Have I mentioned recently that I love research, and have never seen a plot bunny hop into a rabbit hole without wanting to follow it into wonderland?

My browsing history is eclectic, to say the least. At the moment, I have six stories at various stages. Take a look at some of the interesting facts I’ve gone rabbiting after, and tell me what you’d like me to write about here.

I’m close to finishing Abbie’s Wish, my contemporary for the Authors of Main Street Christmas set. In just the last few days, I’ve looked up:

• classic motorcycles, and what model my hero, my villain, and my second lead might have a bonding moment over
• electronic listening devices that wouldn’t be easy for someone to detect
• exercises used in Riding for the Disabled classes
• what dirt bike riding feels like, and how the bikes differ from street bikes
• ideas for costumes for a parade float with the theme ‘summer solstice around the world’.

Paradise Regained is on its final proofread before publication in November as part of the Bluestocking Belles box set. My research days for that are well over, but included Silk Road caravanserais, trading routes north of (or over) the Caspian Sea, the best place in Europe to buy edged weapons, words in Turkmen and Persian, Paradise gardens, Sufi saints and their relics, and  the civil war in Iran during the change of dynasties in the late eighteenth century.

Also on the final run to publication is the novel House of Thorns, which Scarsdale Publishing is bringing out as part of a Marriage of Inconvenience collection. I’ve got the edits back from the publisher and am working my way through them. Research included:

• Wirral Peninsula and the steam ferry services that connected it to Liverpool
• 1816, the year without a summer
• Regency property developers, including failed property developments
• exploring officers in the Napoleonic Wars.

As soon as I clear the work for these three off my desk, I need to get back to The Beast Next Door, a rewrite of the Bluestocking and the Beast, which was originally a short story. The Beast Next Door is going in a Valentine box set for the Bluestocking Belles, and has had me looking up Regency treatments for severe strawberry birthmarks (and what happens without treatment), assemblies at Bath, and distances from Bath that would keep my heroine stranded in the country by bad weather for a crucial length of time at the start of the book.

And my mind still keeps going back to Unkept Promises. I’m over 25% of the way through Mia’s and Jules’s story, the fourth in the Golden Redepenning series. I’m continuing to research the Regency navy, particularly that arm of it that policed the seas off the Cape of Storms. Other rabbits I’ve chased to their lairs include:

• tuberculosis — what it looked like and how it progressed before antibiotics, and tuberculosis treatments in Regency times
• the British presence in Cape Town in 1812
• Cape Town streets and houses in 1812
• the history of the Cape Colony, and specifically the history of slavery in the Cape Colony
• Ceylon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
• the Far East fleet of the British navy in the wars with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France.

The ongoing saga of Never Kiss a Toad keeps on throwing up challenges, being outside my normal research period. I’m cowriting it with Mariana Gabrielle, and we’re publishing it on Wattpad one episode a week. Our heroine is off in the Pacific, on an island group where her father has been appointed governor. Diplomatic, Polynesian, settler, whaler, and other history needed. She has a new suitor, who is a scientist and a balloonist. Two more rabbits. She has been to Alexandria, Cairo, and Madras — all of which required description.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the intrepid hero of Never Kiss a Toad is running a shipping enterprise. New countries and also travel times, which are always fraught. This week’s episode has him preparing for his sister’s debutante ball, events that had changed a little by the time Victoria was on the throne.

It’s a good thing I love research.