Here’s a question that’s come up pretty often at my book events: “How many of the places described in your book have you actually been to in person?”
Answer: One.
... 
Shields Library, UC Davis[/caption]
When I was working on Landfalls, my novel about the Lapérouse expedition, I used to joke that the whole endeavor was just an excuse to go to the library—but I wasn’t always sure I was joking.
One of the reasons the project took so long—besides my painfully slow writing and the demands of grad school and work and, you know, family—was the time I spent researching. There was always one more book to read, one more lead to chase down, one more link to click, one more intriguing footnote I had to follow up on.
It could be a problem. ... 
The Golden Gate? Maybe not.[/caption]
Here’s a fair question: How does a middle-aged American woman with no experience at sea come to write a novel about 18th-century French mariners?
Well, a mapseller in San Francisco is entirely to blame. ... 
One page of my manuscript[/caption]
This summer, I finally finally finally finished a draft of my novel.
It took eight-and-a-half years to complete. Longer—more than a decade—if you count from when I first got the idea for the book, which was before I left San Francisco, which was in 2002. But let’s not go that far back. I was still in my thirties then, for God’s sake. ... 
Slow writer[/caption]
I’m an incredibly slow writer. How slow? Well, there was five minutes of keyboard silence between the completion of that first sentence (“I’m an incredibly slow writer.”) and the arrival of the second one (“How slow?”). And that’s fast for me.
Now you know why I blog so seldom. (Another break while I check my dictionary to see if one blogs seldom or seldomly. Turns out “seldom” is both adverb and adjective. How nice to have that question settled. Another minute while I meditate on that and on the always reliable pleasures of the dictionary.)
This slow thinking coupled with obsessiveness is also why, after seven years of not-exactly-unrelenting-but-pretty-sustained work, my book manuscript is only now crawling toward completion.
Then there’s the research. ...