Researching the Contemporary

Urg. If you didn’t know already, I’m writing a contemporary romance. My first after five years of writing historicals. Not that I’m abandoning historical romance, but this contemporary feels right to be written at this moment. Which brings me to something I never had trouble with as I wrote and plotted my historicals: research. I love it to death, but with the contemporary romance, there are actual people alive–millions of them–who can email me and tell me I got something wrong. Sure, people may email me to zing me on a historical point, but no one today is actually alive and living in say, 1904 New York City, or 1893 London, to ring me up and point out “that street is one way and you made it two way.”

The contemporary–and the one I have planned after it–are both set in my area, but as I begin to research I begin to realize how much I don’t know about my setting! And the most difficult part is deciding where my characters are living, and where they work. 1) My heroine’s family is wealthy. Okay, if this were 1900s NYC or London, I would just put them in a mansion along Fifth Avenue or Park Lane, respectively. But this is 2009 and wealthy neighborhoods aren’t built that way any longer. My first inspiration had the book set in NY and Long Island after coming across a website devoted to the mansions dotting Long Island’s Gold Coast, but I’ve never been to NY in my life and would completely, utterly, entirely bungle it. So I moved it to the Bay Area. Except now I have to go house hunting to find a house that fits the plot.

2) My heroine is a doctor. So the hospital in which she works, um, actually exists, so it has to be right. She can’t go flouncing wherever, and I’m definitely not going to do my research on what she does from Grey’s Anatomy! So…I’ve been emailing doctors like crazy for info.

I’ve got the clothes down. And the cars. And everything else normal. It’s just those two nagging details that have me freaked.