 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name's Jackie and I'm an aspiring fiction writer and at the moment I'm revising my Nanorimo project from last year, Powerless. And I thought something that might be interesting would be to go through the strangest Google searches I did while I was trying to write this book and I can explain what one, what they are and two, why I was looking for them or what happened at that point in the book. So what I've done is I've gone through my history from November and December last year, which is when I was working on this book and I've created a list of all of the searches that were related to this book. So let's look into it. One of the categories of searches I did was things relating to security. Things like most secure buildings in the world, security protecting the Mona Lisa, motion lasers, motion detectors versus laser museum security. Do museums really use lasers? Can you fake a retinal scan? Security of the Pentagon and how to hack a security network. The reason for these searches is because in the book there are like two break-in scenarios, one where they're breaking into the antagonist's home to get access to some blueprints and then two when they're breaking into this prestigious auction house in the world of the story where the antagonist is going to be auctioning off some weapons and obviously they want to stop him. There were a few different medical related questions I was asking. So things like drugs to induce seizures. What does having a seizure feel like? Bullet wound to the scapula. Drugs that cause heart failure. Best place to inject tranquilizer. Can stomach pumping make you throw up? And the reason for that is because the main character in this book is supposed to have some medical knowledge. So her siblings are all superheroes basically and she doesn't have any powers, hence the title the book powerless and when they get back from their missions, she's always been the one to patch them up. So she should have more understanding of medicine than I have, which meant a lot of researching. Then there are certain events that happen in the book that I wanted to be able to cover somewhat accurately. There are a few different questions around stomach pumping as well. So can stomach pumping make you throw up? What's it like to get your stomach pumped? And then things about drug overdoses. So what happens when you have a drug overdose? How to treat it? And the reason they have those questions is because there's a scene where the main character, she's basically being kicked out of home and she has run into the Martian mafia and they've taken her hostage and have decided to take her to a facility to run some tests and put her through some things to see whether she actually has powers or she's just faking it because she has the gene mutation that says she should have powers. So she's there for a few days getting tortured and when she is there strapped to the table and the doctor has to leave the room for some reason, a couple of guys with an unconscious girl barge into her room looking for the doctor to fix her and it turns out she's been given an unidentified drug. They don't know what it is or how to treat it. So she needs to guide them through pumping her stomach. And this is how she gets in with the mafia because this person is the boss's granddaughter, so she's gone and saved the granddaughter's life and now I won't say she can't do no wrong, but she's welcomed into the family. So I currently live in Tallinn, Estonia, which if you don't know where that is, Estonia is in northeastern Europe. It directly neighbours Russia and it was a former Soviet state until 1991, I believe. So there's a very large Russian population here and in fact the company I was working for when I was writing this book, is a Russian company and there are more Russians than Estonians in general, or at least in my floor. So the language you hear spoken around the office tends to be Russian rather than Estonian. So originally I was going to base this book in New York, so it would be more of a typical Marvel superhero type of book. And I thought, well, I'm in this really interesting city that not a lot of people know about, so why not base it on here? So the city in the book is not actually Tallinn, Estonia, but it's based on this and it's also supposed to be a former Soviet state and there is supposed to be a large Russian population. So beyond, beyond transplanting people from my office into my book, which I did quite a bit, I also had a number of Russian related searches I was doing to find different elements I could incorporate into the book. So these include Russian drinking rituals, Russian pet names, Russian mafia cars, Russian insults, Russian breakfast, Russian mafia wives, slang for law enforcement in Russian, and the Russian mob in Estonia. And then of course I had to do a whole lot of research relating to the mafia. So things like how to prepare cocaine for sale, do mobs have headquarters anymore? How does the mob make money, female roles in the mafia and female mob buses? How does the mafia torture people? And then I was also trying to think of positive contributions made by the mafia. And that idea came from a podcast I was listening to when I was working on this book called Mob Queens. And this is about New York in the 50s and 60s, I think, and a woman who was the wife of one of the Italian mob bosses at the time. And she actually ran a drag club and apparently drag clubs were almost exclusively mafia-owned because they were sort of on the shady side of the law. So it was, so it was a way the mafia not only capitalized on things that weren't allowed, but they also created a safe space for people who were discriminated against. So there is a way of looking at it going, okay, they made a safe space for marginalized people, maybe if we put aside all of the damage organized crime does, maybe we can look for positive contributions as well. And that was something I haven't explored that well yet, but it's something I wanted to have in mind when I was working on this book, especially when it comes to the superhuman population in this world. And everything else was fairly random, I couldn't find a way to group it. So here's a selection for you. How does sociopaths see other people? What is the most painful sensation humans can feel? Now this one was because one of the siblings' powers is to project his pain onto others and the weapon that the antagonist develops is actually figuring out how to turn these superhuman powers into bombs and when they figure out how to turn this power of projecting pain into a bomb. I wanted it to be like even more extreme than the things he does in the book. So there's a lot, how much is a lot? There are scenes where like he cuts his skin open and then pulls the skin and twists the muscle and he's not feeling any of it because he's projecting it on something else. So I wanted to look for something that was more extreme than that. So I was researching what's super painful. Successful scientists, who are assholes? This is because the antagonist is a successful scientist who's an asshole. Will bottles of alcohol explode in a fire? Can a taser knock you out? What happens when you get tased? When someone gets shot, do they crumple or fly back? How much damage do brass knuckles do? Can you survive without skin? Now this can you survive without skin is because one of the characters ends up with some of her skin getting dissolved and this isn't so much of a problem if there isn't a sequel but if there is a sequel I thought like it would just be really cool and badass if she didn't get the skin grafted like maybe she has some sort of transparent sleeve and through it you can actually see the exposed muscles or whatever happens when you get burned. So that's what I was thinking. I don't think I found anything that really fit that situation though when I was searching so Google can only help to a certain extent but anyway these are some of the random searches I did when I was writing the first draft of powerless and now I'd love to hear from you and what are some of the strange things you've searched when you've been writing your books or what are the things that have probably put you on some sort of government watch list? Please let me know in the comments below and other than that I'll see you next time. Bye.