I discovered recently, to my great joy, that I can still use my grad school credentials to log in to Project Muse and access a wide variety of academic publications. I spent a happy evening going down the rabbit holes of different search queries – ‘salmon anthropology’, ‘mongol horde history’, ‘transvestite shaman’.

The last, of course, is when my taller half looked over my shoulder. His query: What are you doing?

Research. I’m doing research for Isobel the Bear-Eater, because her story is set in a place not so different from Siberia and the Russian Far East, although I am adding in a healthy dose of my own knowledge and experiences from Alaska, and taking a great many liberties in mixing my own imagination in with true cultures described in historical and anthropological accounts. The more I know about these places, the richer my writing will be. Read More →