What are the 'behind the scenes' aspects of your fiction writing that are interesting?

[Elmir_Arch-Ham_of_Omega]

The protagonist Ingrid and her friends are making their way home one chapter, and since she's in a fantasy DnD-esque city, I thought that one aspect such a city would have are newsreaders just like in Assassin's Creed 2 and HBO's Rome.

Instead of making up random news bits. I decided to tap a resource nobody ever had.
Other authors.
I went around a forum and asked other authors if they wanted in on the news bits and I ended up with more than the few references to their stories.

Originally it was just for "ambience" but it ended evolving into something more.

You see, not too long ago at that point, there had been a monster stampede, and considering most of the cameo news bits my fellow authors had contributed often were summarized as "someone's causing trouble" I used it show that after a monster stampede, the incidences of crime spike since most authorities are more focused in tending the injured and repairing damage than hunting crooks or escaped prisoners.

These fellow authors didn't just pad the wordcount. They helped me with the worldbuilding.

 

[RightThereInTheTitle]

Probably just the sheer volume of research in small details that probably aren't all that important for the story but matter a lot to me for the sake of accuracy. Things like "What were the typical street foods in the medieval era?" or "What medieval diseases were death sentences but entirely treatable with the technology of the time if given modern medical understanding?"

An author after my own heart! I've done the same thing for my tabletop RPGs for decades, and more recently have brought the same sensibility to my writing.

My recent effort for my superhero fiction has involved questions like:

• Assuming that there are roughly as many superheroes in the United States as there are professional atheletes, what would be the average salaries for superheroes who work as law enforcement contractors in cities of various sizes:
  • small cities (e.g. Bend, Oregon - approximately the 300th largest city in the United States)
  • medium sized cities (e.g. Jackson, Mississippi - approximately the 200th largest city in the US)
  • medium-large cities (e.g. Richmond, VA - approximately the 100th largest US city)
  • large cities (e.g. Tampa, Florida - approximately the 50th largest US city)
  • huge cities (e.g. Jacksonville is the smallest city with over 1,000,000 population, and is only the 10th largest city in the US)
• What kind of endorsement deals do professional atheletes get in real life, and how does this differ between minor and major league teams?
  • I was surprised to learn that a majority of NFL football players have no personal endorsement deals, so apparently endorsements of any kind are less common for pro-atheletes than I expected.
• What kinds of city budgets already exist for SWAT teams, bomb squads, high-risk warrant service and fugitive apprehension (in cities where those are a different line item than SWAT), search and rescue, and disaster response?

All of this was basically to produce a "realistic" single line of dialogue in which a superhero team leader makes an offhanded reference to his team's salaries in comparision to superhero salaries in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.

I know that no reader is really going to care that much about these kinds of numbers, but I still have a twenty-seven page worldbuilding document where I work through all of these kinds of numbers, just for my own internal consistency.

This is a huge part of my "behind the scenes" process, though it's possible that it's not actually "interesting" to anyone