Pat Rice here:
Loretta complained the other day of researching subjects of which she knew nothing and in which she couldn’t even speak the language. I don’t know how bad Loretta’s historical Italy is, but I can tell you that France is a huge internet black hole. I visited the country once, chaperoning a bus full of teenagers, 
and learned far more about teenage hormones than the countryside. And now here I am, attempting to race my characters across not only the French landscape, but one that existed in 1791. You think our coasts are affected by global warming now? Do you have any idea how much difference a century or two makes? LOTS. I’m sitting here trying to compare my Rough Guide to Normandy with online travel sites to historical accounts and I’m going cross-eyed. My suspicion is that the information I want is on all those sites in French. Wikipedia may be questionable, but it's a good basic start in English for the area I'm researching: Normandy geography . But beyond that and my guide, I'm rowing hard and going in circles.
And those on-line language translators are good only for a laugh. (this is one of the better ones: http://world.altavista.com/) Monkeys might be able to put two words together and grasp a concept, but computers sure can’t. My theory is that computers have grown up to be just like their parents—nerds who know machinery and logic but have almost no grasp of verbal skills.
Example:
I copied the last three sentences of the first paragraph into Babel, had it translate my English to French, then copied THEIR OWN French translation back to English. Here’s the result:
Do you have an idea how much difference per century or two marks? FATES. I rest the test here to compare my approximate guide of Normandy with the sites in line of voyage to the historical accounts and I am to go cross-observed. My suspicion is that information that I want find on all these French building sites
I rest my case. Cross-observed! I love it. And admittedly, even English hasn’t come up with a correct spelling for on-line, online, on line, so I’m sure “line of voyage” makes a good substitute. <G>
I seem to have an obsession with climatic scenes on cliffs for reasons only my subconscious can understand. And cliffs are not static, as I have learned to my dismay. The first time I wrote a cliff scene (a hundred or so years ago, the way I feel today), I couldn’t travel to the area to check it out personally until the book was done. To my great dismay, the area that had been described as cliffs in historical accounts was flat. Totally flat. No cliffs in sight. To this day I don't know if the cliff disappeared or the writers lied. Argh! So I make a conscientous effort these days to put my characters where there actually are cliffs, if that’s what the scene requires. I’m playing with links to see if I can make them work, so here’s one to the cliffs I’m exploring for the current WIP: Etretat cliffs
and for those of you too lazy to check the link (like me), here's the photo:
Grand, aren’t they? Now try to figure out if I can send my villain out there. Worse yet, I have to save the villain because he’s the hero of the next book, so he has to get back to safe land somehow! The things we do to complicate our lives. How many of our readers have been to Etretat (I’m not going to persuade Typepad to put in the accent marks), France and can tell me if the arches are accessible? Or are there other nifty places where I can drive my villain to the brink and over and not kill him? He has limited powers of earth, wind, fire, and water, but he can’t fly. Let your imaginations go!
And as we near our first anniversary, the wenches will be playing with a new blog format. We’re thinking of posting only on Monday-Wednesday-Friday-sometimes Sunday, which means I have no clue when I’ll be posting next. But I’ll try to post to my personal blog at (http://patriciarice.blogspot.com/) Pat Rice's blog at least once a week, maybe more often, now that our duties here are less demanding. One of these days, I’ll conquer the internet. Or maybe even make a book trailer. How hard can that be, right? (which is a topic for another time--do any of you pay attention to book trailers? Or even know what they are?!)