...And two hours later I'm reading an article on how to speak Llama

The Internet.

A wondrous invention that has brought the world to our fingertips, 'meme' to our vocabulary, and a worship of cats that would make the ancient Egyptians say "whoa, guys, rein in the crazy."

It is also the best friend and worst enemy of writers.

My sister found a llama... and I can't decide who was more
uncomfortable, her or the llama.

I can't tell you the number of times that I have gone to Google to look up one tiny detail for a story only to realize, 45 minutes later, that I am for some reason looking at pictures of the Blue Mosque when I set out to find out what year Constantinople became Istanbul.

And this isn't unusual!

Research for me has always been a rabbit hole of sorts. I learn one thing which leads me to another thing, then to another, and another, so on and so forth. The Internet just makes that easier and more dangerous considering the vast amount of information available. And those stupid "If you enjoyed this, check out this article!" links just make it worse. They're evil.

Add that the insane amount of information out there can make finding the information you're looking for impossible to find and it's amazing that anybody ever leaves the internet! I spent three days researching the cost of a saloon in Wyoming in the late 1800s and ended up learning far more about the modern housing market in Cheyenne than I've ever needed to know. That roadblock kind of put a stop on that project for a while, unfortunately. I have it stuck in my head that I can't continue with the story until I find out exactly how much the main characters paid for the saloon the book is named after.

Doesn't make much sense but it doesn't really have to.

And I wonder why I can never get any writing done.

Oh! And don't get me started on how distracting social media is... mostly because I'm sure you are well aware of it through your own experience (Unless you've been living under a rock, and if that is the case, thank you for finding and reading my blog. Not sure how you were able to under that rock, but I appreciate it.).

I've thought about shutting my wifi off while I'm writing and if I come to a spot that I need to look something up, I just write it down and mark the spot in the story. Then, set aside some time later to look everything up and plug it into the story. 

I have yet to do this for two reasons:

1) I'm worried that what I needed to look up will actually undo all of the writing I did because I was working under a wrong assumption.

2) Facebook.