Writers are scary

It is October 30. What does that mean?

No, it does not mean that Halloween is tomorrow (though that is true, it's not the point of my asking the question). It means that the day after tomorrow, Nanowrimo starts. I'm starting to get that dreading feeling at the pit of my stomach since as of right now, 4:49pm on October 30th, I still don't know what my Nanowrimo will be about. It's not unlike the feeling that followed me throughout three years of university when I realise the next day I have to hand in a 2000 words essay and I haven't started the research.

Well, maybe not exactly like that. But I still don't know what I will write about. But that's ok, I don't have to do Nano this year. But I was just strolling around the Nanowrio forum and had a sort of epiphany.

Writers are scary.

This realisation has actually been coming on for a while now. But looking around the Reference Desk forum of Nanowrimo, there are some pretty twisted research that writers do.

All in the name of research, you, as a writer, can ask perfect strangers on the internet to tell you things like how they felt when they were raped, how a wife would kill her husband but set it up as a suicide, whether there are ways to get illegal stuff past airport security, how to hide a body or to create a new identity to hide away from the police. And people will reply to your question with posts that are so detailed that they are practically novels themselves.

I swear if a real criminal ever go onto a writers' forum, he seriously would get some foolproof ideas.

Of course, I myself have at certain times Googled things such as how to kill someone with acupuncture, where to stab someone to kill them as painlessly and quickly as possible, and complications in pregnancies.

You know, on the bus stop near where I lived in Sydney, there used to be an ad from the Ministry of National Defence or something, encouraging people to report suspicious going-ons in their neighbourhoods, with hints like if you see your neighbour do suspicious searches on the internet, you should report them. Considering I did do some of these search while I was still in Sydney, I'm glad no one ever thought to check the internet searches of a random international student. As for the last search on pregnancy, however, when you live at home with parents the last one is not something to Google when there is a chance of someone standing behind you reading over your shoulders.