on Anne R. Allen:

How often should you water a cactus?

What is the name of the president who came before Abraham Lincoln?

How do you blow up a bridge?

What’s so special about the Sydney opera house?

What does SPECTRE stand for?

In the course of writing a novel, a writer — one who will never indulge in an info dump — will need to find the answers to all sorts of oddball questions, some of them basic, others esoteric, all of them critical.

He or she will also need to know enough about Siberian weather patterns, the career paths of math professors, oil drilling techniques, and the training of dancing horses called dressage to create credible settings and write authentic sounding dialogue.

Explore beneath the surface to find the pearl that will make your book stand out from the crowd: the right research, properly used, can make all the difference.