How the research tends to go with me
When writing a novel, there is a place where you brain is going “Only 20 pages? Are you nuts? You have to write 40 times that to finish the book!”
I also run into that when researching the places and times for the next novel. Pick up a source you think will be great, read 80 or 90 pages before you realize the author is only interested in relaying nominally interesting anecdotes about high-level goings on, with none of the detail of daily life I’m looking for. So I’ll put that aside, grumbling about the lost time, and pick up another.
As with the writing, diligence (“seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”) pays off after a while. The “has been read” pile gets larger, with notes and highlighting and pages worth remembering have been dog-eared.
At this point in the process, it’s coming together. Small scenes appear to me (often at inconvenient-to-record times like driving down a mountainside or in the shower), the image or sequence magnetized, in a sense, by some odd fact I’ve read in one of the other books.
Overall, it goes slower than I like, but tends to end up better than I could have hoped.