On the road again

by Rick Blechta

Grand Central Station

Having been double-vaccinated, my wife and I are busily planning a trip home to the NYC area for the first time since Christmas of 2019.

I must say it feels a bit strange to be making these plans. Normally we make this trip at least twice a year, oftentimes more. Since it’s been so long — and also because we haven’t gone anywhere since the pandemic began in late January 2020 — it feels like we’re going somewhere we’ve never been before.

The time since our last trip has been tough because my wife’s mom is 91 and in frail health. She has live-in, 24-hour-a-day help and my wife and her sister (who lives in LA) have to take care of all the business things, pay bills, sort out problems, etc., etc., something that’s difficult and frustrating from such distances.

On my side, only my brother still lives in the area but he is recovering from a major illness, and even though I’ve spoken to him a lot since he became ill over a year ago, it was only by phone. However, I also have lots of friends down there too.

So it will be good for both my wife and me to be “on site” if only for a week.

But I have even more reason to be excited. You see, my WIP is set (mostly) in the New York City area and I can expend some shoe leather chasing down locations I need, asking questions, doing general research, in other words, the stuff I really enjoy when working on a novel.

First will come a train ride down the Hudson to Grand Central Station in Manhattan. I’m not all that familiar with that route into The City because unlike my main character, I grew up on the Long Island Sound so I took a different train route into Grand Central — and believe me, I know that route very well indeed, having used it every day for my first two years in university (NYU), not to mention numerous other trips.

Then I want to visit several places in Manhattan that I’m thinking might suit my needs for other locations. Some of these I’ve seen before (as in walking by them), but others I’ve only seen through Google street view, and believe me, that’s not enough informationon which to base a scene in a book.

If I had more time, I would also travel to Washington, DC for a few more days of feet-on-the-ground research. Now is just not the time for that. Better to start small in our first “big” trip in 19 months.

Anyone else planning to travel? And where are you going?

Oh, the places you will see!

By Rick Blechta

Being pretty well house-bound by government decree here in Ontario, my mind slipped sideways the other day, thinking of all the places to which I’ve travelled for research purposes since I began writing novels.

These places include various places in the UK, Vienna, Paris and the northwest of France, and Italy, where we were forced to visit Rome, Florence, Tuscany, and Venice.

When I first began writing, I never considered the need for “on location” research. It really is indispensable if you want verismo in your story.

Never having travelled much, I didn’t understand how incredibly joyous is can be. You will meet wonderful people, have unexpected adventures and learn arcane things that will add wonderful layers of information to your plot — if used judiciously.

Another truth I soon discovered came at tax time. These research trips could be written off as long as I could prove to the Canada Revenue Agency that I was legitimately working on a novel.

Since many of the jaunts were to countries where English wasn’t spoken, it was indispensable to have a translator to do the job properly. Fortunately my darling wife is a polyglot. She speaks French, German, and learned to speak Italian well enough for our trip to Italy that she was able to haggle in Italian with a gondolier in Venice one night.

I could always count on her to gain access to a number of places I wouldn’t have been able to manage, using her language skills leavened with a dash of charm.

Best of all, as long as I paid her something — we settled on $25 a day, plus room, board, and travel expenses — she was technically my employee so her costs could also be written off.

The real payoff, however, was all the little details I unearthed, things I never would have thought of had I not visited those locations, and it’s those details, casually tossed into my writing, that help readers feel as if they’re actually “present” in the story they’re reading. I’ve had those comments a lot for which I’m really grateful.

I miss those days (as does my wife!) and I will have to make a trip to Washington, DC if I’m to finish the novel on which I’m working, and I’m sure some wonderful unexpected tidbits will come out of my research trip to that great city.

I can’t wait!