I am lately becoming a bit obsessed with the idea of research or how people research or what writers fall into when they aren't looking and it suddenly becomes research even when it wasn't to begin with (if that makes any sense). Partly this is because of my big love for Paul Collins, the ultimate research man, and partly because it seems that everything I write fiction-wise seems to carry some mention of historical research - it's always been my thing and I guess I'm just now realizing how much that is true.

I interviewed another author recently, Jim Ottaviani with G.T. Labs, who wrote a wicked graphic novel about the gilded age of dinosaur fossil hunting. (You can read my initial thoughts on the book, Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards, here.) The article will run next month in Bookslut but I couldn't help thinking about Jim as I've been working on the piece about Collins and his book, The Trouble with Tom.

The books, of course, have nothing in common but the manner in which both men came up with their ideas is great. They just lucked into them. Paul came across a mention of how Tom Paine's bones went missing in an article while he was looking into something else - and of course that bit stopped him cold - and Jim was leafing through a catalog at his day job in the university library system at Ann Arbor when he saw a mention of a book about the gilded age of dinosaurs. Instead of reading, nodding their heads and moving on, both men filed the information away (or ordered the book for himself in Jim's case) and then stayed with it as the story became more interesting. Jim kept going, wanting to learn more about Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh and their horrible feud and insatiable need to find more fossils and their amazing impact on the field of Natural History. He didn't know where he was going with all of this, he didn't know what he was going to do once he learned more about these men and their lives and their legacies, but he knew that he should just keep going and because he loved the research, he did just that.

And then he wrote a kick ass book about them. How cool is that?

Along the way Jim also discovered the unpublished autobiography of Charles R. Knight, the man who first brought artistic representation to dinosaurs - and really, can you overstate what his impact has been on America's love for the monsters? (Both Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen have intros to Knight's now published book so that should give some clue of how significant his work was to me at least.) (Oh - and Jim is the one who published Knight's book!)

The finished product is amazing to look at and read and it appeals to so many different types of readers - comic fans, of course, but also anyone (and I mean anyone!) even remotely interested in natural history. It's just a great story about fascinating people and interesting times that few people would have known about if Jim wasn't carefully paging through his book catalogs and following the titles to see what caught his eye.

He was researching his next book and he didn't even know it.

It makes you think, doesn't it? It makes you think about what you might be writing at this very moment, even though you don't know it yet.

I really love the holiday season - all those possibilities wrapped up in packages. You just don't know what you might find next.