Hey, SE Readers. Joan with you today.

I have a confession to make. When I first began writing fiction, I hated to do research. I didn’t want to bother with such mundane tasks. Once I even wrote a blog post titled “Research, A Necessary Evil.”

I’m not sure why I had such an aversion. I’ve always loved history and trivia. In general, I’m a curious person and there’s no telling what might pique my interest.

But with writing, I was like “Thanks, but no thanks.” Maybe I wanted to adhere to the adage, “Write what you know.” Needless to say, it didn’t take long for me to discover I knew very little.

The setting of my first novel was in a fictional Texas town during the horrible drought of 2011. I lived through that time. I experienced the better part of two months where the daytime temperatures reached triple digits…