You’ve got to love the internet. I’m working on a cradle song for The Singing Stones, the fantasy story I’m writing. It needs to be a ballad, so I need to work with a rhyming scheme.
Once, when searching for rhymes, I used to sit and mutter my way through the alphabet, hoping my little grey cells would spark and come up with a suitable rhyme. Now I just go to www.rhymezone.com. I can’t believe the generosity and inventiveness of the makers of the almost infinite number of webpages out there. And I can’t believe they’re all available to me in here, in my office in this seaside suburb of Sydney. While researching a story on grizzly bears, I could consult my cousin Kath who’s a vet in Vancouver, and use Google Earth to peek at Emerald Lake at Yoho National Park, literally half a world away from me. You got to love it.
It can also be frustrating. In Grizzly, I have the characters walking across the Natural Bridge in Yoho Naitonal Park. My editor quite rightly questioned whether people could do this. I know I read it on a site when researching the story, but can't find it again. I usually note carefully where I find gems, but this one eludes me. So when you read the final version, if the characters are only 'near' the bridge, not 'on' the bridge, that's why. I do like to make sure the facts in even the fiction books are true. And my editor did find a site with some reference to not being 'one of the idiots clambering over the top of the bridge.' My search continues for now ...
