Immerse Yourself in Books with the Small Demons Storyverse

Give me a really interesting book (for example Just Kids by Patti Smith, which I recently finished), and it can take me weeks to finish it rather than days. It’s not because the reading of these books is in any way harder than other books, but rather because I stop so much, while reading, to do research into what the author is writing about. With Just Kids I pretty much gave myself a crash course in the late 1960s-early 1970s lower Manhattan art scene. I delved so deeply into some of the characters (or, in this case real people, but I will still call them characters because they are that too), that I woke up one night (morning?) around 2:30 a.m. convinced that I was being haunted by Edie Sedgwick (to be fair, it had been a creepy day which included an actual visit to her grave – see the lengths I go to in the name of research? – and it was a very dark night in which the front door light to my house happened to be out, therefore, obviously, making it easier for non-existent ghosts to enter). After telling Edie’s ghost that I didn’t believe in it (that’s the way to get ghosts to go away, right? Or is it the way to get yourself murdered by a ghost? I can never remember), I rechecked under the bed and in the closet and then got on Twitter for a bit until the real world of non-ghosty-glib-140 character philosophy brought me back to normal.

All that to show you that I’m serious when I say, I really like to immerse myself in what I’m reading.

And now, I have Small Demons (seriously, it’s called that, I didn’t make it up at 2:30 in the morning) to help me in my crazy pursuit of research while reading. With Small Demons’ Storyverse you can use what they call Storyboards to look further into a book (or author or character) by finding out what people are in it, which places it references, and things that are mentioned (songs, movies, fashion, food, etc.). Honestly, does it get better than this?