The other issue is just the one described by green_knight. Everything in a world seems to be connected to everything else. How can I be sure my creation hangs together? What I tend to do is compare the bit I’m wondering about to a bit in our real world that is similar. (I’ve researched the history of mining, as well as that of medicine and other topics.) And then I work out what is different and how the differences would make certain parts of my fantasy bit different. (Not sure I’m making sense.) And I “translate,” since the words used by my fantasy cultures tend to be different from modern terms.

No complaints from my readers thus far, but I’m new at this! I suspect that if a certified aromatherapist ever happens to read Troll-magic, she’ll find errors!

So, so painfully true!

I notice you left out the part about hours or even days being sucked away as you wander off on some only tangentially-related but *utterly fascinating* subject. Or do you have some magical means of avoiding that?

Right now I’m looking into period dresses, since I want to borrow some specific dress styles for my own fantasy world. It’s turning out to be more interesting than I thought it would be.

I find it the opposite. A historical setting has usually been examined and described by more than one someone and all you need to do is work your way through the reference books.

When you make up a world, it has to be plausible and you’re forever balancing between what resources your world has and what your characters would have made of them. And some of those choices are logical (if you have timber and clay you are likely to get timberframe buildings, but moments later you’re thinking about towns and fire risks and local stone and building techniques and not only do you not have the ability to simply look things up on a geological map, you need to make sure that the landscape your character walks through matches the inn he’ll rest in at the end of the day.

And *then* you need to ask what your culture would have made of the resources and whether their magic or religion or social customs would make a difference. (When you get the whole household and all their dependants eating together, you need a large central room they all fit into, and then you need the timber to construct such houses and the requisite tables. Etc etc.)

From where I’m sitting, that looks like more work. I’m lucky that I have a lot of that knowledge at hand, but there’s a lot of thinking about consequences involved. And of course you can just borrow a historical region, but to me, that feels like a cheap way out, because the historical setting evolved _in history_ and doesn’t take well to being grafted upon a fantasy setting. Most of them don’t take and wither away.