13 Jul What’s in My Search History?

Help! The Asylum Warden has me locked away working on my next book. While I’m slaving away in the upper room of a farmhouse somewhere in the Midwest, I thought you might enjoy this blog I wrote about the strange things in my search history. I wish I could reveal what I’m been searching for as I work on this new project, but I’m sworn to secrecy for a few more weeks.

This article originally appeared on Fresh Fiction just before Firstborn was realeased. 

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The other day my son was talking about all the things (for good or bad) you can learn to do or make online.

“Careful that you don’t end up on some government list,” I joked until he looked meaningfully at me.

Oh. Right.

I cringe to think what someone would make of my searches through the years, which have included:

• The life of Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the most prolific female serial killer of all time who purportedly bathed in the blood of virgins.
• How much virgin’s blood it takes to constitute a bath
• The Order of the Dragon
• How to tie fly-fishing lures
• Whether one can make a living hand-tying fishing lures
• How to play the ancient Egyptian board game Senet
• First Century public latrines
• What the uh, toilet paper options were in 1st Century public latrines
• Secret tunnels beneath Budapest’s Castle Hill
• Secret tunnels in Zagreb
• Secret tunnels in Jerusalem
• Ancient Glagolitic
• Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
• Sabaean alphabet
• How long it takes to get a caravan of 600 camels from Yemen to Israel
• Leprosy
• Heart conditions
• A bunch of random diseases
• Pretty much anything that can go wrong in pregnancy
• How stinky a dead body would be after three days
• Whether it’s possible to strangle someone with their own shirt
• How fast one dies from Japanese ritual suicide
• How many kids a 900 year-old woman could produce
• Mitochondrial DNA
• UV Tattoos
• Where Solomon might have gotten his gold
• Where the Queen of Sheba got her gold
• Where all this gold came from, anyway
• The importance of myrrh in mummy preparation
• Phoenician sea snails
• The future of memory erasing science
• Skiptracing
• Escaping the grid
• Evasive driving
• How to disappear

So many twisted rabbit trails—most lately as I’ve written this latest duology about the descendants of the Blood Countess whom I later learned I’m related to! Sometimes all that research yields a little more than I expected.