Research Links

Research is all about the search and the Web has become the best writer's tool for research in the history of the written word. Yahoo!, Google and MSN are the three major search engines to start your quest for information but you quickly find that the facts are not all that you need. Frequently you need to let your imagination play with the information and interpret the facts into your own voice. For this, you need a different search approach. This is what I do.

First, you should be aware of the Amazon.com search engine that allows you to search inside the book, providing access to millions of lines of text from thousands of books.

Search:
Keywords:

This is truly an amazing search and provides you with a quick and comprehensive list of where a particular phrase has been used by other writers. Try it with "Call me Ishmael" from Moby Dick. You will find over 3000 hits with references from Miss Manners to Tom Peters and every fiction style manual in between.

You should also pay attention to what is selling right now, what the marketplace is telling you about the audience of readers out there. I regularly check the best sellers lists to stay on top of the potential audience out there:

Another great search application I use is for quotations. A crisp quotation is a shorthand way of clarifying a theme, character or an entire book. Look below for the quotations that inspired me during the writing of Devil Jazz, all obtained from The Quotations Page. These quotes enabled me to focus my own thoughts and bring clarity and crispness to my chapters and characters.

Research on Devil Jazz...

Devil Jazz is primarily about good vs. evil and our inability to be good. There are 10 commandments and it is difficult to remember them, let alone obey them every day of your life. Add to that the enormous ability of the Devil to seduce us into sinful acts and you have the deck totally stacked against us. This realization that evil has all the cards in the hand of life has sparked comments from others over the years, some of whom I have sampled below for your amusement.

Good and evil

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books.

Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)

I can resist anything but temptation.

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I

Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell.

Unknown

The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.

John Locke (1632 - 1704)

The second theme of Devil Jazz is our freedom to choose, to act of our own free will. We make a choice every day to keep ourselves free of sin or not, according to our faith and fear of consequences. Freedom for our actions is a balance between faith and reason. If we truly believed that breaking any of the 10 commandments would send us into everlasting Hell, we wouldn't cross the line. However, our reason tells us that Judgment will not be that harsh, if there really is a Judgment. Also, with the rise of the individual, the concept of external Judgment based on arcane and ill-defined rules is a conflict with our individual sense of self-worth and superiority. So we break a few commandments every day in the reasonable assumption that we will get away with it. We are free to choose and either make a good argument later or beg forgiveness.

Freedom

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Following the Equator (1897)

All we have of freedom -- all we use or know --
This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.

Kipling

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster "To the Vanishing Point"

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)