Something crazy.

Why yes, I have taken over 2 dozen different purported herbal aphrodisiacs for my nonfiction book. All at different times of course.

Other field trips shall remain anonymous.

P.S. Woo hoo!

Did you read the Vanity Fair story Hitchens wrote on waterboarding? I thought he did an excellent job of describing the feelings and how it impacted him psychologically.

Video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

I once wrote a story about a male hooker who lived on Chinese instant noodles. Then I realized: I don't know what a day is like when you have spicy noodles and coacoa for breakfast! Neither do I know what walking the streets, let alone sex is like. I was writing from a totally ignorant position!

So that had to be remedied.

Getting used to the noodles was the easy part. And then I got rich

I self-waterboarded too, btw.

I mummified a cornish game hen.

I do not recommend this if you have roommates.

Sad Soup-eating Girl said:

I once wrote a story about a male hooker who lived on Chinese instant noodles. Then I realized: I don't know what a day is like when you have spicy noodles and coacoa for breakfast! Neither do I know what walking the streets, let alone sex is like. I was writing from a totally ignorant position!

So that had to be remedied.

Getting used to the noodles was the easy part. And then I got rich

I self-waterboarded too, btw.

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Are you saying you became a prostitute to for a story? First, I'm not sure I believe that. People become prostitutes for lots of reasons, typically research isn't one of them.

Research and curiosity that resulted from that research, was my primary reason at the time. More reasons came along after my initial decision to try it out, of course, but first I simply wanted to live the phantasy to see what it's really like.

Raquel said:

Now I'm curious. What does that involve?

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washing soda is the closet thing you can get commercially to the natrun the Egyptians used (its a naturally occurring salt from Wadi Natrun) you clean it and gut it really good and then totally cover it with the soda. I guessed how much and should have used more. It should be at least 4 times as much soda as bird if you try this because it sucks out all the moisture and then decomposes outside the body. (It was more involved and there were different levels of quality for humans, btw)

The stink was gangrenous, indescribable. There is a reason the houses of mummification were located off-wind of towns. but it worked, i had a mummy.

The worst I've done is stalked a few people. Sometimes I just liked their look other times to watch reactions.
I was writing an exceedingly tall character and followed a man near seven feet tall for close to an hour to sketch reactions of people.

The water boarding was scary to watch. I almost drowned as a kid and it was very scary and disorienting. I was only a few feet from shallow water, and once I was saved It occurred to me how easy it would have been to just push myself along the sand. But all I could think about at the time was getting my head above water.

As for the prostitution, I know three newspaper escorts and one woman who worked the streets, and fantasy is not the word for it. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to their stories, sometimes they brag about strange people they meet or the amount of money the can make in a night. But there's always fear, always. Fear of friends they've lost to the trade, the illnesses, the legality.
If you want a unique encounter pay for an hour of an escorts time and take her to dinner. If they get over their suspicion of your motives you might have an interesting conversation. Just don't expect friendly banter.
If you haven't got the cash for that, take the bus. Talk to the guy nobody will sit next to. I've gotten some great advice from bushy-bearded drunk guys.

I live in New York.
Before that, I lived in Los Angeles.
So my research material pretty much comes to me.

Wow I feel like such a slacker. Most of my research takes place at the library

BySharonNelson said:

Wow I feel like such a slacker. Most of my research takes place at the library

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Me too! And I thought spending weeks taking notes on as many little details of how theater works as you can possibly find was nuts. I mean, I believe in putting myself through torture to get what I need, but not literally!

What about something weird? I'm going to be learning magic tricks as research for my next project.

I made acorn biscuits and steamed cattail roots for dinner once. The preparation time and effort exceded the culinary value.