue as I crept through the giant villa. Marble never creaked, whether you walked in the middle or to the sides. All you had to do was watch how hard you stepped. Marble made the most curiously harsh and dim ‘clank’ sound, whenever one wasn’t watching their pace, but I did. There was still no alarm, no police sirens and no people attacking me with baseball bats, so either nobody was home and they had forgotten to arm the security system, or they were at home and hadn’t heard my grand entrance through the window. Judging by the size of the building, that second version was more than possible.
I stayed near the walls wherever I could, but I kept a good distance to every piece of furniture. Wouldn’t do me any good to creep around like a half-frozen ninja, only to bump into a vase and send it crashing down to the floor. My heart was pumping like crazy, doing its little dance through the rush of adrenaline I was having… for no reason at all. Well, there was a reason, getting ready for violence naturally led to rushes of adrenaline and other funny juices, but with me things were a little different. I had grown up in a number of institutions, most of them medical in some way, and it had left me broken and with no social or moral skills to mention. Maybe I hadn’t had those to begin with, but try as they might, my caregivers hadn’t succeeded in teaching them to me, either. Breaking into a house and digging through other people’s stuff didn’t feel wrong to me. I didn’t get nervous or fearful when I broke a law, because I didn’t understand the reasoning behind most of them. That didn’t spare me from instinctual responses, though; violence was one of the things even monkeys understood. Expecting violence drove my heart to its gallop.
I did know fear, of course. There were a lot of things I feared, although they probably made no sense to other people. They couldn’t see what I saw on a daily basis. They couldn’t see the dirty, malicious, depraved, foul, rancid, darkness. They couldn’t see how it stuck to everyone, everything, especially places where evil lived. Small evil bore small darkness, a smattering of tar-like drops clinging to men and women, pulling out in threads when it touched other things, like spittle. Big evil drew darkness into big, encompassing fog, or smoke, if you like. And where that evil nested, a sea of stinking rot was born, growing up the walls like fungus and seeping into the plastering like roots.
I feared the darkness like nothing else, but at the same time, I was very used to seeing it. People who paid for murder usually had evil in them. And the people I murdered, well… It made my job very easy, murdering those who bore darkness into this world. It made it easy on my heart, easy on my mind, to pull the trigger, or cut their throats, or, well, shove them off bridges. I was a creative assassin, albeit an opportunistic one.
In this house, though, there was no darkness. None. Nowhere. Not seeing it on a job made me more uneasy than the lingering cold in my limbs.
Something was wrong. There was always darkness at the places I went for money, just like the people paying me always were demon-monsters. I hated those dark places, the moving walls, the cold shiver running down my back, the innate feeling of dread, and I tried my best to stay away from them, but…
Nothing. This house was untouched by demons. Huh.
I stopped at the big, shiny-white stairwell and looked up into the bright darkness above. The steps were broad enough to make a good sleeping place, and there were enough of them to house thirty people if they squeezed together, but the pale marble and the screaming white walls would never see homeless people finding shelter. Some of my ‘neighbors’ would have killed to spend a night in a place like this, even if it were only sleeping on the stairs, but not me. I preferred dark rooms with boarded up windows and peeling paint, because they made nights darker and contours indistinguishable. Not being able to see where I was sleeping hid possible dark spots and helped with the anxiety.
Ever so slowly, I crept up the stairs, stopping on the last half dozen to peek over the upper edge into the drawn-out hall. No marble here, only dark, old, hardwood floors. Those creaky little bastards. And doors, oh, so many doors, more than any game show could ever fit into one trademark sentence. So many choices were coming my way, I really couldn’t decide how to best proceed. Contestant number one! Will it be door number one, right next to the ceiling-high window? Door two with the slightly peeling paint? Door three, with the  bump on the antique doorstep? Door number four, with that touch of moonlight shining on the wood, or maybe door number five, sitting in the shade? And would somebody please wake the audience for this next part?
I blocked out my galloping thoughts and listened and looked for a few more moments, hoping to see or hear a sign of where to head next, but everything was quiet. Too quiet, too normal, too… dark-less, for all I cared. It made me doubt my mission, if just a little bit.
Four doors were on the opposite side of the hallway, two more on my side. From what I remembered of the outside layout, there was a big, cavernous, windowed gazebo right at the back center of the house, and I could just imagine the private library inside. I decided the library would be behind the opposite right door, because in my imagination a left-turn after entering that door felt more natural. Rich people had enough money to make things more natural.
That left me with five other choices. The other door right in front of me wouldn’t be a bedroom, it was too exposed and demon-people were too paranoid to sleep right at the end of stairs. I went up the last few steps, then hovered there for a moment, trying to decide. Left or right?
Finally, I decided to turn left, because I myself was left-handed. If in doubt, do as you’d do. I crept down the hardwood hallway, wincing ever so often when one of the boards groaned softly beneath my soggy boots. Whoever had to bear the aftermath of my visit, would have a lot of fun with the drops of water I left in my wake. And the blood I was supposed to shed, but there were professionals for those kinds of cleaning jobs.
I slowly, carefully, checked both doors in the left wing of the first floor, holding my hand out against the old wood, all but touching it. I was trying to feel for the tingling sensations that the darkness usually brought upon me, but there was still nothing. That put me between a rock and a hard place— I’d have to either open every door and take a peeky-peek inside, risking to wake whoever was home, or I could sneak back, continue to the right wing, and risk tripping some kind of alarm after all.
Did I mention how bad I am with self-control?
I opened the first door on my left, risking a glance inside. It was a teenager’s room, judging by the posters on the walls, and it was clean and empty. It looked just like in a TV series, all nice and comfy, with a rug and a desk and a stereo, and I wanted to mess it up. I’d never had such a nice room. I’d never had my own room, as it happened. Sighing, I closed the door and crept over to the one vis-à-vis of it, listening for a moment. It wouldn’t do me any good to barge in on an old, rich couple going at it, after all.
That door opened soundlessly, too, and I was treated to another teenager’s room, its layout an exact copy of the other, except for a change in colors and poster themes. Two children, then. I hated killing children. I should have asked about this when I had taken the contract, damn it! Or had I stumbled into the same room again, too confused to orient myself? That, too, had happened before, and that, too, had led to a beating to remember. I carefully took a step inside the room, drippedy-dripping cold Bracket River water onto the flashy carpet beneath my boots, trying my hardest to remember and compare what I was seeing with what I had seen.
The safety-switch of a gun clicked behind me, and I froze.
“Don’t move a muscle,” a sharp, deep voice ordered.
Shit.