Amber Morn
Brandilyn Collins

Brandilyn Collins is a best-selling novelist known for her trademark Seatbelt Suspense™. These harrowing crime thrillers have earned her the tagline “Don’t forget to b r e a t h e …®”. She writes for Zondervan, the Christian division of HarperCollins Publishers, and is currently at work on her 19th book. Her first, A Question of Innocence, was a true crime published by Avon in 1995 and landed her on local and national TV and radio, including the Phil Donahue and Leeza talk shows. She’s also known for her distinctive book on fiction-writing techniques, Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (John Wiley & Sons), and often teaches at writers conferences.
Visit her blog at Forensics and Faith, and her website at Brandilyn Collins.com to read the first chapters of all her books.

A Burning Cigarette In A Couch

It’s amazing the factoids I’ve gathered, writing as a full-time novelist for the last ten years. I know tidbits on all kinds of things. Sometimes the weirdest of things. All because at one point or another, I’ve needed them in a book. If I had to list every piece of data I’ve researched, the list would take me a week to type. Here are just a few questions for which I’ve had to find answers.


1. Do teeth ever float? (dentist question, of course)


2. Who’s present at a C-section? (doc question)


3. The moon phase on a certain night one year in the future, when my book is taking place. (online research. Great Web site at http://stardate.org/nightsky/moon/)


4. What time the sun will rise/set on a certain day in a certain town a year in the future. (online at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html. This site also gives moon phases.)


5. What times the tide will go out/come in on a certain beach on a certain day a year in the future. (online: http://tbone.biol.sc.edu/tide/)


6. How does strychnine kill you?


7. What would a judge do if he/she heard someone had threatened a jury member?


8. How does a forensic artist recreate a face from a bare skull?


9. How does a detective make a mold of a footprint?


10. How does a mass spectrometer microscope work?


11. What are the exceptions to the hearsay rule in law?


12. What’s the procedure for doing a sweep of a room for bugging devices?


13. What are the various ways to bug a phone?


14. How can you track someone’s whereabouts through his or her cell phone?


15. How many officers serve on the police force of a town of seventeen hundred people, and how do they run their shifts?


16. How do night vision goggles work, and what are the choices in buying a pair?


17. Does a car rental agency ever make a copy of a renter’s driver’s license?


18. In Idaho, can you tape record a conversation when only one person in that conversation knows it’s being recorded? (Answer: Yes. This is not true in many states.)


19. How is Pitocin (drug used to induce labor) administered?


20. How long before a cigarette in a couch burns a house down?


21. What’s the frequency for Oakland, California, air space?


22. How do forensic anthropologists determine gender/age from scattered human bones?


23. What’s the procedure for a private adoption?


24. How long before wild animals eat a corpse in the woods?


25. At what stage of development was DNA use in forensics in 1992?


26. What kind of little wild animal might steal bones?


27. On car dealership lots, where are the keys kept for all the new cars? (Answer: In a lock box on the car. The sales person carries a key to get into the lock boxes.)


28. Are the windows in the parking lot shuttles at a certain airport tinted?


29. Where do out-of-state media get their big news trucks?


30. Under what conditions can a single hair yield useable DNA?


As my life continues, so do my questions. Writing is not just a career. It’s a way of life. I always keep my eyes open, never knowing what factoid I happen upon may wind up in a book. True, most of the time it’s the other way around—I’m writing a novel and see what I need to research. Still, numerous times I’ve heard an interesting fact and thought, “Hmmm, what if . . . ?”




Exposure