Hello, Go Teen Writers! It’s Jill, here for my last hosted panel of the summer. I hope you enjoyed these. I sure had a lot of fun learning about all of you. Today is the first day back to school for my kids, which means it’s also the first day back to me having to wake up SUPER EARLY! 🙁 But that’s okay. I’m most productive in the mornings, so conceivably, I’ll start getting things accomplished now. Because I’m really, really behind. Really.

So, bring it 2017-2018 school year. I’m ready!

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Yeah! Whoo! Bwa ha ha . . .

What’s the strangest thing you have ever had to research online for your book?

Shannon Dittemore
I just finished writing a book about ice road trucking in a magical land. I’ve researched a bunch of weird stuff lately. Maybe my favorite research moment was when I stumbled onto an image of an r/c ice road truck that looked identical to the rig my brain had concocted. It was amazing and I had to share it with everyone. Poor people. No one knew what I was talking about, but it was such a shock to see my imagination realized like that. Crazy, crazy.

Stephanie Morrill

“History of urinals” is the most recent weird thing I’ve searched for. I’ve also had to write some uncomfortable emails to doctor friends saying things like, “What’s something that could happen where the unborn baby would die, but they would already know what gender it was?”

Jill Williamson
The Safe Lands trilogy wins this answer, hands down, though it’s difficult to pick just one of the things I had to research as the strangest. There were so many weird things I researched for that trilogy. Here are a few:
-how to build a funeral pyre to burn dozens of corpses. :-/
-what to do for a gunshot wound.
-types of waterborne and bloodborne diseases.
-sexually transmitted diseases.
-vaping.
-being a doctor and knowing doctory stuff.
-a multitude of narcotics and their effects.
-what it feels like to take different narcotics, heroin in particular.
-GPS tracking implants for dogs (I put them in humans).
-how to disable a dam or an electrical power plant.
-how to make a simple homemade bomb. (I wonder if the FBI picked up on some of my Google searches that year…)
-people that live in underground sewers.
-artificial insemination.
-how live TV shows are filmed.
-what it feels like to be tazed.
-a day in the life of a garbage man.
-a day in the life on a cattle ranch.
-a day in the life working in a chicken slaughterhouse. 😛
-a day in the life in a maximum-security prison.
-prison horror stories. :-/
-how night vision goggles work.
-how to make your own hot air balloon. (This one I really enjoyed.)
If any of that intrigues you, read The Safe Lands trilogy and you’ll see how it all fit in. Ha ha.

In fact, just for kicks, here is the book trailer my publisher Blink made for the series. They did a great job with the Finley and Flynn Morning Show.

Now it’s your turn. What’s the strangest thing you have ever had to research online for your book?