I don't think I'd have noticed the bulbs, although I did question one story where the vampire protagonist turned up at midnight with a romantic bunch of freshly-picked wildflowers -- I was picturing all the blossoms being tightly closed after dark, but apparently that only affects some species. (Depends whether they are pollinated by day-flying or night-flying insects, I dare say.)
The errors that have really jarred on me have been railway-related -- I *still* remember the "Pirates of the Caribbean" fanfic that had the protagonists saying goodbye on a railway platform, with a defiant footnote from the author saying that she had researched the period and railways had been invented by the early eighteenth century, so there :-p Well, she may have come across some claim about some primitive mining plateway, but there were quite definitely no public passenger services across the United States at the same time as piracy in Tortuga and Port Royal, let alone steam engines and railway stations of the type depicted in the story...
Another one was the "Frozen" fanfic where an important plot point was the protagonist's train journey down to London from the north of England, which supposedly took him three *days* (including dramatic fights along the rooftops of carriages and on the open balconies at the end, and characters dashing up and down the gangway between the seats) -- basically, the author had transplanted Wild West train travel into mid-Victorian England, with its gas-lit closed compartments and fast Scottish expresses. It was so very, very obviously written by someone whose sole image of 19th-century railways and rolling-stock came from cowboy films :-(
As always, the problem is not *knowing* when you don't know something; you can check your facts, but only if you have reason to suspect that they may need checking. I very nearly used 'married by a ship's captain outside the three-mile limit' as a plot point in Arctic Raoul, and it was extremely fortunate that I did for some reason think to research this, and discovered that (like a couple being able to obtain an automatic annulment if the marriage had not yet been consummated) this is a popular trope in historical fiction -- and I believe even contemporary novels -- that has no factual basis. Simply being in international waters did not empower ships' captains to conduct marriages :-(
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The errors that have really jarred on me have been railway-related -- I *still* remember the "Pirates of the Caribbean" fanfic that had the protagonists saying goodbye on a railway platform, with a defiant footnote from the author saying that she had researched the period and railways had been invented by the early eighteenth century, so there :-p Well, she may have come across some claim about some primitive mining plateway, but there were quite definitely no public passenger services across the United States at the same time as piracy in Tortuga and Port Royal, let alone steam engines and railway stations of the type depicted in the story...
Another one was the "Frozen" fanfic where an important plot point was the protagonist's train journey down to London from the north of England, which supposedly took him three *days* (including dramatic fights along the rooftops of carriages and on the open balconies at the end, and characters dashing up and down the gangway between the seats) -- basically, the author had transplanted Wild West train travel into mid-Victorian England, with its gas-lit closed compartments and fast Scottish expresses. It was so very, very obviously written by someone whose sole image of 19th-century railways and rolling-stock came from cowboy films :-(
As always, the problem is not *knowing* when you don't know something; you can check your facts, but only if you have reason to suspect that they may need checking.
I very nearly used 'married by a ship's captain outside the three-mile limit' as a plot point in Arctic Raoul, and it was extremely fortunate that I did for some reason think to research this, and discovered that (like a couple being able to obtain an automatic annulment if the marriage had not yet been consummated) this is a popular trope in historical fiction -- and I believe even contemporary novels -- that has no factual basis. Simply being in international waters did not empower ships' captains to conduct marriages :-(