Tag: research

Common Errors of Fantasy, Transportation Division

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Horses are not motorcycles.

If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.

While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story.  Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.

It’s All in the Search Terms

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

An actual conversation that took place in the office here, a couple of books back:

My co-author to me: I know that the term “latrine” didn’t come into use until World War I, when the Army got it from the French. What did they call them during the Civil War?

Me: Um. Let me look around and find out.

(Sound of typing, as I Google “US Army sanitary regulations Civil War” and find, in short order, a reference to a text entitled Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers, written in 1864 by a Brigadier-General August Kreutz, which includes a section on camp cleanliness. A little more Googling, and I have the text itself.)

Me: The word was “sinks.”  God, I love research.

I also love the internet.  Back in the olden time, locating an obscure text like that would have required a visit to a university research library and some quality time spent with the card catalog — and while I enjoy roaming at will through the stacks as much as any bibliophile, it’s not something easily done when you live in a small town an hour and fifteen minutes north of the nearest traffic light.

Revision Research Weirdness

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Today’s odd job:  Invoking the awesome power of the internet in order to determine whether or not the closed and abandoned 86th Street Station on the commuter train line in to Grand Central could be used to gain access to the street above.

Our editor had queried this, since the stairs leading up from the old platform are covered at street level by secure hatches.

We eventually found a photo reference showing one of the hatches standing open, with the panic bar on the underside clearly visible.  Victory!

(All this, in the service of about three paragraphs whose sole purpose is to get our protagonist from point A to point B without being spotted by the people who are watching for him at all the regular exits.  But here as elsewhere, God is in the details.)