is filling out tax forms for fanfic characters, to make sure you didn’t accidentally write them living beyond their means, too obsessive?

chuckwinchester:

gabolange:

aflinley:

measured-words:

kyanve:

blackkatmagic:

cameoappearance:

rainbowbarnacle:

lizardlicks:

universe-c:

edenfalling:

thatgirlnevershutsup:

liesmyth:

liesmyth:

I mean last week I browsed google scholar trying to find details about the composition of ancient Byzantine shampoo and ended up google translating an article written in Hungarian, so. You’re probably fine, nonnie. We’re all quirky here.

Friends, please reblog and tell me what is the most obsessive detail you’ve researched at length for fic writing purposes!

It’s a tossup between research on transatlantic travel in the latter part of the 19th century, and research on orcas in Sea World.

Probably sluice gate construction and installation methods, for field drainage in Tudor England… and/or the life stages of various bloodborne parasites and their attendant bacteria plus the comparative structures of avian and mamalian lungs, so I could design a superficially plausible xenobiological plague vector.

I once spent 3+ hours researching bird species of the Himalayas to come up with the phrase “the little brown bird.”

I know so god damned much about sailing.

I’ve read a ton of dusty Victorian medical guides, so I could tell you a lot about the hilariously bad snake oil cure-alls that got advertised back then, or various home cures for stuff like snake bites or burns, or phrenology, or how masturbation causes the “brain softening”.

I now know a moderate amount about alcohol-based fuel cells – I spent several hours on a Wikipedia binge – because I needed to come up with a power source for robots that would be shelf-stable enough to still work after being left out in the woods for 12 years. (This one was technically for RP, and it hasn’t even come up so far.)

I technically know how to build a sloop from the 1800s, from raw timber. And I once spent six hours researching how an arc reactor would hypothetically work in real life so I could write one sentence of technobabble and make it sound legit.

1800′s Italian legal standards on a scattershot of different things.  Thanks to a couple of RP things, I know way too much about dumb daily life things/mundane legalities/etc. for 1800′s Italy and 1600′s Germany.  

Also I could probably do basic maintenance on antique firearms now.  

Pooossibly a tossup between implanted RFID technology I did for a crackfic about smuggling data in a dog’s microchip, and intensive research about Luddites and early industrial revolutionary weaving technology I did for worldbuilding in a regency-era Changeling: the Dreaming fic.  Jacquard looms are freakin’ cool!

For a generations-spanning ghost story with @rivendellrose, I printed out blank US census records for 1880 – 1930 and filled them out, not only with the central family, but with the info of all the neighbors. 

Five different translations of psalm 39.

None of which made it into the story. 

Mostly all the “if they drive for this long, where will they end up?” research, as well as the hour of research it took me to figure out how much gas the Impala takes and how much it would have cost to fill the tank in the month the fic was set and how often the Winchesters would have to stop for gas. It ended up being an integral part of an entire half a sentence.