Wake Up World!

One of the joys of writing novels in a historical setting is the research. Some people hate it. I thrive on it, love it in fact! It feeds my soul to go digging for new information, to find the tiny little details which may have been lost in the depths of time. Once upon a time, I did it more frequently, digging out information people needed. When I stopped doing it, it felt as though a part of my soul had died. So when I began to inadvertently write in a Victorian setting, that little part of me which had gone to sleep suddenly woke up singing.

It's got me thinking about the way we see the world. Once upon a time, we had one newspaper or one news channel or a single radio station. Before that, we had nothing. We relied on word of mouth for information. These days we have entire libraries and encyclopaedias at our fingertips. A multitude of news sources are just a click away.

Yet people still seem to rely on a single source for their information. Often I'll see arguments where the person will say "I saw it on X blog so it must be true". Or, "I found it on X news source". Never has the person ventured further than this single link to verify what they're posing to the world.

It's time to wake up. There's so many alternative news sites out there, so many everyday people reporting from the ground. The major news channels want you to believe what they report. They want you to believe that what they say is truth. They want you to get hooked on what they say and pass it along verbatim.

Time to wake up, world. Time to start looking deeper into the issues which matter to you. Get out there and get reading. It's amazing what there is to discover and read. Enjoy! It's an incredible ride!