Happy Monday booklovers! Today I’m so excited to be kicking off the blog tour for one of favourite reads of 2024, Find Me After by A.Connors. You can read my fangirly review here. I am a huge champion for Adam’s books as they are just amazing, atmospheric and immersive YA books. Find Me After, his second YA book is out this Thursday, 4th July. So I urge you to pick up a copy. But before I share this epic guest post with you here is a bit more about the book.

Find Me After - Welcome to the world between life and death... by A. Connors
Published by Scholastic on July 4, 2024
Genres: Adventure, Dystopian, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Amazon | Waterstones
Goodreads

Where do you go when you're not quite gone? After suffering an epileptic seizure, Kyle finds himself in a world that looks like ours but where nothing feels the same. This is the Stillness: an eerie, liminal alternative reality populated by those who are caught between life and death.

Here, he meets his real-world crush, Farah, who is also unconscious back home. But as they get to know each other in the Stillness, they must face the possibility of forgetting each other in the real world. The way back to life is fraught with danger, and time, for both of them, is running out...

A. Connors was inspired to write this novel based on his own experience with epilepsy A slow-burn romance at the centre of the story that is perfect for anyone who loves BookTok tropes #forcedproximity and #friendstolovers The Stillness is a wildly imaginative world that will appeal to fans of Erik J Brown, Patrick Ness and Netflix's Stranger Things

The Case for Lazy and Chaotic Research

One of the things I love most about writing is when I stumble across something interesting or cool about the world, and I get to craft a story around it. My first novel, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, started when I discovered that over a million square kilometres of the Pacific ocean was already licensed for exploratory deep-sea mining. My new novel, Find Me After, started (in part) when I read a piece of academic research about what happens to the human brain at the point of death.

But I describe myself as a lazy and chaotic researcher, and I think (for me) that’s a good thing. Let me describe my journey of writing Find Me After and I’ll show you what I mean.

Step 1: The Kitchen Floor

I started writing this book on the kitchen floor. I was on holiday with my family and I found myself on the ground, alone, in a strange room, in a strange house. I’d had an epileptic seizure. For the first few minutes after a seizure I hardly know who I am; my head buzzes; I feel like I’m coming back from somewhere, but something still has one hand around my ankle and doesn’t want to let me go.

I wanted to capture that fraught energy in a story, that sense of wondering: Am I all the way back? Am I going to get back?

I wrote the first chapter (in my head) that night. It felt natural to start the story with Kyle, my main character, waking up from a seizure, feeling the disorientation, the distorted perception of postictal shock. I knew that the first thing somebody would say to him was: You’re not where you think you are.

Step 2: Google

But I felt that stories of the afterlife, purgatory, and alternative realities had been done to death (pun intended). I didn’t want to slip into the gravity well of every book and film I’d encountered about the afterlife. I needed something to make the world feel fresh. 

I’m a physicist by training (I did my PhD at the Large Hadron Collider) so I always look to science to ground whatever I’m writing about. I Googled. I had to sift through a lot of “New Age” material that didn’t get me beyond the usual tropes. From my own experiences of epilepsy, I figured that Kyle’s experiences would be the result of a traumatised brain-state, so I started Googling “neuroscience” instead of “alternative reality”. I searched for authoritative sources and Anith Seth quickly emerged as one of the most compelling voices in the field.

Anith Seth (Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex) was like a rich seam of coal as far as I was concerned. Watch his TED talk, it’s brilliant. Through simple optical illusions he makes the point that the brain doesn’t just experience reality, it constructs it. He describes our perceived reality as a controlled hallucination. Check out my resources page if you’re curious.

That was enough.

I thought, if everything we consider real is in fact a controlled hallucination, it’s not a big leap to imagine that a traumatised brain could construct a different version of reality. An alternative world that was not less real than our world, but more real.

This gave me the confidence to start telling my story, knowing that this core idea was lodged in my mind and it would protect me from the worst cliches of the genre.  

Step 3: Google

Now my secret weapon in the war of attrition that is “researching for a novel” comes into play — Google Discover. Google Discover is a kind of personalised auto-search. You might have it already (swipe right on an Android phone) and if you don’t you can install it (part of the Google app) from whichever App Store you believe in. 

It freaked me out the first time I encountered it. I’d just started researching deep-sea mining for The Girl Who Broke The Sea and I thought I’d found an important subject that nobody was really talking about — terrible for humanity, perfect for a novel! Then suddenly, everyone was talking about deep-sea mining. What had happened? Nearly every article in my newsfeed was related to deep-sea mining. It was surely the most talked about topic in the entire world and my lovely book was going to feel hackneyed and obvious by the time it ever got to print!

But wait—no. Everybody was not talking about deep-sea mining. Google had done its thing and quietly reorientated my newsfeed to accommodate my new special interest.

Back to Find Me After: once I had my start (my Anil Seth), and Google Discover, I didn’t do any more active research for a while. I just wrote the story. I packed the results of a bit of haphazard Googling in my toolbag and off I went.

But this is good. At this point I’m concentrating on the story, thinking about the journey the characters are on, what they need, and what the story needs.

But in parallel my feed is dropping new, fascinating details into my life. These I read when I’m waiting for my tea to brew or my train to arrive. Sometimes Google drops a book or film recommendation into my feed and I get to watch television and call it research!

I forget 90% of what I read (consciously at least) and I read mostly with an eye for “cool stuff I can use”. I’m mercenary. I skim. I abandon. The scientist in me would be horrified. But I cover a lot of ground as a result, and I think something important happens along the way. 

Making the world of a novel feel real to the reader often hinges on an unexpected detail. The art is in striking the right balance, knowing a broad enough scope of details to give the reader just the right slice of knowledge at the perfect moment. But the details have to be subservient to the story. You can’t give too much, you can’t drift into exposition because that breaks the illusion and wrenches the reader out of your world.

For me, learning as I go helps me strike that balance.

Step 4: Research papers and Interviews

Only by the second or third draft do I start doing what I’d call real research. I go back to my bookmarks and re-read the more technical articles. I follow the references in order to get to the original papers.

The overall story is set now, it’s found its rhythm and pace, so there’s no danger that I’m going to overload the reader with too much information in the opening chapters.

But the additional detail helps me to internalise the language of the field, the ways of talking and thinking. These details seep into the rewrites and crystallise the world, once and for all, into something that feels real for the reader.

My favourite thing is interviewing somebody who works in whatever field I’m writing about. Anil Seth didn’t respond to my email (I don’t blame him), but I found some lovely neuroscientists through work colleagues. Every discipline develops its own subculture, its own way of talking. Even more so than research papers, an hour with somebody who knows their field is the most effective way I know to get what I need to build a compelling world.

Conclusion

I’m sure if I was writing historical fiction this haphazard process of parallel writing and researching would go wrong. Somebody would call me out because my mediaeval monks had pockets, or some such. But for speculative fiction I think it’s ideal.

One of the main purposes of a story is to transport the reader somewhere they haven’t been before. And one of the reasons I love speculative fiction is because the possibilities of those worlds are so vast and rich. But one of the criticisms levelled at speculative fiction (some people call it sci-fi) is that it can be expositional, as if the urge to impart the richness of the world has overpowered the characters and the plot. 

Personally, I need the research to ground my writing. But I need to avoid doing too much too early and losing sight of what really matters about the book. Doing just enough research up front to set things in motion, and doing deeper research later, when it can help enrich the voice but not overwhelm the plot, gives me the kind of balance I’m looking for.

I’d love to know how other people research, whether they’re up-front and thorough or haphazard and lazy like me. I wonder if, as well as asking writers if they’re “plotters of pantsers” we should be asking them if they’re “research plotters or pansters”.