I once heard Canadian Sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer say that writing was how justified his research habit. I am, by profession, a researcher, but the amount of research I have had to do for my WIP (five years, two drafts, and counting 🙁 ), is probably more than I did during my PhD.

My research has run the gamut from the natural history of certain predators to Buddhist burial practices to the transition zone between subtropical and temperate forests in the Himalayas to poring over the Google Earth map of Khabarovsk, Russia in obsessive detail. I’ve also read widely outside of my speculative fiction/ eco-fiction genre, including thrillers, classic works of natural history (The Peregrine by J.A. Baker; read it!) mysteries, literary fiction, and a journalistic memoir of the Vietnam War (Dispatches by Michael Herr; read that too!)

Needless to say, none of this makes for a draft that could be written within the space of NanoWriMo