Comments | grumpymartian: Heading to the Danger Zone

grumpymartian

Heading to the Danger Zone

Sep 21, 2010 00:46

I have made a miscalculation. Writing a setting in the near past is really difficult. I mean there's a certain amount of hand waving and personal memory that goes into it... but there are details that must be researched and verified. Writing in the near past means there's a strong possibility that there are people alive who remember things well ( Read more... )

Comments 7

pixelfish September 21 2010, 08:35:45 UTC

Feathered should be enough. Hairsprayed, gelled, blown out, deliberately styled, shiny, bouncy.

grumpymartian September 21 2010, 08:43:17 UTC

Fear my villain and his bouncy shiny hair.

pixelfish September 21 2010, 08:59:47 UTC

My villain (one of them anyway) wears Hugo Boss.

I wonder if my future editor will make me remove that part. I LIKE Hugo Boss (at least their cologne) but maybe that will cause trouble?

pixelfish September 21 2010, 17:56:41 UTC

I don't know. I think if it matters for proper description or evoking a certain feel, it shouldn't be taken out.

I know there so many things that I can't use a generic for by necessity.

Thread 5

eebrother September 27 2010, 00:11:38 UTC

Even the not-quite-so-near past has its pitfalls. Just watched a bit of a movie about the Pearl Harbor attack. It showed nice aerial views of the Japanese aircraft carriers with planes taking off. From a carrier with an "angle" deck, not used until AFTER WWII, and the superstructure "the island" on the starboard (right) side. Japanese carriers were all straight deck with the island on the port side. The carrier also had "horns" which were incorporated only after catapults were invented, again AFTER WWII.

Such errors can certainly detract from the story, if you're as picky as I am.

EEB

grumpymartian September 29 2010, 17:36:53 UTC

Exactly. I have a bad habit of picking up skeleton inconsistencies in forensic shows. It's distracting when they identify a clearly female skull as male or use different skulls for the same victim. There was an episode of Bones where the plot required them to "overlook" the fact that a bone had mounting holes (for articulating it into a teaching skeleton) for 24 hours while submitting the bone to all sorts of scrutiny. That is the sort of thing that you'd notice within 5 seconds... maybe 30 if you hadn't had coffee yet.

I know that I'll never get EVERY little detail right (especially writing about a city that I didn't live in at the time of the story) but I'd like to avoid the glaring errors that bounce people out.