More change of pace

After my last post regarding the Lonesome Dove series I found this article.

The way I see it, Larry McMurtry was pissed because the readers of Lonesome Dove and viewers of the movie saw it as a great Western story instead of the great anti-Western which he perceived himself as having written. So to teach his readers and viewers of the movie a lesson he showed no respect for people who spent their hard earned money and changed the history of the characters to suit his own agenda. Mr. McMurtry where is your respect for your readers? These people who loved your story, at the very least, deserve your gratitude since your perceived great anti-Western made you very rich.

Instead of pissing on the people who spent money to read and watch the story of Gus and Woodrow, why didn't you just calmly give away that money to a charity since it upset you so much? Don't you think that act would have done more to get your real point of view across than writing three more books in an attempt to show what you really meant? Oh, wait, didn't you also make plenty of money off those three books, plus the movie rights, too? And did you keep that money for yourself? Of course you kept it. Which is perfectly fine. But pissing on the readers and viewers isn't really fine from my perspective.

Enough of Larry McMurtry. I've spent my last penny on his novels and movies.

While I'm on the subject of writers who frustrate me...I'll move on to Diana Gabaldon. I love her Outlander series. At one time I was a little put out with her when it came to the fifth book, but I read the series again this past summer/fall. It wasn't as rambling as I felt it was the first time around.

My beef with Diana is her lack of knowledge about the making of soap. Sigh. Sweetie, it's very simple, all soap is made with lye. If you are using true soap, it's lye soap. You can't have soap without lye. No matter what anyone tries to tell you, you just can't have soap without using lye. No lie. Or as soapmakers like to say: No lye, no soap. Period. It's a great chemical fact.

So when your characters try to differentiate between French soap and lye soap, it shows that you didn't do enough research on the subject of soapmaking. Since there's this HUGE industry out there of soapmakers it might be worthwhile to actually use Google.

It's a real stretch of my imagination to believe that Clair didn't know this. After all, Clair learned how to make ether. She learned how to make penicillin. She learned which herbs to use for medicinal purposes. She's a cleanliness freak because she knows all about bacteria, so she knows how important soap is. When she goes back to Jamie after she finds out he didn't die at Culloden, she learned all these things to take back with her.

Being in the medical field myself, I can't believe she didn't spend time at the library learning all she could about soapmaking since she knew for a fact that it's the first line of defense against so many infections. Had she done so, she would have never, ever confused French soap with lye soap.

What she would have known was that the soap they made in North Carolina was lye heavy soap. That's understandable since they used potassium hydroxide and they had no way of knowing how pure their potassium hydroxide was when they used it. Plus they used a variety of animal fats, which each one has a different saponification rate. So the reality of having some lye heavy soap was very possible. However, had she done that teeny tiny bit of research on how to make soap while she was in the 20th century, she would also have learned it's possible to "rebatch" the lye heavy soap and use up the excess lye to where it didn't feel like it was removing the skin.

I find it very hard to believe a surgeon and an engineer (Brianna) were both too stupid to know these things about a craft that isn't all that hard to learn.

Research is a wonderful thing. For every career your character has, for every skill they have, there are others who will read your works when you write fiction who have the same career or skill and they'll know when your research is falling very short. If you're going to make a big deal about something like homemade soap, make sure you have your facts right. We will catch you. If you're going to write about medicine, law, automotive problems, farming, etc., there are people who do these things every day of their lives and they read and will know when you've failed with your research. It yanks us out of the story.

For all the writers out there, be careful with your facts. For all the non-writers out there, writing fiction is hard work. I know from experience. You can't just make it up as you go. Well, you can, but then that means you'll forever be an unpublished writer.