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<\/div>\nI’ve mentioned before that I am a Googlopath. In fact, when making up the word “Googlopath”, I Googled “pathological” just to be sure I was using it correctly. I pretty much Google everything. And I laugh my *** off when Google tries to autocomplete the search phrases for me. As bizarre as they often seem, sometimes Google gets it right. Recently, my dog was up to his usual shenanigans and swallowed…well, can you guess? Yep, he swallowed my underwear. I freaked out and immediately turned to my pal, Google, to find out what one is supposed to do when her dog eats her underwear. (He’s fine, btw. Trust me, you don’t wanna hear how that one played out….)<\/p>\n
I rely on Google to help me research things I need to know in order to write authentic characters. If I stuck to the “write what you know” mantra, my stories wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. One of my favorite means of research is watching YouTube videos. While writing Play Me, I’m Yours<\/em>, I needed to learn as much as I could about playing the piano and swimming, and a little bit about swing dancing<\/a>. These are things that are important to my characters, so they’re important to me. While I did read through websites and blogs, I also soaked up video after video on YouTube. In my exploration, I discovered Stone Nelson’s channel, and it was eerie how much he reminded me of my main character, Lucas. He even made a video of himself playing one of the songs in the novel, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl<\/a> \u201d. I also watched dozens of swimming videos, like JimmyDShea’s “How to Swim Butterfly Stroke<\/a>” (and was glued to Olympic coverage of swimming events). I learned about the various strokes and got a look at what swim meets are like. I even learned a few swim cheers! And I found myself so inspired by my research that I signed up for adult swim lessons shortly after completing the novel.<\/p>\n Although I learn a lot from watching instructional type videos, I find personal vlogs a great source of inspiration as a writer. Vlogging is a phenomenon that didn’t exist when I was in school, but there are\u2014hang on, let me Google it\u2014tens of millions<\/a> of vloggers out there making videos for public consumption, and over 800 million<\/a> unique users visit YouTube each month. Many vloggers hide their real identities, which makes them feel at ease enough to speak freely about anything from the most mundane topics to those that are highly controversial. Do I steal their stories? No. But I watch and listen and learn, and most importantly, I feel<\/em>. It’s “people watching”, up close and personal.<\/p>\n Sometimes I watch teenage vloggers to get a sense of how teens talk and the sorts of things they care about. With video blogs, you get an instant feel for the vloggers’ personalities. I find that when I connect to them on an emotional level, it sparks my creativity and the plot bunnies run rampant. Vlogs can also provide writers with excercises in identifying character tags (like voice, gestures, dialect, hair, clothing, etc.) and “show vs. tell” (try muting a video and using the subject’s facial expressions and mannerisms to interpret how they’re feeling.).<\/p>\n\n