I have a friend that I only see every few months, but when we do hang out we end up chatting for six hour chunks, and as you can imagine the subject of conversation varies wildly. We’ve known each other for years, but we didn’t get close until we found out we were both INTJ’s (or at least that’s how we were typed).

We’ve since started putting less and less stock into what the MBTI personality types really mean, but he still enjoys figuring people out via their “functions”, something I never cared enough to learn. Recently he used these functions to explain the core difference between us. Both of us like gaining and storing information. I obsessively take what I’ve got and put them in neat little boxes so that the office space in my head has files and folders and neat cabinets. He does the same thing, only he cares a lot more about new information than I do. He’s constantly looking up new things and having new ideas, but doesn’t hold on to them for long.

It gave me an idea, and this might end up changing up the blog schedule slightly (specifically Wednesday, probably). I sort of want to spend a few hours a week researching one completely random topic. Like, this week I’m going to learn all the fundamental knowledge about owls. What sort of ecosystems do they live in, what makes them different from other birds, that sort of thing. Maybe write a blog post about interesting things I learned. The next week I research different types of irrigation systems, both primitive and modern. The week after that I look up Voltaire, his philosophies, and what he was like as a person.

I think it could be pretty useful because some of that stuff is bound to end up in my stories sooner or later, and expanding one’s breadth of knowledge is never a bad thing. In fact I can easily see how all three of those topics might inform my epic fantasy writing by allowing me to implement richer ecosystems, more realistic cities, and more developed politics within those cities.

The biggest deterrent that’s keeping me from starting this right now is that I don’t know how to come up with random topics every week. I want a definitive and useful random topic generator. Something that has enough depth to require research, but not enough complexity to require context by researching something else.

I’m also scared to start this because I’m still looking for a job, and I’m already having a hard enough time finding the willpower to write as it is. I’m currently on Spring Break for my classes, and I should be using it to write the next Lisa Stenton story so I’m not up on Thursday and Saturday night writing while half asleep, but here I am not doing that.

So, while this idea is on my radar, it might be more of a fun summer project rather than a more immediate goal. We’ll see what happens.