I’m Sure I’ve Landed on a Federal List Somewhere

Please welcome debut author Allyson Rice to Writer Unboxed today!

After many years as a working actress (Connor Walsh on As the World Turns), Allyson turned her attention to other pursuits– running, yoga, meditation, running retreats for women, writing/directing/producing/performing in an award-winning comedic rap video, creating a line of coloring books for women, producing a handmade jewelry line, and writing a novel.

Her debut, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway, releases today!

“In this rollicking family dramedy, debut author Rice sends three lovable siblings on a zany yet touching road trip. […] Rice’s sharp observations of society’s absurdity verge on the satirical and even on occasion veer toward delightfully crude. The conversational writing style, realistic banter, and frequent flashbacks bring to mind friends sharing juicy gossip… [F]ans of family drama with big laughs will enjoy this hilarious road-trip adventure.”
— BookLife

Writing The Key to Circus-Mom Highway required some interesting research, including Googling topics that might make a writer worry they’ll land on a federal watch list–which is what today’s post is about.

Learn more about Allyson and her many endeavors on her website. The Department of Homeland Security (and anyone else) can follow her on Instagram: @allysonriceauthor @allysonriceart @officialallysonrice.

---

I love the research aspect of writing a book. Even with fiction, I find there’s quite a lot of research to be done in the process of world-building. You don’t ever want a reader to be taken out of the flow of your story because they’re distracted by inaccuracies or generalizations. And it never fails that as I learn new facts about whatever subject I’m investigating, some choice tidbit revealed adds another unexpected layer to a part of the story that I initially didn’t think was connected to the research topic at hand. New layers are added to the plot or the to characters’ backstories almost accidentally like the novel is writing itself. For a writer, these synchronicities create enough resultant joy to get us through the hundreds of simultaneous frustrations.

While writing my recently completed novel, I spent several days learning how to write in a Cajun dialect for one very short scene. It took a bit of digging. When I couldn’t find a handy website titled HeresHowToWriteInaCajunDialect.com (go figure), I searched out message boards where people from the Deep South reminisced, including one glorious, currently-inactive thread from years ago about their favorite Cajun words and phrases when they were growing up. (I felt like a pioneer in the Old West who had just struck gold.) And the old one-eyed “Cajun pirate” that the protagonists briefly interact with at a Thibodeaux, Louisiana gas station came alive.

Because a road trip is a central feature of the book, I researched freeway routes and driving times on the “road-less-traveled” back roads through the South, choosing the towns where my protagonists would stop because the distances and times are crucial. They have an inflexible one-week timeframe and there’s an unplanned detour in the eleventh hour. Because I had lived in Mississippi when I was young (where the residents pronounced Lafayette County “lay-FAY-it”), I also spent a couple of days researching how the local residents pronounced the locations and business names in these towns in preparation for recording the audiobook.

At one point in the novel, there are two short flashback scenes where the protagonist’s now-deceased mother had run away as a teen, joined the circus, and was training to take over one of the acts. So I searched out videos showing acrobatics on horseback. When I found the trick I wanted to use, I watched those videos repeatedly ad nauseum. I must’ve stopped and re-started them over fifty times, inching along at a couple of frames at a time, until I could accurately describe every step of the trick. Because I didn’t want some circus horseback acrobat to leave a review saying, “Great book. Except for those godawful flashback scenes where the author mangled that front walkover dismount. Those ruined it for me! I can’t recommend it.” (You’re welcome, horseback acrobats.)

I researched indigenous healing practices of the southern traitures because the mother of one of the supporting characters has “the gift” that was passed down in her family. I pieced the information together as best I could. If you’ve ever tried to research indigenous healing practices (and who hasn’t, am I right?), you will have found that the information is hard to come by. So many of those teachings were traditionally passed down in the oral tradition, and elders are often distrustful of random people who ask about them. You have to earn the right to know through years of apprenticeship. They’re being lost as the younger generations aren’t interested anymore and the elders are passing away. It’s sad. But I digress…

It wasn’t until I needed to research types of handguns, and not long after that, searched the phrases “will an alligator eat a dead human body?” and “how do you dispose of a dead human body using alligators?” that I began to wonder what kinds of search phrases get you flagged as someone to keep an eye on. Surely, I thought, I must be venturing into that territory with search phrases like these. I sounded like a potential backwoods-murderer-in-training.

Up to this point, I hadn’t ventured much into the backstory of my protagonist’s newly-discovered brother, other than to mention he was a veteran with mild PTSD that caused nightmares and sleepwalking. It plays out in the story. I did have to research medication combinations, but a nurse friend with connections at the VA was helpful with that. It wasn’t until several beta readers had expressed interest in knowing more about his story and I realized that his backstory had an essential tie-in to the backstory of his sister that I acquiesced. I was going to need to write some flashback scenes for him.  Damn it. I dreaded that because as much as I didn’t know about writing Cajun dialects, or traiture healing practices, I knew even less about anything military. It was overwhelming to think about but I knew I needed to take a deep dive and write it. The story was incomplete without it.

My first task was to backtrack from 2018 to the age my character would’ve been after 9/11, to see if he would’ve been the right age to have enlisted then. Check. I set his deployment in Afghanistan. Then I had to decide what had happened to him, which entailed learning how a military convoy was structured, through what terrain in Afghanistan it might be traveling, how an ambush by insurgents would play out, and what kinds of weapons were probably used in the attack, as well as any other miscellaneous terminology involved.

When I began to find myself on government websites reading technical articles about these things, I felt like young Matthew Broderick in the movie War Games, accidentally stumbling into military areas online where civilians aren’t supposed to be. I had visions of someone in the Department of Homeland Security flagging my searches and showing up at my apartment to bring me in for questioning.

When I first began to think about writing a novel, it was an amorphous blob of generalized ideas. But by the time I finished writing it, knowing by that point how to dispose of a dead body using an alligator and how an attack on a U.S. military convoy in Afghanistan might go down, I was sure I had landed myself on a Federal watch-list somewhere. That this thought crossed my mind (even tongue-in-cheek) speaks to where we are as a culture and as a world. Internet servers and phone companies share our personal information with government offices. Certain words trigger a closer second look. Big Brother is watching. Does it keep us safer? Possibly. Sometimes. But is the constant surveillance also a profound invasion of privacy, bordering on an Orwellian State? I believe it is.

But writers, maybe more than anyone, should continue to think differently and promote new ideas because it’s stories that inspire and entertain and connect with readers’ emotions that worm their way into the collective consciousness. So, Thought Police be damned. Continue your internet searches with abandon, researching whatever it is that will make your stories come to life in your readers’ hearts and minds.

And to all my new followers at the Department of Homeland Security, please just wait until the book is released before you decide whether I’m an actual threat to democracy or other humans (can I do book signings from prison?), or if it was all in the name of a good story and excellent research. In the meantime, make sure you guys at DHS follow me on Instagram (I could use the extra followers there).

Have you ever conducted research you feared might put you on a federal watch list? Bring on the gruesome stories. Let’s compare notes.