The Devil in the Details

 You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie or tv show that includes a topic about which you are very knowledgeable, and they get it utterly wrong? Lawyers watching law procedurals roar at the screen. Doctors who watch House are appalled. 

For me, it's New Jersey. Bones had a body wash up in Gloucester City, so they began their investigation on the Rancocas River. How difficult is it to check a map? The X-Files had the Jersey Devil running through huge Vancouver trees with fern fields and rocky stream beds. Umm, there's a reason it's called the Pine Barrens, people. Later, it's observed that the Jersey Devil rummages through the trash in Atlantic City, and runs back to her den in the Pine Barrens. Didn't anyone notice the bay in between the two? Another short-lived, and deservedly so, series, Point Pleasant, once again about the Jersey Devil, featured a Catholic Church IN Ocean Grove, NJ, a Methodist camp meeting. 

I cringe when authors, writing on topic, use phrases like "the Book of Revelations," or "Tesla built a humongous dynamo" or "on a subconscious level, Napoleon believed..."

Those are three widely diverse statements, but what do they have in common? They're just plain wrong. The last book of the Bible is called the Apokalypse of John, or the Revelation of John. The word "humongous" didn't exist in Tesla's day; so, while he may have built a massive dynamo, he could not say it was humongous because the word wasn't coined until 1970. Similarly, the theory of a sub-consciousness was not proposed until 1889.

I recall reading a medieval fantasy novel in which a character under a spell moved with "robot-like" actions. Can you spot my problem? 

These are the kinds of things that matter to me when I write period fiction. I write steampunk, which is a form of historical fantasy. Unlike many steampunk writers, I don't write in the late Victorian England or New York turn-of-the-century setting. I go back to the beginnings of the industrial age, the 1840s, in France. 

I'm currently writing about an ironworks. I've visited a few historical sites featuring early 1800s furnaces. Do you know why pig iron is called pig iron? Smelted iron pours out of a furnace into a sand trough, and off into ingot molds that feed off the trough. Since they resembled piglets suckling a sow, the iron was called pig iron. I think it's an adorable story. 

However, it's an English story. Did the French call pig iron "fer de cochon," or maybe "porc fer"? Did they find some other analogy? How do I even go about finding out? Google Translate tells me they use the term "smelt salmon," which is pretty confusing in English since smelt and salmon are both fish. But more importantly, why salmon? Are their ingots salmon-shaped? These are things I need to know!

I've decided to contact a French iron forge to see if they can tell me their history. I can only hope they answer.

But the problem that presents itself is this: How do I write my narrative about these concepts without using anachronistic or culturally-specific (and therefore wrong) terms? 

Part of the fun of steampunk is that I can have my character invent things before their actual invention, but not share the details with anyone else, or have the invention disappear somehow. So Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace, chats with my heroine about her translation of an Italian manuscript, and while Charles Babbage fiddles with his Silver Lady, my heroine makes Monsieur Claque, an automaton with AI, expanding on Lovelace's formulae. A vampire takes over someone's thoughts, so my Austrian vampire hunter refers to her control of the "unter-conscious." Instead of saying "subconsciously," I have to write, "Without realizing it."

Part of the NOT-so-much-fun of my brand of steampunk is that everything in abundance out there is about late Victorian or Regency, and not about the mid-century. It's tough finding material that can provide me with the details I need to keep integrity in my narrative.

Do you know when donuts were invented? Did you know that pain au chocolat was originally called croissant chocolat? 

If you're planning to be a writer, this is the kind of research that goes into it. It's a devil of a job, but it's got to be done to be right.