We're writers. No, wait. We're fiction writers. It's our life's work to make stuff up and get paid for it. I ask you: Does life get any better than this?

Well, okay. I won't try to kid the kidders. We don't make everything up. We occasionally (incessantly, obsessively, fill in the adverb of your choice) research things. It's the R word and we all have a love-hate relationship with it.

We know all about research. We know all about deep research. And, if pressed, we'll admit to knowing a thing or two about the quick-and-dirty research we need to do when we want an answer, a description, or just a smidge of realism… now. As in on deadline. While the Internet has made all of the above easier, it is this last sort of research that the Internet has made really fun.

My purpose in writing this sporadic column is to bring that didn't-know-I-needed-it information that much closer to your fingertips. Painlessly. My topic this month:

This shadowy, secretive, clandestine, independent government agency has a veritable goldmine of information available on its website. The CIA we know and love to exploit today evolved from the historic and ground-breaking Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which came into being in 1942. Today's CIA (or The Agency as we novelists like to call it) consists of four major components, called directorates: the National Clandestine Service, the Directorate of Intelligence, the Directorate of Science and Technology, and the Directorate of Support. These four units comprise the workings of "the intelligence cycle": the collection and analysis of information and its dissemination to the upper echelon of US government officials.

So that's the brain center, but, let's face it, no agency (or Agency) can operate without a nerve center-the administrative end of things; the functions filled by a whole other set of people who oversee the care and feeding of our spies. These nameless others make sure there is paper in the printer, book the plane tickets, and soothe ruffled congressional feathers. They provide counseling, produce documentation and graphics, provide medical care or legal assistance, and, well, you get the picture. There's more to the Agency than poison pens and more opportunities for character development than the now-cardboard, MacGyveristic super spy.

So if you need to know just where or for whom your agent (or case officer, as they are known in real life) or physician's assistant, legal eagle, or hapless admin assistant might work, what they might do in a day, or what they earn, then go here and put in the career of choice. The page will tell you what you need to know. Well, at least it will tell you about the mundane stuff-it's up to you to manufacture the Wow Factor. (See statement above re: making stuff up and getting paid for it.)

Want to know the government structure of modern Somalia? Whether Americans are allowed to travel freely to Cuba? What Tonga's major exports are? The World Factbook is your one-stop source for all the up-to-the-minute nuts-and-bolts information about any country. It's kept current and it's comprehensive.   The site also offers a guide to current world leaders, and in a world in which a nation's leadership can unfortunately change at the speed of a bullet or a market failure, it's an invaluable resource. The information is listed alphabetically by nation, and each country's page provides the names and positions of those in the top several tiers of government. So if you need to know who heads up Denmark's Ministry of Refugees, Immigration, Integration, and Ecclesiastical Affairs (Birthe Ronn Hornbech) or who is Djibouti's Minister of Youth, Sports, Leisure, and Tourism (Akban Goita Moussa), you know where to go.

If you want to know who said what to whom when, the News and Information page can help you out. It provides links to interviews, congressional testimony, press releases, feature stories on issues and personnel (mostly historical), and timely updates in response to current world events. 

If you need to know how America's intelligence community operated during the Revolutionary War or Civil War, there's an entire collection of articles at your disposal here and here respectively.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of the issues and challenges facing the intelligence community today, head over to the Center for the Study of Intelligence and prepare to read unclassified, academic articles from the journal Studies in Intelligence. Or head over to the site for the Kent Center Occasional Papers if your taste really runs to the academic. Whether the articles you find fire up your imagination to that stage where everything is crackling and there aren't enough hours in the day to write, or they numb your brain into something resembling day-old polenta, is between you and your synapses, but it's all there for the taking.

Want to know where to find information that falls outside the purview of CIA? (Yes, there are some things they don't want or need to know….) Then head over to the page that leads you to the other US intelligence agencies. This page contains links for the intelligence arms of each branch of the US military (We all know the joke, so let's just move on, shall we? ), as well as links to the FBI, DEA, NSA (National Security Agency or, as it used to be known, No Such Agency), and the intelligence arms of the departments of homeland security, energy, state (yes, really), and treasury. As if that wasn't enough, the page has links to the lesser known agencies, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) (I only learned about that one two years ago…). 

But one of the best pages on the website, in my opinion, is the Intelligence Literature page. It provides a pretty comprehensive bibliography of books written about the intelligence community, its operations, history, and personalities. The page provides a cross-referenced list of works about the agency and the industry, ranging from historical eras (for example, World War II and Before) to topics (for example, Terrorism or Espionage) to social divisions (Women in Intelligence) to biographies and memoirs of former intelligence personnel.  The most interesting thing about this list, which is comprehensive, though not exhaustive, is that it's not a list of polished press releases. Not all the books are flattering to the Agency, and some the Agency tried to suppress.

Well, I'm running up against my word count, so I have to stop. But the point is that the wealth of information out there is a little staggering when you think of it. And when it's all at your fingertips, there's not a reason in the world not to take ten or twenty minutes to tiptoe through the tidbits to get the good stuff.

Happy researching.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration came into being in 1958 as a response to the "Sputnik crisis of confidence" and one of its first priorities was human spaceflight, which led to rapid and continual innovations in every  branch of aeronautics, space science, and earth science. So it's no surprise that NASA's website, is pretty close to geek heaven. But before you breeze past this article as being not what you're interested in, I need to point out that the site isn't just for the science fiction and fantasy writers among us. Don't let that 'aeronautics and space' stuff in the title fool you: the NASA website is a goldmine of information for the rest of us, too.

NASA's website is massive and contains something for everyone  Sure you can learn about the spacecraft settling into life on Mars, what the latest solar orbiters are seeing, why NASA is firing a green laser beam at the Moon, and what the Hubble is photographing now. But as I said, there's more to NASA than just outer space. Many of NASA's scientists and researchers are working on projects that are closer to home and perhaps closer to our hearts.

The first thing that I find wonderful about this site is that you don't need a Ph.D. to get your  information. The home page has buttons that take you to portals set up for educators and students, either of which is a great place to start if you want you information in plain, old, understandable terms. Those areas of the site are further segmented by the age of the audience (kindergarten through college), which is great if you're not exactly sure what you need or want to know, and prefer to start your research with baby steps before moving on to more sophisticated information. And the best part is that every article or news release closes with links to additional information and, usually, information regarding who to contact if you want more information. It's like a gift from the universe.

So, once you're on the home page, and you don't want to go the educator/student route because you know what you want and just want to get there, you can just click on the large icons on the right side of the home page, which will take you directly to the broad topic you're interested in: Earth, the Universe, our Solar System, the Moon, etc. Since the point of this article is showing you the things you might be surprised to find on the site, let's start with information most of us could use in our books: stuff about Earth. 

NASA's many earth-orbiting satellites collect atmospheric data regarding both global climate and regional weather, as well as more focused terrestrial issues. For instance, a single project currently underway is focusing on Central America and will enable researchers to study the structure of tropical rainforests, monitor volcanic processes and activity, create three-dimensional maps of earthquake faults, and examine Mayan archeology sites.

The Hurricane Information page provides what you think it does, like images of hurricanes taken by Shuttle astronauts, but it offers a lot more than just that. There are some great pictures and videos of storms to get you in the mood to write that disaster scene, as well as information about how such storms form and why they move the way they do.

If your character is is a pilot or maybe just a frequent flyer, you might be interested to know why NASA is studying how much solar radiation people are exposed to during commercial airline flights. It's in part because airplane cockpit and cabin crews are considered by the federal government to be "radiation workers", just like X-ray technicians and workers at nuclear power plants. However, until now, no one has been able to quantify how much radiation exposure they receive during flights, only that they are indeed exposed. Going to be crashing a plane in your pages soon? You might want to know the dangers of, as well as the whys and hows of, ice forming on airplane wings. Or maybe you need some down-and-dirty info on the destructive forces that occur during a helicopter crash. NASA recently looked into that… by dropping a small chopper from a height of thirty-five feet. And filmed it.

If your story's going up in smoke, you need to check out the Fire and Smoke page. It's the place to go if you want to find out what the global pollution and carbon monoxide distributions were from last autumn's Southern California forest fires, or just see some amazing photographs of them. If you want to see visible light, infrared, and thermal images of those fires, go here.  The Fire and Smoke page also contains links to satellite images of recent wildfires elsewhere in the U.S., as well as in Africa, Australia and Asia, and articles about their environmental and atmospheric impact.

The Climate page is the place to learn about everything from the history of the ozone hole to recent changes in Arctic Ocean sea ice coverage. Specific information regarding all sorts of terrestrial and atmospheric issues is available on an interactive page that allows you to click on a number of different earth-orbiting satellites to find out what they do, to track their orbits and find out where they are in real time… and when one of them might be coming to your neighborhood. (For what it's worth, many earth-orbiting satellites, including the International Space Station, are visible with the naked eye if you know where and when to look for them.)

Then there are the more quirky and/or more basic things you can learn from the site. Want to know what you have to do and wear before being allowed access to a clean room? There's a YouTube video just for you. Maybe you have a burning desire to know how microgravity affects the microscopic hairs of the human inner ear and why NASA is studying it. Or what the latest developments are in robotics, and how things are going for Robonaut, the first "humanoid robot designed for space travel", which came into being ten years ago, or its sexy younger sibling, Robonaut2, the "next generation dextrous robot". (go here then click on the Robonaut2 video)  For a techno-beast, it's sexy-hot. And, um, its penmanship is way better than mine.

If you want to know about budgets, how far in advance NASA programs are planned, the hoops a program has to go through to get off the ground (so to speak), or how issues are handled, you want to head to the page set up for policymakers. You'll find links to everything from budget discussions and congressional testimony to the latest reports on near-earth objects and the hazard mitigation plans in place regarding them, to treatises on space trash and reports on the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

Setting a story in a town that houses one of  NASA's sixteen space centers and facilities? Download a fact sheet about the center and the projects going on there. The News Release Archive goes back to 1990 if you want to find out what might have been going on at a certain time in the last twenty years, and the Media Alert archive is another place to find some interesting tidbits. (Glow-in-the-dark plants, anyone?) Press kits are available going back to 1997 and audio clip files are available. They go back to 2005 and cover everything from Chesley Sullenberger, the Hero of the Hudson, chatting with Shuttle astronauts to interviews with scientists creating computer models that recreate the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And let's not forget NASA TV, which offers channels for the public, the media, and for educational purposes, as well as streaming video from the International Space Station and streaming mission audio, as available.

It's no surprise that the website really shines when it comes to things beyond our atmosphere and I will leave that to you to discover on your own time. Again, though, the site is divided into easily navigable segments via buttons on the Home Page: the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, the Moon and Mars, the Sun and its Solar System, and the Universe. There is a veritable galaxy of information available, ranging from discussions of the intricacies of a Shuttle astronaut's spacewalking suit, including a clickable spacesuit for getting at that specific information, to ponderings about baby black holes, to full-color sky maps of our solar system, to seeing evidence of water on the moon.

No matter which section of this excellent website you go to, you'll find vast amounts of detailed information that will intrigue and amaze; beautiful graphics, photographs, and videos that are available for download; and, best of all, links that work. Happy researching!