​I’ve never been murdered or committed a murder. Outside of pure memoir, you can’t build a narrative by writing only what you know.

So you can limit what you write, or you can stretch what you know. No surprise that I prefer the latter. Authors of nonfiction and fiction alike do intensive research. Beyond libraries, archives, and the Internet, they’re out there talking to people and visiting places.

Some authors of police procedurals have worked as homicide detectives. Many more list a police department in their acknowledgements, with thanks for showing the author the inner workings of the job. Lately I’ve asked friends about dyslexia and cat behavior. Drafting a scene of fifteenth-century hand-to-hand combat in all its gory detail, I may consult an expert in historical swordsmanship.

​Imagination takes us down haunted corridors we’ll never walk in real life. But wise writers walk down similar corridors, when possible, even without the ghosts. When you haven’t been there, go as close as you can to avoid getting it just plain wrong. I once read a student essay that described Holland as brilliantly colored with tulips on every hillside. It sounds plausible until you see a photograph of the flat, flat tulip fields of Holland, with nary a hill in sight.

Buying a house, getting another ready to sell, and preparing to move are enough to induce motion sickness, especially when they come up on short notice. Meanwhile the world keeps spinning. Cars, bodies, and relationships need maintenance. Serious ailments plague friends and family members. Some current events are too big to ignore.

A sailors’ trick for preventing seasickness is to look at the horizon. Amid high winds and high waves, the horizon is the only thing that doesn’t move.

For organizational activity, whether business or volunteer, this means keeping an eye on the mission. The faster the changes or the hotter the conflict, the more vital it is to remember the organization’s underlying reason to exist.

The same holds in rocky personal times. What is your mission at this phase of your life? Art, self-knowledge, kindness, discovery, service to a cause? Not your short-term objectives (they’re probably what’s rocking) but the steady purpose behind them. Your mission may not stay constant from decade to decade, but its constancy from week to week can hold the seasickness at bay.

​This week I’m joining a class related to my current writing. I’m five chapters into the first draft of a late medieval mystery. Who has time to take a class or write a book in the middle of packing to move house? Personally, I don’t have time not to. It keeps my eye on the horizon.

A lot we learn as history never happened. “What’s the dividing line between romanticism, pseudohistory, and plain old error?” That comment under my May 30 post, “Time Travel Fallacies,” gives a lot to grapple with. Here’s a start.

I’d define pseudohistory as an account of the past that meets three criteria:
            1. It purports to be true.
            2. It either contradicts or goes far beyond the evidence.
            3. It has an agenda.

Holocaust denial is a familiar example. Matriarchal prehistory, Neopaganism that poses as ancient, and Afrocentrism are less insidious, and more likely to be taken seriously in my circles (meaning I’ve probably just offended somebody). They may be less insidious, but not harmless when they’re taken as history rather than myth.

Taking pseudohistory as fact encourages a habit of devaluing evidence for the sake of an agenda. It’s fine for an agenda to shape the questions we ask. It can draw attention to peoples and issues that were traditionally ignored, or to longstanding assumptions that need reexamination. But to serve us well in the long run, the answers need to emerge from the evidence, not what we wish the evidence showed.