Tag: getting it right

Getting it Right: Time and Distance on Foot and Horse

monks-1077839_640 courtesy of pixabay.comCharacters in many genres, especially Fantasy and Historical Fiction, often travel by foot. Especially when time is part of the conflict, the author must have a clear idea of exactly how far apart everything is and how long it takes to get from one place to the next.

Note that many authors ignore this kind of detail completely. In many Fantasies, actual distances are never mentioned. However, it is useful for purposes of veracity and suspense to be able to use the time factor. Personally, I spend hours with maps and a calculator on all my books. Which is why I am passing this information on to you. Continue reading “Getting it Right: Time and Distance on Foot and Horse”

Literature’s Torrid Love Affair with Arsenic

arsenic for authors courtesy of pixabay bottle-1481599_960_720Guest Post
by Ben Steele

If arsenic had a golden age, it was probably the Victorian era in England and the United States. It was in bloody everything, from wallpaper, to clothing dye, to cosmetics. If arsenic had a golden age in terms of literature, it was probably the mid-1900s, though by then its career as an actual murder weapon was being regulated out of relevance. Still, writers like Agatha Christie made arsenic one of the most well-known and sordid tools in popular crime fiction.

There is an absolute ton of juicy content to get into here. For a start, it really was as common as you hear, according to Sandra Hempel, an author and expert on the subject. She states, “Through much of the nineteenth century, a third of all criminal cases of poisoning involved arsenic. One reason for its popularity was simply its availability. All you had to do was go into a chemist’s shop and say that you needed to kill rats.” Continue reading “Literature’s Torrid Love Affair with Arsenic”

Getting it Right: Characteristics and Traits of your Supporting Cast

generations-462134_960_720For the first time in history, we are experiencing at least four generations laboring side-by-side in the workplace. In fact, six living generations exist representing six distinct groups. Collective experiences in life — wars, financial collapse, tech bubbles, nation building — have formed collective characteristics of like-minded people within each of these groupings. There’s a little variance in the classification of these generations but it looks like this: Continue reading “Getting it Right: Characteristics and Traits of your Supporting Cast”

The Skinny on How Investigators Use DNA, Fingerprints in Solving Crimes

CSI for authors crime-scene-30112_640At the October meeting of the Maryland Writers Association (Howard County), John L. French, a crime scene supervisor for the Baltimore City Police Department, offered writers some tips on making their fictional crime investigations more realistic.

Part 1 of this article offered French’s suggestions on documenting the crime scene and what firearms evidence left there could reveal. In part two, we look at how fingerprint and DNA evidence are used by crime scene investigation units. Continue reading “The Skinny on How Investigators Use DNA, Fingerprints in Solving Crimes”