It’s also possible to go too far in the other direction. I’m obsessed with accuracy, and love looking things up, so it’s real easy to kill an afternoon on this sort of thing.

My current YA book involves the Romanian language, lots of astronomy and almanac information, geography, climate in a particular area, what wildlife lives where, how long it takes to drive a car from point A to point B and what you’ll see along the way, how fast a horse-drawn wagon goes and what the harness looks like, train schedules and routes in Nevada, and if you were ten times stronger than you were, how would the physics really work? Hint: not at all like Superman or Steve Austin.

Thank God for the Internet. I think. Remember, all this assumes I don’t get distracted by something else I find out along the way and go off on some completely useless web trek.

Sooner or later I come up for air and realize that I actually do have to put words on the page, too!

P.S. Here’s a useful tip: Google Earth has a marvelous feature called “street view.” If you have something in your story going on in, say, Pittsburgh, you can pop over there in virtual form and “walk” down the street, gathering description and the sense of the place as you go.

You still have to get the stuff that IS grounded in reality right. In fact, you have to be even more careful, because your target audience are the worst nitpickers around. I know…I do it myself. (For example, there are two kinds of fantasy writers – ones who ride and love horses and know everything and ones who haven’t even sat on one and get it all wrong. Never anything in between, from what I’ve seen).