 Have you ever been reading a book when the author drops a fact-bomb on you that leaves you a little stunned, or pleased that you've learned something new? This has happened to me a few times, and I love it., especially when it's a small detail you wouldn't have really noticed, but you're glad the author took the time to research and include. So, while writing Sparks Fly, whenever I came across something I wasn't 100% sure of, I took off down the research rabbit hole to see what I could find. As I'm English, living in the UK, and writing a story set in Chicago, somewhere I've never visited, a lot of the research in my book centred around location. I wanted to choose the right settings for my story and spent quite a bit of time ensuring the time to travel between locations was accurate and that the weather would be realistic. Since my book is set at the start of the year, be prepared for a frosty Chicago winter.
One of my MC's also happens to be a police detective, and I'll admit, my research for this involved a lot of tv - mostly as I binge-watched Lucifer. That counts as research, right? But for me, the most interesting bit of research came from a scene that might not even make it to the final release! While writing a flashback scene set in 1937 from my vampire MC, I wondered how, if he refused to take blood from a living person, would he drink? This led me to think about blood bags, something we've seen or read about in a lot of paranormal fantasy like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries. But this got me thinking, had blood bags been invented in 1937? The short answer is no. Blood bags weren't invented until much later, in 1950 by a Dr William Murphy and before this, glass bottles were used to store blood.* However, I also stumbled across this really fascinating fact that in 1937, Dr Bernard Fantus, director of therapeutics at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States.** I love this little snippet that led to a completely random coincidence that in the same year my MC became a vampire, the first hospital blood bank in the US was opened in Chicago, the very city where my story is set. Pretty cool, huh? Now tell me, what's the craziest, most interesting fact you've ever come across while reading (or writing)? ---- *The Blood Bag (1950) **Dr Bernard Fantus
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