Greetings October! And Detail Overload.

And we've moved into yet another month. Not only a change of season, but a lot to look forward to! Not least, of course, is Halloween. Love to hear if anyone has any crazy costume ideas going on! Me? Not sure yet, although I've always wanted to go as Sally from Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Anyone have a patched dress they could lend me?

So I've hit an interesting point in my writing. It's a challenge I've come across in the past and have usually been able to work around it by, well, making things up, but that's not going to work this time around. As I describe on my Daughter of Time page, the story is split between the present day and the past.

The present is all fine and dandy thanks to the wonderful tool that is the interwebs. It lets me know flight schedules, and shows me houses in certain areas that I use to describe some of my settings. It cannot, however, show me what life was like 800 years ago. Therein lies my difficulty.

I tend to get distracted by historical details that really don't impact my story. I am not a writer of historical fiction. I admire those that can manage it, but the near impossibility of getting correct all the little details is pressure I don't want to deal with at this point in my writing career. While there are some facts I'm doing a lot of research into, a few specifically chosen events, for the most part I'm aiming for the "feel" of time.

The images on Google's street views does not include what France would have looked like in 1203 and, alas, as good as medieval architecture was, there aren't many structures that still date that far back aside from the breathtakingly impressive Churches. So what's a girl to do?

Edit: Would like to send a big thank you to writer Fran Terminiello for her vast medieval knowledge and help