Cool Story, Bro - Open Book Blog Hop #111

♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦

Topic #111

Research. Post an interesting fact or facts you’ve come across researching a book.

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

There are a lot of fascinating things in non-fiction books. I used to think they’d be so boring, like school textbook reading on late may afternoons. When reading is assigned, I guess it is boring. Something in your brain immediately rejects the material, simply because it’s assigned. But, even then, these tidbits would come up that managed to make it bearable.

Of course that feeling changed over the course of my undergraduate studies. There was more reward than punishment to the assignments. Eventually, selecting the material for research became part of the assignment. Researching all of my graduate papers was thus very enjoyable. What can I say, I like to learn and I like to read, so doing research for my books is a huge win.

The most interesting facts I came across were those pertaining to the timeline of OP-DEC: Operation Deceit. Not only did I have to find the perfect film released at the perfect time, but I had to find dates that allowed for a German submarine to be on the surface. Those dates had to correspond with military actions over a set period. That’s a tall order! Good luck with that, right?

Yeah, well, it worked out. The mid-May date for the release of This Gun for Hire in the New York City Paramount theaters headed a cycle of dark nights, where the moon was barely perceptible. To add to that, the Thousand Bomber Raid featured in the story soon followed at the beginning of June.

With my first book, Blue Honor, I was learning to write around historical events. OP-DEC benefited from that exercise immensely, but I can’t pat myself on the back too much. I simply did the research to find the perfect time, and it fell into my lap due to that effort. Still, this fact is something that I love to chat about in regards to my writing. It’s a great conversational piece.

Let’s hop on over to the other author’s pages to see what they have to say and continue the cool stories…