Free Realms of Fantasy

As per douglascohen you may have your own personal FREE copy of Realms of Fantasy.  And it looks REALLY easy:  all you have to do is post our banner on your website.   Go to the RoF website and you'll see our banner at the top of the main page.  Click on it to get the code and receive further instructions.

Details HERE

The importance of fact checking

Get your facts straight or risk a red face.  Anyone read the Sunday comics?  In today's B.C., (you can see it HERE ) the snake overhears someone calling him a garter snake.  But he thinks he hears it as GARDENER snake.  So he gets a hoe and goes out to work in the yard.  Except, the picture shows him with a rake.  Or maybe a cultivator.  It has 4 tines on it anyway, and the common garden hoe has a single blade.  It's just a simple little detail, right?  Who'll notice?  

It reminds me of an older toilet paper commercial.  Can't remember the brand, but it's big selling point was the quilted softness.  It was a cartoon-like commercial with a couple of old ladies and a younger one, all quilting on the toilet paper to make it soft.  Except they were using knitting needles.  I remember thinking at the time, what a bone-headed mistake.  I noticed they pulled the commercial pretty quickly, probably due to all the laughter from quilters and knitters heard in the background every time the commercial aired.

If you're not familiar with different sewing techniques, (as the artist behind the commercial obviously wasn't), you're thinking it's not that big of a deal, right?  Except making what seems a tiny, unimportant mistake makes one look ignorant.  And it gives the impression (in these two cases, rightly enough) that you don't know what you're talking about.  And that can be death to a writer, who has to make the reader believe in their world and characters enough to want to go along for the ride.

You may think that because you write fantasy and scifi, there's no need to research, right?  But there's nothing worse than losing your credibility with readers because of a simple mistake.  Someone, somewhere, is going to notice.  Of course we play with facts, of course we can't please everyone, but sometimes it's the simple stuff that trips us up.