Writing is Weird and so are my Google searches
14January 11, 2014 by Kira Lyn Blue
I laughed out loud yesterday in response to Kristen Lamb’s post You Know You’re a Writer When….
You should stop by and check her out, but it was this that really got my attention:
I can’t tell you how often I’ve joked with my husband about having the NSA tapped into my PC because of the stuff I’ve researched for my writing.
A few examples:
- How to break into a garage
- How to break into a patio door
- How long does it take a person to die of suffocation?
- Dogfighting in Indiana
- How to train a fighting dog
- Quickest ways to kill someone
- Lethal strikepoints on a body
- Flashpoint of natural gas
- Arson investigation techniques
I mean, can you imagine what that search history would look like to someone without the context that I’m researching for scenarios for a book?
You also really don’t want to know what kinds of ads Google gives me as a result. I’m kidding, it mostly sends me baby stuff because I use baby name sites so frequently to name characters. And I still get Tony Robbins ads from the one time I looked him up for inspiration for a character I was voicing for an audiobook I was recording.
kiralynblue 
My weirdest thing, that I can think of, has to do with killing people, too. How long someone can survive after getting stabbed in the gut.
I think I did a variant of that, too! I was trying to figure out how realistic it was for a character to be injured a certain way and NOT have damage to the intestines which would make the injury that much more serious. I ended up asking a paramedic friend and learned waaaay more than I intended to!
Funny, I did that one too. Oh, and whether it’s better to pull the knife out or leave it in if you want to survive.
I’ve done a lot of research on plant toxins and their effects because I ‘m basing my ambimorph character’s abilities on duplication of chemicals that terrestrial plants produce. What I’ve found is that there are some scary-ass vegetables out there. You’re better off eating meat, animals usually stop fighting back once they’re dead.
So, what you’re telling me is the plantpocalypse is coming? AFK to invest in herbicides!
That’s cool. 🙂
I researched how to remove eyeballs without damaging them. Apparently that process is called enucleation, while cutting through the eyeball in order to remove it (for when you don’t care about damage to the eyeball itself) is called evisceration. There is a notched spoon and/or a loop of wire involved in the first, and sort of a flattened sharp-ended spoon for the second. And now you know.
…although my strangest one, now that I’m looking at my search history, is ‘crocodile fruitcake’. What?
I did ask, didn’t I? Suppose I deserve to be stuck with that image then. And now I, too, can boast “crocodile fruitcake” as my strangest search. It ended up rather disappointing, though.
Yeah, I don’t know how that came up at all. Maybe I should make something.
I found another funny on mine “french toast pocalypse.” That wasn’t related to writing though. Someone recently mentioned a french toast alert in the context of the big snowfalls we’ve recently had and I got the two mixed up while I was trying to figure out the french toast reference.
Oo, I have a lot of interesting ‘define:’ searches. Inculcate, uprucked, coursing, rutilated, caravansary, petichiae, furze, flensed, airag ….. I like words.
Maybe this explains some of those mysterious search terms I get that bring people to my blog….
[…] Careful What You Google Writing is weird and so are my Google searches In Which I examine my Google Search History One day my Google search history will get me arrested […]