The Blank Canvas

So, 1911. I usually start out thinking about what I know about the year without looking at any resources. For 1911, there's not an awful lot. I know Taft was President, and Wilson was Governor of New Jersey. I imagine that TR was probably stewing about something Taft was doing or not doing, since he was about to run against his former protégé. I imagine something nasty was going on in the Balkans. Arizona and New Mexico were probably working on state constitutions, since they were going to become states the next year. Ty Cobb was probably doing something interesting, and I know I have a book called "The Ty Cobb Scrapbook", which covers Cobb in amazing detail (but is sort of a hagiography, but heck, I'm a born Tigers fan). That's about it.

The next thing I do is to look at my Chronologies database. This is a database of over 2100 chronologies which are the building blocks for games. I'll discuss the rules of how that works in discussions of the first game of 2011, but for now just assume there are about 90 books I need to check to see if they have entries for 1911 (which isn't hard to check, since all the books are entered by first and last dates, so I only have to look at the ones that show data in between). These are books I haven't used in 2010 yet. It's a small number because it's the end of the year, but also because a lot of these books are on specific years or really narrow ranges, like a book that covers nothing but Stonewall Jackson's service in the Civil War, which is just 1861-63. A number of the others aren't really there, they're lost, but I haven't deleted them from the database because I might find them or I might replace them and I'm anal that way.

My guess is that at most I will have two or three sources I have to use because of this. It might indeed be zero, because the last game I wrote was 1903, and a lot of the sources I had not used yet that cover this general time period were used in that game.

Next, I check the piles of unused sources, which are not in my database but just lying around the office. I like to use about two or three new sources every game. One reason for this is that it keeps the games fresh, particularly when there's a great new source, either covering a new topic or covering a topic in an unusual way. Another is that based on the rules for how I write the games, it's bad to have a lot of narrow sources, either by topic or time, used in the same game. Again, I'll elaborate more on that for the first game of 2011.

If I've written a game on the year before, I'll probably re-read that game. I certainly have written on 1911 before, because I've done every year of the 20th century at least once, and many of them five or six times, and I have all the games in my files. I re-read both to remind myself of the big events of the year and to make sure I don't inadvertently write the same question. So, just to pull something out of the air, if Ty Cobb were in a race for the batting title with Nap Lajoie, I would make sure that if last time the answer to the question on this topic was "Ty Cobb", this time it would be "Nap Lajoie" or "second base" or "Cleveland" or whatever.

Then I just pull books off the shelf that are likely to fit the topic. I like to make sure I have a mix of really narrow topics ("Pasadena Chronology") and really wide ones ("20th Century Year by Year"). Unless a year is particularly appropriate for it (say, 1964 and rock music), I like to limit the number of books used on a particular topic. I like to cover the whole world if I can (there are only so many Asian or South American or African sources, of course) and I like to cover a lot of topics--art, literature, music, sports, daily life--along with the usual political and military things that people might know off the top of their heads.

The books get put on a wire rack in my office, short books on the top, tall on the bottom. My rule is 46 questions minimum; there is no maximum but except for oversize books, I won't go over the size of the wire rack once I've hit 46.

I usually use one of the broader sources for the bonus, because I like a good bonus where the double answer is integral to the question. Again, if I were doing 1964, I might use a narrower source like a Beatles chronology (I probably have a dozen of these), because it's not hard to get a double answer out of it. I suppose I might end up with Arizona and New Mexico as a dual answer for 1911.

On to actually picking the books.