Activity

@seekjustice Girls or women going bareheaded. Unless it’s set after 1950-something (and even then some women still wore hats for special occasions), ye need to cover yer hair. There have been tiny slivers of time and place with exceptions to this rule. But still. If you’re writing a novel set during the Norman Conquest of England and your hero falls in love with the heroine based on her shining auburn hair or whatever, and he’s not spying on her in her bath (which, ugh) — I’m going to count that an impossibility. Similarly, nineteenth-century grown women with their hair flowing all over the place. Not going to happen. Even poor women had more than two hairpins apiece.

Also medieval women characters: “I’m not allowed to do anything! Men get all the fun!” Whine, whine, whine. Do your research.

Also the choose-your-poison thing where your options are “this was set before the French Revolution, so everyone’s a superstitious (because of religion, natch), super-religious frownyface who simultaneously has ten children and never has any fun” or the only slightly better researched “we know they made bawdy art, so here’s a story where even the superficially religious characters are all irreligious all the time”. (These usually come from an authour with a deep misunderstanding of the dictionary definition of religion.) I’ve gone on rants all up and down the margins of my classmates’ stories that way.