When was it invented?

This week I saw an open call for a magazine of cosy fantasy.  It's a new one to me, and possibly in the past I might have decided to disregard it, but I had so much fun writing my magical tea rooms story that I decided to take on the challenge of writing something for it.  And challenge it was.  I had seven days to write, edit, and submit a 6,000 word story.

I'm pleased to say that I met the challenge. I started the story on Monday and finished it yesterday, leaving today for edits before submitting.

The story is set on a magical sailing ship, and involves two female dwarves in a relationship.  But of course, I had to turn it into a feminist discussion of how women are discriminated against.

The story flowed freely, but what stopped me in my tracks most often was research.  The magazine stipulates that it doesn't want to see technology beyond the 19th century in stories, so everything had to be checked out date-wise.

I wanted to describe a mirrored room in a Guildhouse.  I had in mind a more modest version of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, but how old were glass mirrors?  The answer is that silvered glass mirrors have been used for at least 200 years, so they fitted the technology constraint.

Another thing I needed to know was when gold leaf was first used for decoration.  It turns out that ancient Greek sculptors used it to decorate their statues of the goddess Athena at the Parthenon, and Zeus at the Temple of Olympia.  I think that's easily old enough to satisfy the technology rule.

The story takes place aboard a magical sailing ship, but the captain needs to be able to navigate around her world.  Cue the next bit of research.  Could I have her using a marine chronometer?  Yes, I could, as they were first developed in the 18th century.

I have the sort of mind which remembers the basic details of many things from many different disciplines  and multiple streams of reading, but what it doesn't remember are the nit-picky details.  So I always have to look those up.  I have no affinity for numbers, so I usually have to look up the date of something.

I do my research on the go, using my ipad to quickly check things as I write.  Some writers love to get deeply mired in research, I don't.  I can easily combine a dozen different technologies from all over the world in one story, but if you ask me exactly how old something is, I will always have to look that up.

So there was a lot of searching for "when was this invented" for that story, and I'm glad that everything I  wanted to use in it fitted the guidelines.