My recent change to stop posting humorous micro-stories (on a slave master’s schedule; please don’t whip me) has allowed me to return to one of my favorite activities: studying!

Being a writer isn’t simply learning about grammar, story structure, and character arcs. The fundamental truth is you can’t write what you don’t know (and you don’t know what you don’t know).

If you don’t know what it was like in medieval times, what weapons they used, what their politics looked like, what they ate, and how they talked, you might find writing fantasy to be quite difficult.

Building believable worlds require you to understand a whole swath of topics. This is a never-ending pursuit.

When writing Bookworm to Badass, I studied Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology and The Monsters Know What They’re Doing (absolutely fantastic for writers and tabletop roleplayers).

I have books on demons and witchcraft and psychology, all mythical things… I particularly love my visual encyclopedias for animals, plants, and resources.

I’ve attached a few pictures of my physical books. I have a lot more eBooks…

(Dammit! Looking up the title for The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I found that he released two more books, and I just had to buy them. They are that awesome!)