I have a Ph.D. in engineering, which I acknowledge is weird. Wonderful and weird. Math and chemistry and metallurgy, oh my!
Anyway, I spent many hours, some fun, some not so fun, reading scientific articles. During my years in graduate school (my many many many years) I worked hard to get my facts completely right. I am not saying I entirely succeeded as research is a messy business, but I tried.
Fast forward 20+ years and now I am a stay at home mother to a horde of children, and I am writing Regency novels in the Pride and Prejudice genre. I am going to say something shocking -- when you are writing, you do not have to get everything exactly right historically.
My soul cringed as I typed that sentence, but my brain says it is true. Why? Because if I was determined to be totally accurate, I would not have gotten more than a few hundred words into my first book, I am Jael.
Regency History is complicated, maybe especially for an American? All those titles, all those details about livings and taking orders and the landowners and tenants, wow! I could spend the rest of my life hunting down details of Regency England.
Now I think being well informed is a good thing. I have purchased a couple of books on Regency England to help me understand the times. I have hunted through Regency blogs to learn more about mourning, and half mourning, and clothing, and the British East India Company...
But sometimes I just write. Truthfully, part of the reason I enjoy posting my stories on a fanfiction site is that my readers catch me on problems. For example, in my book The Blind Will See I originally mentioned pineapples being served at Longbourn. It turns out pineapples were so rare that only the extremely wealthy so much as caught a glimpse of one. So forget that! I changed it to mandarin oranges.
This goes back to my previous post. Sometimes you just have to write. If you spend too much time wallowing in the great waves of historical scholarship, you will never get anywhere!
Anyway, I spent many hours, some fun, some not so fun, reading scientific articles. During my years in graduate school (my many many many years) I worked hard to get my facts completely right. I am not saying I entirely succeeded as research is a messy business, but I tried.
Fast forward 20+ years and now I am a stay at home mother to a horde of children, and I am writing Regency novels in the Pride and Prejudice genre. I am going to say something shocking -- when you are writing, you do not have to get everything exactly right historically.
My soul cringed as I typed that sentence, but my brain says it is true. Why? Because if I was determined to be totally accurate, I would not have gotten more than a few hundred words into my first book, I am Jael.
Regency History is complicated, maybe especially for an American? All those titles, all those details about livings and taking orders and the landowners and tenants, wow! I could spend the rest of my life hunting down details of Regency England.
Now I think being well informed is a good thing. I have purchased a couple of books on Regency England to help me understand the times. I have hunted through Regency blogs to learn more about mourning, and half mourning, and clothing, and the British East India Company...
But sometimes I just write. Truthfully, part of the reason I enjoy posting my stories on a fanfiction site is that my readers catch me on problems. For example, in my book The Blind Will See I originally mentioned pineapples being served at Longbourn. It turns out pineapples were so rare that only the extremely wealthy so much as caught a glimpse of one. So forget that! I changed it to mandarin oranges.
This goes back to my previous post. Sometimes you just have to write. If you spend too much time wallowing in the great waves of historical scholarship, you will never get anywhere!