One-Stop Shopping for Research

Only one week until the start of National Novel Writing Month, and I'm not at all ready. I'm a big planner and outliner, and I've done very little so far, so I need to get my butt in gear. I need to do some research on a variety of things before I start writing.

The message board at NaNoWriMo is a great place for me to find answers to questions about my writing, or about anything at all. One section is called "Character and Plot Realism Q+A," the subtitle of which is "you have a question, someone out there has an answer." There are tens of thousands of NaNoWriMo participants from around the world, and this forum is a great resource for pretty much anything.

Seriously, a quick scan of the last couple hours of posts reveals expert information about 1850's evictions, redheads and genetics, Hodgkin's Disease, small towns in Mexico, Japanese surnames, paganism, professional photography, and much, much more. And that's just a few of the thousands of posts so far on the site.

If you every wondered what kinds of shoes mailmen wear, or whether a dog could accidentally start a golf cart, or any other bizarre thing you ever considered, this is the place to be.