This happened to me just the other day. I was working on a scene for the third installment in Willa's adventures and I had my two characters traveling from Point A to Point B the day before Thanksgiving. That's when I realized that if they were going to where they were supposed to be going (no spoilers!) they would end up there ON Thanksgiving, in which case everything would be closed. Well, I had already written detailed scenes of them shopping, eating at restaurants and generally participating in the commerce of their chosen city, and I wasn't about to have them sitting around twiddling their thumbs, national holiday or no national holiday. Time to go back and consult the travel schedules, the maps, the logistical whathaveyous again. Time to massage the timeline to make it all work.
These were small but important facts, which probably only affected the first chapter or two of the manuscript. No, they wouldn't make or break the story, but they were a reminder that, as caught up as I was in the fantasy, I still had to play along by the rules of reality or risk losing my credibility as a storyteller.
How about you? Where have the "facts" gotten you into trouble?
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