I want to be an author.

I write. A lot. But I don’t write things for anyone other than myself and one or two other people to see. Even just sharing  a silly fairy tale that’s inspired by a video game was not exactly easy for me. I want to write a book someday, and I have an idea for one, but like so many other people, I don’t have much to show for it, other than a thousand pages of writing that I don’t want to share with anyone.

This isn’t a post complaining about writing though. This is a post about one of my favorite side effects of writing, which are the rabbit holes I fall into as I’m trying to write. One minute I’m trying to describe how something smells and then two hours later I’m reading about how turpentine is made. And that’s one of the more normal things that I’ve randomly started researching because of writing. I should keep a journal of all the things I’ve read about because I bet there’s some good inspiration there. Off the top of my head I can remember reading about:

• Voodoo
• old names for illnesses and diseases (For example, phnemonia being called lung fever)
• eleuthero
• the can-can dance
• snake oil
• sled dogs
• ice ages
• chiengora (dog fur wool)
• Montreal
• horses
• falconry
• deer
• holistic medicine
• Iceland
• biodomes
• birds native to China
• replacement knee surgery

Seriously, looking at that list makes me feel crazy. And that’s just a small sampling of all the crap I’ve read about, just to write stories that are intended for no one but myself! This is probably part of why I haven’t started that book I want to write yet. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of research I’ll end up doing to write a convincing story.

I need to get over that.