@bookstodon No, historical romance author, your heroine’s skirt hem did not skim over the bluebells, nor did lilac petals fall onto her bright unbound hair.
What kind of details bring your suspension of disbelief plummeting to the ground, fellow readers? For me, it’s often mistakes about plants, or food.
@CommonMugwort@bookstodon It just seems to me that writing a historical anything is making an electrified rod for your own back. Unless you really like doing all that research, set the damn thing in a fantasy universe, where you have more leeway!
@bookstodon So, for example, the book in which Julius Caesar was served a meal including stuffed peppers was abandoned, and the one where shipwrecked Odysseus munched olives off the tree, went, book-lover that I am, straight into the recycling box.
@bookstodon@mutinyc It depends on the period. There’s this https://archive.org/details/cbk?tab=collection, but for earlier, or outside the English-speaking world you’d have to work a bit harder, searching for articles on material culture or looking at texts actually from the period for clues. The main thing, I think, is to check your assumptions. Seasonality before refrigeration never seems to occur to some, or storage. I’ve never seen it done better than by Nicola Griffith in Hild.
@CommonMugwort@bookstodon Putting a corset on a heroine (or any other femme-identifying character) before corsets were invented yet. Double points against for meditations on how uncomfortable the corsets were -- it just makes me wonder why the character doesn't pay for or make herself garments that fit properly.
@eyrea@bookstodon there’s also the laundry question - either nothing is ever cleaned, or our heroine wears a different outfit every day, possessing a dozen or more while living in genteel poverty
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