Today, the hubby and hun-buns and I all arrived home from a weeklong vacation in Florida. While I was there, I visited the Ponce de Leon lighthouse--the setting for my newest YA idea roiling around inside my head. Well, not new, since I started thinking about it two years ago during my first visit to the historic lighthouse and the museum grounds holding the original brick dwellings the lightkeepers and their families lived in. But just recently I developed a real plot for this story.
So, on this trip to Florida, I returned to the lighthouse and did some research. I felt out the grounds and buildings, and really tried to dip into my character's head while I was there. It was such a settling feeling to be there, to be in the spot where my character lives somewhere deep inside my head. I could have spent all day there, if not for the withering hun-buns growing pink under the Florida sun.
This is the best kind of research, I realized, because you can uncover the smallest details to inject life and authenticity to your story, even if these details are used sparingly in the actual story--or maybe not even used at all. I learned so much about my main character walking the same lawns as her, being inside her house, climbing to the top of the lighthouse and seeing what she sees on a daily basis, even feeling the same heat and humidity as her.
So of course now that I'm all amped up to write this story, I come home to find the thumbs-up from my editor to continue working on the sequel to EVERLASTING because she loved the first 60 pages of the manuscript! I'm excited to work on that project too, so for now, I'll just have to keep percolating my romantic paranormal lighthouse story :-)
