King Canola's Coming to Kill You

This post is part one in a series of posts that will fully cover my "down the rabbit hole experience" I had when I attempted to use the internet to do research for my sci-fi novel.

My daughter and her girls were telling jokes. Stephanie hit her mom's arm with the back of a butter knife in a gesture, "Oh mom", not hard enough to hurt. My daughters arm split open like it was rotten. She called me to ask what could have caused it. I said, "I'll bet anything that you are using Canola oil". Sure enough, there was a big gallon jug in the pantry.

Part One : A Writer's Toil

This whole thing started yesterday as I was toiling away on the outline for my sci-fi novel. I’m currently working on the part of the narrative that takes place in a bio-diesel facility south of Sacramento. Sketching out this particular set of scenes has been much more difficult than the rest of the outline so far.

After ruminating for a while on what the source of the problem might be, it occurred to me that I should engage in a creative exercise and see if that helped to knock some ideas loose. Sometimes, a bit of “world-building” helps me to really get into the center of what I’m trying to write about. So, I set out to do some research on the internets about how one goes about making bio-diesel.

This portion of the research went easily enough. Not surprisingly, most of the “civilian” websites on bio-diesel production weren’t very informative. What else would you expect from a bunch of hippies but poorly organized information? Eventually though, I ran across a number of academic sites that had plenty of relatively well-detailed information. From that information I was able to develope a generalized process schematic, and from that start generating an actual map of the facility.

In my head and on paper, the bio-diesel production facility of the future was taking shape.

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In the next installment of the series, the author will blog about his efforts to select the ideal oil seed crop of the future.