I can't believe it took me so long to reply to this topic because this topic was made for me.
So, my first mistake: writing a chapter set on the S.S. Anne. I knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about cruise ships, and it
showed. I basically described nothing at all about the inside of the ship because I had no idea what it would look like. Almost all the plot conversations and plot scenes took place in random storage areas, and even the engine room was a dark, featureless room full of the ubiquitous Storage Boxes™ that served no purpose other than cover. Sooo, I researched the layout of a cruise ship, what kinds of areas would even be on a ship, where you board a ship, where the cabins are, where the engine room is, what the layout of the engine room is (how big, how loud, what's in it, ect.) how the alarms work, what different kinds of alarms there are, what would happen if the engine room exploded, and for an entire month I had THREE MILLION TABS OF SHIP RESEARCH.
Next! I recently obtained a bit of a casual interest in stargazing. This led me to realize some things about the night sky that I somehow never knew, but which seem
comepletely friggin obvious in retrospect. For example, the fact that the moon will always be in a specific region of the sky depending on its phase and the time of day. It only rises at sunset and sets at sunrise if it's full, because that's the exact opposite of the sun. Crescent moons are near the sun from our POV, therefore they're only visible around twilight. There is no such thing as a midnight crescent moon. No moon out does not equal a new moon. It might just be something that rises at 2am and you can't see it yet. If it's 9pm and the moon is directly overhead, guess what, that's not a full moon either, it's a quarter moon, a waxing one to be exact. Also you just indicated that it's winter (the moon hangs low in the sky in the summer. This effect is more noticeable closer to the poles.) Don't forget that the moon rises an hour later every day except for one bizarro week near the autumnal equinox!
Now combine this with the fact that my fic keeps an exact record of how much time has passed between chapters and
oh no you can see where this is going. Like all authors, I love to have glorious moonlight illuminating my characters in the night scenes, which meant that pretty much every single night scene had a full moon regardless of whether or not it made any sense. But the text explicitly said it's been two weeks since that other chapter
it literally cannot be a full moon. Cue me bringing up
the best moon calculator on the internet and fussing about with the years to find one that would give suitable phases for every chapter in my fic. And yes, I know that this is another universe, who's to say that the moon follows the same orbit as ours? To which I offer the rebuttal: do you really think I want to go through the even worse effort of inventing my own unique lunar cycle?
(One last note: I recently read a fic where, for the first half of it, I was dead convinced that the moon and earth were tidally locked to each other because of the unique way the night sky was described, and then was very confused when that was later disproven.)
~Chibi~;249;;448;
