I'm in the drafting trenches at the moment, so I thought I'd blog a little about what I'm doing besides stringing sentences together in the shape of a story, beginning with research.

Authors are tasked with writing a compelling story, to make you think and feel while also entertaining you. Ideally, a reader is absorbed into the book, and only comes up for air when they need to sleep or go back to work or feed their cat.

We do everything we can to prevent breaking immersion, and too little research will snap a reader out of your story faster than a cold bucket of water over their head.

I live in mild fear of anachronisms and errors. Even though most of my stories are speculative fiction in which I bend the rules of reality, I want them to feel as true as possible.

You can believe in the magic in A Fix of Light because Irish mythology is so ancient and ingrained in our modern day lives. The reader can buy into it. Finding magic in an ancient forest in rural Ireland is far more believable than, say, a field of grazing zebra on the outskirts of Skenashogue.

It would pull you out of the story. You might press on, waiting for an explanation, but eventually you'd realise that I had made an error. Certainly you wouldn't think I was from Cork, or knew anything about Ireland's wildlife — your trust in me has been broken along with your immersion.

That is my nightmare!

And look, authors are human beings. We'll make mistakes. I'm sure at some point I'll describe a bird singing and then find out that actually, that species migrates during that season, so it wouldn't be possible, etc etc. I apologise in advance to any ornithologists.

The point is to minimise those mistakes, and keep the reader believing in your words, using specific details to make them think, Yes, that is what it's like!

My next book is very different from A Fix of Light. I've made up a whole new country, and nestled it in between Germany and the Netherlands. The characters are from a whole host of different places: Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Korea, Spain. I've bent the rules of psychology and physiology so much that it just looks like magic. There's a whole big EU-run organisation at the centre of it all.

I'm writing about a lot of things I don't know, and I really need the reader to buy in. Enter: research.