The Devil is in the Details (and He's a Dick)

[unavoidedcrisis]

I've been writing this story. I really hit my stride the other night and put about 2.8k on my word count.

Woke up in a panic yesterday and realized "oh no, my story is set in Boston and I'm not from Boston! What if I got details wrong?!". Now little things don't bug me that much, that's called artistic license. I can make up the location of a department store or randomly add a set of traffic lights.

But I have a scene with the characters stealing ammunition to kill zombies with. Where I come from, you can buy bullets at any gun shop or military surplus, obviously, or at any outdoors store or even Walmart. Turns out, in Boston, you need to go to very specific gun shops. That's not something I can 'artistic lisence' right over.

So the 2,000 and some odd words I wrote are basically nonsensical rambling. My epic night of extra awesome writingosity feels more like a night of epic writing failosity.

Does anyone else ever have that problem where a little detail turns out to be way more important than you thought and then you want to punch yourself in the throat for messin git up because now it means you're going to spend all day rejiggering what was supposed to be an easy, breezy plot device/angst machine?

Or is that just me, then?

Comments

[smartamy15.livejournal.com]

I definitely understand! I'm co-authoring a Star Trek fic right now and whereas normally the type of engine or how fast a ship flies is just random information that you can make up on the spot, it's actually something that has to be researched; my friend and I spent a futile hour trying to calculate star dates.

Just take a deep breath and slowly backtrack - it'll clean itself up! :)

[unavoidedcrisis.livejournal.com]

Good luck with star dates, they always confused the heck out of me! Having a co-author is nice though.