Oh, the Places You Will Go! (Otherwise known as: Why Writers Spend So Much Time Online)

Most fiction writer's have blush-worthy and/or FBI-investigation-worthy online search histories.

Last year my palms got sweaty--and I glanced over my shoulder so many times I pulled a muscle--when I scoured Google for "the best locations for growing marijuana in Michigan." I was on my iPhone at a shoe store, giggling to myself.

Not that giggling to myself in public is a strange occurrence...

So yesterday I rattled off all the things I've researched while writing my current novel to my husband. It was quite the eclectic list, so I thought I'd share.

A few recent research topics:

The Chicago Outfit 

newspaper prices in 1927

the price of a Model T

1920s fashion

how to jailbreak an iPhone

how to bypass a door locked with an electronic strike

the symptoms and treatment of schizophrenia

when was the Buckingham fountain built?

The Jazz Singer

T. S. Eliot

Jesse James

the first Ferris wheel

the colony of Roanoke

the colony of Jamestown

modern high schools and curriculum in and around Annapolis, MD

farmland in Virginia

The Spanish Armada

custom electronic mods

Bessie Smith

Gershwin

speakeasies and Prohibition

commuting times between D.C., Baltimore, and Annapolis

The Wild West

stagecoach robberies

women's suffrage 

The Great Depression

glass insulators

"upsycling"

The Roaring Twenties

recipe for applesauce cake (I was hungry)

Dante's Inferno

Robert Burns

Martin Luther King Jr.

robotics competitions

lost paintings during WWII

1963 Corvette Sting Ray

bobtail cats

Hollywood starlets

Polish neighborhoods in Chicago

how to buy an island

Johns Hopkins

childhood cancers

paradoxes

the theory of relativity

the history of the 'L'

water temperatures of Chesapeake Bay

brick Colonial architecture

sycamore trees

Baltimore Ravens and Orioles

attention seeking behavior disorders

do kids still take auto shop?

So there you have it, a peek into a writer's search engine history. Just in case you wondered why we spend so much time online...

If you're a writer, what's the strangest thing you've ever researched? Leave a comment in the doobly-doo below.