STOP! NANOTIME!
First day wordcount 6,505. Not too shabby.
All my research is fairly useless though, because when writing historical fiction the only thing worse than doing no research is prancing around yelling I HAVE DONE LOADS OF RESEARCH! LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF!!!
It's a tricky old line to walk and the best example of it being crossed recently was that Sherlock Holmes remake with Robert Downey Jr. It was tremendously cool to see the now-iconic Tower Bridge under construction. What was not cool was the way they drew attention to it in the dialogue because it just came off as HAY EVERYBODY LOOK AT US BEING ALL SMART AND SHIT! Jesus - if you're going to set the climax of the film on the half-completed bridge I think we've had about enough.
Of course, if you want to take it to even stupider extremes then you can go the James Cameron route, like in Titanic when Rose shows up with a bunch of Impressionist paintings and I think an early Picasso and her evil fiance is all "Oh, it will never catch on," when of course, it did. I'm sure that scene caused Cameron numerous squirmings of unmitigated glee at his own brilliant grasp of historical irony. The rest of us just cringed.
And then there is the ultimate research maven - Dr. Robert Langdon of Dan Brown fame. Whenever Dan himself fails to infodump vast sections of common knowledge on your noggin you can always count on Langdon and his frequent and annoying wikispasms to remedy the deficit. Nobody wants that.
All my research is fairly useless though, because when writing historical fiction the only thing worse than doing no research is prancing around yelling I HAVE DONE LOADS OF RESEARCH! LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF!!!
It's a tricky old line to walk and the best example of it being crossed recently was that Sherlock Holmes remake with Robert Downey Jr. It was tremendously cool to see the now-iconic Tower Bridge under construction. What was not cool was the way they drew attention to it in the dialogue because it just came off as HAY EVERYBODY LOOK AT US BEING ALL SMART AND SHIT! Jesus - if you're going to set the climax of the film on the half-completed bridge I think we've had about enough.
Of course, if you want to take it to even stupider extremes then you can go the James Cameron route, like in Titanic when Rose shows up with a bunch of Impressionist paintings and I think an early Picasso and her evil fiance is all "Oh, it will never catch on," when of course, it did. I'm sure that scene caused Cameron numerous squirmings of unmitigated glee at his own brilliant grasp of historical irony. The rest of us just cringed.
And then there is the ultimate research maven - Dr. Robert Langdon of Dan Brown fame. Whenever Dan himself fails to infodump vast sections of common knowledge on your noggin you can always count on Langdon and his frequent and annoying wikispasms to remedy the deficit. Nobody wants that.