It's History!

While reading some of the blogs I follow, I saw the recent blog post on History Hoydens titled "Accuracy or Intelligibility" regarding the historical accuracy of historical novels. Today, there is a similar discussion on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. As a former graduate student, I am or can be quite a stickler for details and can find inaccuracies, particularly in the fields that I know, to be quite distracting and annoying. At the same time, I can't say that history or facts should be immobile to the flow of the story or voice. Even Thackeray did not adhere to history when writing "Vanity Fair" (check out the introduction of the penguin edition of the book for details).

For my writing, I've done my preliminary research. Though, I must admit a lot of the terms for clothing, housing, transportation, etc. do not come easily to me even with the research and years of built up knowledge based on osmosis. I'm writing the most I can and figure I will work out the details and fact checking in the revisions. If I had to check a fact every time I wrote, it would take forever to write (For example, after reading the History Hoydens' blog, I searched for the word foyer and had to replace it with a more appropriate word for the time period. Thankfully, I don't have many scenes in the foyer).

Page/Word Count:
84 pages
44,424 words