Virtual field trip

Most of us writers are more textual than visual, but all of us need to be able to see, at least in our mind’s eye, the places, people and things about which we write.  A few weeks ago, I discovered a great tool that helps me to do this.  Historypin.com shows me images of the past superimposed on contemporary maps.  You can view a short video about the site here.

I was looking for architectural images from the coastal area of the state of Maine in the 1870’s, so I typed that into the search bars on the site’s home page.  A couple dozen images of houses showed up on the map, and I was able to add some details to the story I was writing about an old house in Maine built just after the Civil War ended. 

Another way to use the site is for inspiration.  You can browse the site by collection (i.e. facial hair through time), tours (i.e. travels through Europe) or community.  What do you think?  Useful or a time waster?

Links to help with your research

Technology tip:  Living historian and reenactor groups, like good historical novelists, try to be as honest as they can in portraying their characters, and we can learn much from them.  They have studied everything about the period of history they portray, right down to the material from which their buttons are made.

The web page of a group devoted to the Middle Ages can be found at http://www.sca.org/

The Civil War Reenactors home page is

http://www.cwreenactors.com/index.php

Reenactor.net at http://www.reenactor.net/

Is a site that includes reenactor groups from ancient times to the present.

How to stay on task

This summer I have writer's block.  One of the reasons is because I recently purchased some new technology tools and well, as you know, learning new technologies can be a time eater. 

I woke up and decided to devote the entire morning to writing chapter 4 of a book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Artctic explorer. I sat down at the computer, opened up a new file, and titled it Chapter 4.  Hmmmm.  How to begin?  I reread the draft of Chapter 3 and fiddled with a few sentences there. This all took about 20 minutes and I still couldn’t think of how to begin Chapter 4.

So, I decided to check in on my email.  Three messages---all from students (this summer, I have 20 writing students from my university in Ohio).  It only took five minutes to read the messages, but one student gave a link to website she wanted me to review as a possible source for her project.  That took another 10 minutes.  Oh yes, and while I was on the internet, I decided to check my Face book posts.  Oops, someone posted something controversial on my wall—I then needed to post and upload a video and link in order to make a rebuttal.  Another  fifteen minutes. 

I decided to knock off for lunch at 11 a.m. and after that I had to watch the news and after that, I was a little sleepy so I took a walk to wake myself up.  The walk made me tired, so I decided to take a little nap, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like writing anymore.  Therefore, I decided to devote today to working on Chapter 4 and here I am writing this blog post. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll have lunch because it is 11 a.m.  After that, I’ll work on Chapter 4.

How about you?  Is technology sometimes a distraction to writing?  Share your ideas aboput how to stay on task.