As I mention in last weeks post about fish cleaning stations, I didn’t intend to do any research for the Miri Attwater series. So when I did start doing some research, I wasn’t doing it like I would if I had been writing a non-fiction book about marine biology. I wasn’t taking a lot of detailed notes with page numbers and cross-referencing. I wasn’t double checking to see if information I got in one source could be confirmed by other sources. I wasn’t looking at a lot of original sources – meaning I wasn’t reading scientific research articles in marine biology journals. Because I know from my text book writing and editing work that there is lots of misinformation in science books and text books, and it gets copied when writers don’t go back to original sources. Writing a really well researched science book takes time – a lot of it. And it helps if you’re an expert in the field.
Really, my first goal for my research was to look at pretty pictures so I could make the underwater scenes in the book more real to the reader.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the more I saw, the more amazed I became by the diversity of marine life. …
