Category Archives: Clockwork Heart 2

I managed to convey my characters to their destination yesterday, thanks to the wonders of the web, although they’ve yet to slip out to look around. Honestly, how did writers manage before all the information in the world was at their fingertips? A little research on variable-gauge axles and rail gauge changing facilities gave me what I want. The technology wasn’t around in the quasi-Victorian time period of steampunk, but it seems like it could have been, perhaps in a more primitive form, had the need for it been perceived by a clever, engineering-minded society like Ondinium.

Yesterday I visited the library, promising myself that I’d only check out a few novels for the weekend, and ended up carrying home an armful, of course. This week my theme is “thinking,” with Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, and Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore. I’ve read the first and am halfway through the second. The information in these first two books draws to a great extent on the same body of research, the same research I’ve read about in other books, like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational — but I figure that re-reading that research will help embed it in my memory, and each book takes a slightly different slant on it.

What does this have to do with rail gauge changers?

One of the lessons in these books is that more information does not necessarily lead to better decision-making. In fact, a few pertinent data points lead to as good, if not better, decisions and predictions than a plethora of data. For example, Lehrer reports on stock investment experiments in which subjects who could only see share prices rise and fall made better investing decisions than subjects who could review all the financial information to which they could gain access; and on college counselors whose predictions of incoming students’ freshman grades were more accurate knowing only the students’ high-school GPAs and scores on one standardized test than college counselors who had access to student’s high-school transcripts, test scores, application essays, personality and vocational test scores, and personal interviews.

As Lehrer notes, quoting Herbert Simon: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (p. 159).

I love the fact that I have the vast resources of the internet at my fingertips, and it’s a rush to find a real-life solution to my story problems, like the existence of rail gauge changers. However, sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have come up with that answer faster if I hadn’t stopped to research it. I spend an awful lot of time trying to find information online — how a Victorian-era airgun would work, how long it takes for steam engines to refuel, what doctors do about heavy blood loss when transfusions aren’t readily available — when it might be better for me just to write forward, making guesses or inventing things out of whole cloth, and save the fact-checking process for the second draft. After all, the first lesson in writing is to put words on the page.

Ah, well.  Now that my characters are where they need to be, I have a whole new area of research to conduct….

Last weekend I managed to put in another 10K on my Clockwork Heart sequel, although some of it was hard-won. I was having trouble with the fact that locomotives need to stop periodically to replenish their coal and water — and a stop was going to give my characters a very good chance of escaping, which wasn’t going to suit the plot at all.

So I grumbled about it on Facebook, and a number of friends replied.  I appreciated the help; several sent me facts about steam engines, several suggested fantastic methods of fueling-on-the-run, and several reminded me that it’s my story, and steam engines should refuel just as often as the story requires, and no more. 

I gotta admit, sometimes I hit that realism barrier and forget that I can walk around it, if I really must.  Writers strive for a certain level of realism in their stories, even in fantasy. Doesn’t matter if your book is full of magic and monsters; you’ll probably still take the time to mention watering the horses or gathering wood for the fire, or any other little detail of day-to-day life that will make your world seem real, even though it’s purely imaginative. Those little realistic details help the reader accept the more outrageously fantastic parts of your story — “okay, other than the magic and the monsters, this world works pretty much the same as mine. Got it.”

I’ve been especially concerned with realism in Ondinium, because there isn’t any magic. Well, all right, lighter-than-air metal is technically “magical,” because it defies all the known laws of physics, but as far as the characters are concerned, it’s just another wondrous curiosity of nature to be exploited in the name of industrial development. And, other than that, I’ve tried to keep technology in the range of the possible for the late 19th and early 20th century.

Besides, I have a father who counts the bullets expended in movies and books and is quick to critique those amazing “infinity clips” so many heroes carry — I understand that readers who are experts in a field will be quick to comment if an author gets the details wrong!

However, my steam engine must travel without stopping, so even though I’m not sure how long an engine can go without refueling/rewatering in reality, it’s going to succeed in Ondinium. Chalk it up to superior manufacturing, if you must….

So now I’ve got my characters one last transfer away from their destination, but I’ve been momentarily stumped by difference in rail gauge between Ondinium and the surrounding countries, an important defense strategy that I set up earlier in the novel and now need to resolve within the necessities of the story. Doh! Trapped by my own precedent!