Down with the Sickness

Following up on my first post about procrastination, I say with pride that I have made baby steps towards getting things done. I started editing my fantasy WIP - hooray - and I did the wash. Those dishes are still piling up in the hallway though...

the aforementioned dishes, of which half have since been removed

But I'd prefer to move on to today's topic: the sickness - aka story research. Perhaps it would be best to first explain why I consider this a sickness. The answer is that, whenever I actually decide to do research - you know, instead of just wing it - I get obsessed.

While writing Red Sun for example, I needed to learn how fast-roping procedures worked. Having never served in the military and not knowing whom to ask, I went where every sane IT professional does and queried Google. Cue six hours of me reading US army manuals and watching YouTube videos, all to write one paragraph of text. Not to say that research isn't important or informative but there's something about me and curiosity which disallows me to stop reading even after research has lost relevance to the topic at hand - I started with fast-roping, continued on to how tilt-rotor aircraft function and ended up reading about flight controls despite the fact there's no scene in the entire work where that could POSSIBLY have added any value.

The same sort of thing happened while writing The Black March - that fantasy WIP I'm editing. I had established early on that there would be a large army of humans facing off against a smaller force of undead. This lent itself well to a guerrilla-esque war, especially since the undead don't tire easily and can out-march a human army. Awesome setup, I thought, but I didn't have the faintest clue how fast - or by what means - a human army in the 14th century would march.

Unlike the fast-roping thing, I knew my dad's familiarity with military history would give me a pretty good answer. Indeed, while not exactly 14th century, he pulled out an infantry manual from the 1790s and set me up with some basic calculations which accounted for the difference. Honestly, I can't remember the details but I think we worked out a human would march 8 of 24 hours and cover about 20 kilometer tops (there's the whole having to organize the column, get everyone going, navigate, stop for rests, sleep and so on which slows down the entire process). By that theory, an undead army which doesn't need to stop for more than an hour every day, could probably cover 60 kilometers in 24 hours. Then I started calculating distances, drawing up maps, checking those against my text and finally ended up with a number which is once again mentioned in exactly one scene.

Now, to jump from past to present, I'm down with the sickness again. I'm sketching out a prospective cyberpunk/biopunk universe and decided, if the concept bears fruit, I want to use a semi-realistic hacker as my main character. Naturally, I'm aware hacking doesn't work the way Hollywood would have us believe it does but I didn't - and still don't really - know anything about the actual methods employed.

I did however find two really useful resources: MalwareMustDie, a blog dedicated to malware research, and the FireEye blog, which is written by a security company active in enterprise threat prevention - there were several others I looked into too but those gave the most detail IMO.

To date, I've sunk approximately 20 hours into reading up on malware. In that same time span, I wrote a measly two scenes. Now I'm acutely worried I'll never get around to actually writing and simply continue researching until there are so many ideas floating around my head that nothing comes of them.

Not to say I don't like reading everything I can. It's interesting, fun and makes me feel like I'm actually learning something useful for a change. But it's also a sickness, an obsessive need to make every last detail plausible, no matter how small. At the moment I'm wondering if I'm not taking it a little too far - more so considering the story I'm researching for isn't even past the concept phase. The mere thought of so much 'wasted effort ' (yes, I know it isn't really wasted) conflicts with the part of me which demands I must be efficient in any endeavor I set myself to.

Oh, if only the human mind were a rational construct...