Do Your Research

If you're going to be a writer of any kind, you have to research. No escaping it. Fail to and a reader somewhere in the world will catch that one inconsistency and call you on it, and for them, because of that oversight, the story will most likely lose credibility. You may even lose them as a follower, not something to dismiss with a pshaw in this new age of immediate entertainment gratification.

Recently I had one writer tell me that she knew all this historical information because of her...