Another fact: author Rodrigo Rey Rosa did visit the National Police Archive to research a novel. That novel became Human Matter, a book that is part documentary, part diary, and, as the epigraph of the novel makes clear, is a work of fiction “though it may not seem to be, though it may not want to seem to be.”

When I was in elementary school, my father took a theater class in which they learned about different methods of acting, and one of these was Lee Strasbourg’s method acting. In method acting, an actor uses his or her own emotional memories to develop a realistic performance.

After our island’s veterinarian died, the cat population exploded.

Friday. First week of kindergarten. Everybody sitting in a circle around teacher. Waiting to go out to the buses home.

The spots are so smooth that Franklin wouldn’t notice them if he closed his eyes and ran his thumb across her like he was testing a piece of furniture.

Gravity is an invisible force exerted between any two objects with mass. It holds the cosmos together, keeping the moon circling the Earth, and the Earth and planets circling our sun. As a relation between two bodies in space, gravity offers itself as a rich metaphor for a fiction writer.

I’ve heard that a blue whale’s veins are so large that a human could swim, naiad-like, through them, diving into the thick currents nourished by a towering heart that thundered like bells.

When a reader finishes the title story of R.L. Maizes’ first collection, We Love Anderson Cooper, it is likely they will know they are in the hands of a writer with compassion and empathy, someone worth reading.

I completed my initial research for First Cosmic Velocity six or seven years ago. That research was, of course, supplemented by ongoing Googling throughout the writing process.