Tormented by Research

by Alayna Williams

Research is not for the faint of heart.

We’re often told to write what we know. And there’s a lot of truth in that idea. We can explain what we understand and convey the meaning to others when we’re intimately familiar with what we’re writing about. Oftentimes, I took this to mean that I should only write about the things in my small world…which, frankly, seems pretty boring sometimes. I often start with a base of what I do know – Tarot, criminal investigations, psychology – and then branch out into the unknown.

And that’s where it can get scary. The unknown.

To write about what I don’t know, I’ve gotta dig deep. Start the research process and work on filling the gaps in my knowledge. For my ORACLE books, I felt I had a pretty good handle on the Tarot – I’ve been puttering with cards since I was a teenager. I’m also well-acquainted with criminal justice through my work. And I knew my heroine well: Tara Sheridan is a criminal profiler who uses Tarot cards to solve crimes. She’s a member of an order of oracles who are descended from the Oracle of Delphi. I had a fat file folder of notes about ancient oracles from my last adventures with Tara in DARK ORACLE. For DARK ORACLE, I taught myself some of the rudimentary ideas about dark matter and particle accelerators – fun stuff that was utterly foreign to me. I spent a lot of time watching PBS and paging through textbooks that were way over my head. With that book, I knew clearly what I didn’t know and what I needed to. I drew a roadmap to get the information I wanted, and dove in with relish.

ROGUE ORACLE was a whole ‘nother kettle of radioactive fish. I’ve always been intriuged by Cold Ware-era mysteries. I set Tara and her partner, federal agent Harry Li, on the trail of a serial killer who’s selling old nuclear secrets on the black market. And the villain happens to be a Chernobyl survivor.

I was a kid in middle school when Chernobyl happened. A bystander’s bystander, half a world away. But something about the story captivated and frightened me. I remember seeing some pictures of Chernobyl on the news, of an industrial plant. That plant was not quite so different than those plants that surrounded me where I grew up, where my dad worked. Many of us had the experience of our fathers returning home in the middle of the night, scrubbed red as lobsters and wearing white crinkly plastic suits. We knew a little bit about contamination, but nothing like what the television showed.

On the television, we saw fire. And the rumors about plumes of poison moving over Europe, unstoppably. It made me shudder. I remember that my mother turned off the television when we were in the room.

But the story of Chernobyl – of the people who died immediately in the fire, those who died after of horrible cancers, of secrets and something invisible that could kill so ruthlessly – it seemed to seep into the minds of the adults. I remember that my class was shown a film about radiation in the school library. I don’t remember what it was called, but I remember that it was pretty graphic. It talked a lot about Hiroshima. Poisoned radioactive organs in jars. A man in a perfectly pristine white T-shirt who was covered in radiation burns. Shadows burnt onto sidewalks from Hiroshima. Almost a supernatural horror – more terrifying than the books about the making of classic Dracula and Frankenstein movies that we were reading.

It did give me nightmares. And I think many of the other kids.

And I guess that it never did completely dislodge from my memory. It still rattled around the back of it somewhere, wanting to crawl out on the page. So I dug into research, as I had for my other books.

But this research was different for me. I paged through stories of survivors, widows, orphans. Saw pictures of children in orphanages. Read about the half-lives of radioactive elements. Read about how the containment structure has failed, about how one can see daylight through the seams of the containment structure, the Sarcophagus. So much of it was so heartbreaking and utterly disturbing.

And it gave me nightmares all over again. That formless fear had been bolstered by data and images, became more solid and real. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, scratching out notes.

It felt much different than digging into mythology and old history. This felt real. Because it was.

And that, I think, is where research can get scary: when it drags up your own fear on its tiptoes and slams it up against the wall of reality. Then I realized that the story had a hold on me as much as I thought I had a grasp on it. Maybe more.

About the Author:

Rogue Oracle

Delphic Oracle #2

by Alayna Williams

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