alpacas, sheep, child abuse, and amputation in the 19th century

Research can be fun.

Alpacas are going to be impossible for a 19th century English person to get, so she's going to have to settle for the best merino sheep or maybe some cashmere goats. i still haven't decided. I am about to write a chapter about her doing research.

My first book has a hero with a prosthesis. I still need to find more about late Victorian amputations. It's not going to be pretty. I wonder how advanced they were with fancy prostheses. It was an age of innovation, so I guess if you knew the right people, you could try out some things, right?

And not so much fun for the part about child abuse. When I realized that my current heroine's paralyzing shyness came not only from introversion and sensitivity, but from a lifetime of bad treatment - neglect, verbal abuse, occasional physical abuse - by her mother, her older sister, and sometimes even her father, I realized that I was going to have to find out more about adult children of abuse. What little I've read on the Internet, I'm apparently already hitting most of the points on the checklists.