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I don't intend to try and convince the IRS of this, but one of the real perks of being a writer is the amount of retroactive research you discover you've already done. When I took week-long driving tour of Ireland in 2005, my interest was in genetic (if not genealogical) research. An adopted child of obviously Irish extraction, I was aware of watching for some glimmer of recognition of familiarity in the landscape and faces, but primarily I was there for the beauty, the whiskey, the time alone, and the music. A writing career in general (and and Falling, Fly, in particular) were still several years and a failed online retail venture away.
A measure of planning put me at the Stone- and Iron-Age sites Newgrange and the Hill of Tara on my first day of driving, half a year away from the solstice Newgrange was built to mark. Although neither place made it intoand Falling, Fly, Newgrange makes a brief appearance in my next book, In Dreams Begin.
From the Hill of Tara, I explored the lonely roads that radiated out into the countryside, where I caught a 
glimpse of roofless stone walls above the road-smothering trees. I pulled my rental car onto the non-existent shoulder and investigated.
What I found worked its way, almost three years later, into "Overtaken," the seventh chapter of and Falling, Fly. In this scene, fallen angel and vampire Olivia escapes the surreal, underground Hotel of the Damned, motorcycling into the clear, cold Irish night in the company of troubled neuroscientist Dominic:
An hour out of Cashel, Dominic points at something through the trees. I catch a glimpse of walls and windows, of moon-raked sky where roof and glass should be. We pull off the road and push our bikes into the underbrush.
A fence towers along the road, but I track Dominic as he walks away from the bikes, skirting the barricade. He finds a low metal gate and pushes it open. Spectral cows regard us darkly in the ashen April moonlight.
He sets off purposefully towards the ruined church across the grey grass. "Come on," he calls, unperturbed by the spotted cows whose whiteness leaves them grotesquely incomplete where the night swallows the black places in their hide.They stand along the low stone wall that bounds the ruined abbey. There is a gate, but Dominic vaults the wall and turns to offer me a hand across it. I can leap ten vertical feet without a running start. It would rattle him right out of the complacent gallantry that holds out his waiting hand to me but, quite frankly, the cows rattle me, so I take his warm hand and step onto the wall.
"Can't they climb a fence this low?" I ask him.
"The cows?" He grins up at me. "It'd be more like a clamber, but yeah."
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Tomorrow: History and Sewers: a trip to Cashel, home of the Hotel of the Damned.
