RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#PennedPossibilities 649 — What research did you conduct for your WIP, and did you uncover anything surprising or fascinating?

When you are writing 31 chapters in 31 days and posting a chapter a day, having only come up with the idea and character the day before starting, research is a concept dealt with by quick and dirty searches. I did have one interesting factino in my pocket, though. I'd found an article about growing fungus to make building blocks for construction on Mars, and knew the blocks might help repel radiation. Another recent article spoke about inflating a balloon for a habitat. I combined both ideas in the 4th chapter titled Glue. Beyond that, I spent quite a bit of time Googling things about 16 Psyche (an asteroid) and learned that Martian dust is poisonous, and like moon dust, pernicious. Recent NASA tests lofted by a private company to the moon proves that electostatic grids can capture or repel dust. I used that. Much of the rest of the technology I punted on. I realized green minerals on Mars might be rare, so I backtracked on some red-green-black ferric metaphors. Yesterday, I read up on planetary transfer orbits and made changes to the revised novel. I also learned about the Lunar Gateway space station concept, and will revise that concept when I get to revising the relevant chapter.

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Apr 21 at 4:08amWeb
Show threadRS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistApr 21

#PennedPossibilities 649 2/2 — What research did you conduct for your WIP, and did you uncover anything surprising or fascinating?

This answer, however, should interest any authors wanting to learn something from another authors' search behavior. I finally got completely feed up with the substandard results from DuckDuckGo and the on again off again AI search creeping into Google results, even with &udm=14.

A few days ago I decided to research paid search. All FREE search, it goes without saying, monetizes your behavior, time, or attention, so I understand it isn't free. How much do you make per hour? When I search for anything that could be construed as a product or service someone could SELL, it's impossible to find answers. Look for words for describing how to rock a baby, for example. I'm sure you've a slew of searches you've given up on.

I am trialing kagi.com. I am NOT advertising it; I'm not endorsing it. I've only tried two searches of the 100 allocated me so far. However, those two have been so full of useful results that I'm still mining them the next day.

I'll report back after I use it more.

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