Five Free Online Tools That Made Me A Bestselling Writer
I needed to visit the Bahamas to push my girl off a cruise ship.
My reasons for the Bahamas were varied. The protagonist of my book, Ana, had financial troubles and couldn’t afford a lengthy trip aboard a luxurious ocean liner. She had three days away from home, max. She also needed warm water due to reasons I can’t explain without spoiling my story. Most of all, I required someplace historically used by undocumented immigrants as a launching pad to enter the U.S.
The Bahamas fit the bill. The problem was I’d never been there. I’d visited Jamaica often to see my mother’s family and I’d traveled to many other Caribbean islands on vacation. But all those trips had only assured me that every island nation between Miami and Central America has its own distinct culture, topography, and people — and woe to the writer that got it wrong.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to travel to an island solely to research the setting in a small portion of my book. Fortunately, there are apps for that. Or, rather, there are a bunch of free online Web sites that enable writers to virtually visit foreign places and get a real feel for the inhabitants. Without these research tools, I wouldn’t have been able to write about the Bahamas with as much detail as I did. In fact, without the five free sites below, I doubt my book, The Widower’s Wife, would have made USA Today’s Bestseller list.
Here are my favorites.

· TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com): Wherever you want to virtually go, this site can take you there. It contains pictures galore. Business supplied photos. Hotel photos. User provided photos. Satellite photos. There are maps annotated with photos of local establishments with links to more reviews and photos. If a picture contains a thousand words, TripAdvisor has a library full on pretty much anywhere you’d want to go.
In addition to the photos, it includes detailed reviews of local establishments supplied by its large, vocal community. The site also has visitor guides that include links to articles about everything from local culture, customs, weather, and food to the logistics of how folks get around.

· Zillow (www.zillow.com): In my stories, homes are often as developed as the characters. I obsess about their appearances, how they relate to their larger surroundings, and how their fictional inhabitants navigate through them and, in the process, alter them. Just as I often derive my characters from combining traits of people I know, celebrities, and other fictional folks, I cast my homes using pieces of other people’s properties.
This is where Zillow comes in. Thanks to the realty site, I am able to walk through various styles of houses, examine kitchen appliances and finishes — even take drone tours of the surrounding grounds. I can check out the tiles in a pool and the materials of an exterior. I am currently writing a novel set in an Amagansett beach house that is an amalgamation of several properties in that area and, also, several beautiful saltbox barns converted into homes in Europe. If I won the lottery, I’d buy beachfront property in the Hamptons and build the home in my book. Too bad someone will have already died in it.
· Google Maps (http://www.google.com/maps): A few months ago, I wrote a short story inspired by the song Pale Blue Eyes for an upcoming anthology based on the music of Lou Reed. Something about Lou Reed’s languid, rumbling tenor in Pale Blue Eyes forbade setting it in fast-talking New Jersey or New York, the states in which I’ve lived most of my life. So, I set it in Las Vegas — the infamous strip, which I’ve visited, and the Red Rock Canyon State Park, which I’ve never set foot in.

Writing the latter part of the story, fortunately, was no problem thanks to Google Maps. I took a virtual walking tour of the Canyon by drilling down from the satellite images to a first-person view along the trail. There were also linked comments from visitors explaining what the place felt like and smelled like as I traveled along via my keyboard’s up and down arrows.

· Dictionary.com (dictionary.com): Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms. This site has them all. Want to describe the grimace on your villain’s face but don’t want to waste words on the curl of his lips? Or, want a word that means the same thing as frown but will allow for a little alliteration? Dictionary.com. The wayward man’s worried expression turned wry as the switchblade’s snap echoed in the hallway. Oh, words. How I do love thee.
· DP Lyle’s Forensics for Writers (https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/): Multi-award-winning thriller author and cardiologist DP Lyle knows how to write a taught suspense novel that is both page-turning terrifying and hellishly accurate. Thankfully for those of us who aren’t him, he has a blog where he generously shares his knowledge of how the human body responds under a variety of awful circumstances and how the police figure out causes of death. (Not to mention a book: Forensics for Dummies).

· In my current novel-in-progress, I needed to know about drowning. His site had posts on when and why a body would float face up, how bacteria and diatoms can reveal a corpse’s location, and true crime tales of spouses dumped at sea.
Writers help writers. I’m thankful for the knowledge shared on DP Lyle’s blog and I hope this blog post helps other authors looking for ways to enhance their storytelling without shelling out more cash on research.
Cate Holahan is the USA Today Bestselling author of The Widower’s Wife, named to Kirkus’ Best Books of 2016. Her third suspense thriller, Lies She Told, will be published Sept. 12 by Crooked Lane Books. In a former life, she was an award-winning journalist that wrote for The Record, The Boston Globe, and BusinessWeek. She lives in NJ with her husband, two daughters, and food-obsessed dog, and spends a disturbing amount of time highly-caffeinated, mining her own anxieties for material.