Just the facts, ma’am.

So…if you read my “About” page, you know that I love road trips. Can’t get enough of ‘em! And to write the Bone Wars Trilogy, I’ve covered quite a lot of territory across the U.S. (My husband, Al, does the driving so that I can watch and navigate. Bless him!)

What’s great about field research is that you can chat with fellow travelers, museum personnel, and others; from those chats, great tips often emerge—tips that send you to places you hadn’t heard of before. When planning my road trips, I always allow time for those unforeseen excursions.

By now you’re asking why I’ve posted such a seemingly mundane image: a spreadsheet, of all things.

Well, that’s because my research began with the scholarly part. I started with Cope’s and Marsh’s official biographies and moved on to other books, old news articles, scientific papers, maps, a fossil database, etc. For every fact to which I could assign a date or time period, I entered the information in a spreadsheet (for ease of sorting). This exercise lasted months, but it resulted in a plethora of chronological facts which provided the basic timeline of the Bone Wars Trilogy.

As a bonus, several of the 2,650 entries in the spreadsheet pointed me to historically significant places in the story—places I added to the itineraries for my field research. Boy, did that pay off! I’ll tell you more about my whirlwind field trips in near-future posts. All very exciting stuff!