Tag Archives: research

What Everybody Knows

June 26, 2011 – 6:29 am

On the very first day at Fourth Street Fantasy convention (which as of this posting, is still in session for another half-day or so), Elizabeth Bear mentioned running into a writing myth I’d never heard myself before: Women can’t ride stallions, because stallions get aggressive around women. Geldings or mares only for female riders, please.
Say, [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (12)

Rewriting the past

June 19, 2011 – 6:30 am

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” - L.P. Hartley
 One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous number of things that most people know or believe in the [...]

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Time Travel the Easy Way

July 25, 2010 – 11:07 am

A few days ago, Beth my exercise buddy mentioned that she’d been rereading some of Connie Willis’ time-travel stories, and it inspired her to ask me a question:  If you could go back in time to do historical research, what time and place would you pick?
I mulled it over for a few days before I [...]

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The Devil’s in the Details

November 5, 2009 – 6:33 am

In the comments on our last exciting episode, accio_aqualung asked:
So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is  terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in a very specific way or their uncle won the [...]

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Did They Have Birds in the Fourth Century?

October 31, 2009 – 8:38 am

“How could you write about anything without wondering if it was true? I mean, you’d be describing a bird in a garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” (Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, Harpers, 1965)
One of the things my mother never understood [...]

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