little_details | Recent Entries

Little Details is a community that helps writers with their research and fact-checking. We're here to answer questions such as:

If I drop a brick on someone's head from twenty stories high, what will happen?
How big does an asteroid need to be to destroy the Earth?
How do I say "it's not you, it's me" in French?
Can people have freckles on their penises?

All types of fiction writers (professional, amateur, fanfiction, original, dungeon masters) are welcome to post questions. Our focus is factual accuracy rather than general writing advice.

This is the new home of the (now defunct) Little Details community on LiveJournal. Welcome back, everybody!

( Rules and Guidelines )

goddess47

I'm writing a story where my main character stops his friend, a dad to a 13-ish year old boy, from purchasing some ~~anime~~ manga books because the main character knows the book series is too adult (sex, violence, both) for a 13 year old. The main character then recommends a different series because the story line is more appropriate for the age of the teen.

The story is the relationship between the main character and the dad, so this is a small piece of the larger story. But I know absolutely nothing about anime (or manga, obviously!) and would appreciate some recommendations of titles that would fit those categories.

Thanks!

ETA: I'm looking for currently available titles and perhaps where they are best purchased (a bookstore, a comic book store, a specialty shop, online?)

ETA2: I'm looking US-centric here.

timemidae

Hi!

I've been reading up on the historical Catholic school system in Quebec, and I've gathered that until 1960 there were commonly Catholic schools that were supported by public funds (officially ended in the 90's). I've been able to find the names of some of the girl's schools, but haven't been able to easily find the names of any of the mixed or boy's schools below the high school level.

Anyone know any specific schools that could have served a 10-year old, working class, Catholic boy in Montreal or Quebec City ~1940?

Thanks!

elisheva_m

I'm trying to write a scene where two co-workers are trouble-shooting a new custom security or encryption routine. Someone else (who isn't present) wrote the code and he will have been careful to ensure it works before sending it to them. So maybe something in the implementation of it?

The scene is dual purpose, showing their interaction growing closer while also hiding something else in plain sight. The tech part of it can be whatever is plausible and easy to convey without bogging it down in details. I am so out of touch with that sort of thing I don't know what's plausible any more.

What could go wrong with uploading the new code into their office network or onto their phones which would need a bit of trouble-shooting? The kind of thing one person might overlook and another catch. Preferably with them being literally close while they do this. And again - easy to convey without bogging it down in details. Jargon is fine.

Edit: Turns out jargon is not fine. Well it would be in the sense I meant, but that's not how it was taken. Am overwhelmed by how much I can't understand well enough to follow here, let alone distill into a few phrases. I know the readers for my lakorn-novel are non-existent but I can't swamp them with details.

Edit 2: Sorry to have bothered everyone. I'm just going to trash this. It was a stupid idea in the first place. Thank you for your time.

donut_donut

Hi! I'm writing a novel that takes place in the French Pyrenees (modern day), and I'm trying to figure out what plants to place in this fictional garden.

More info:
The novel takes place at a villa owned by a middle-aged bohemian lady who moved there from Paris maybe a decade ago. Gardening is her hobby. In the back of the house is a potager (vegetable garden), and I've got that covered. But the front of the house has a flower garden, and I don't know so much about that.

It doesn't need to be plants that are native to the region, but it has to be plausible that they would be available and could thrive there. It's summertime (late July-August), and I would like there to be flowers, because we often see her pruning the old blooms. I assume rose bushes would work, but I would love some other options to work with. I've been picturing something like hydrangeas or rhodedendrons, but I don't know how common they are in this environment.

Some kind of ornamental tree would also be nice, for a character cry under. A flowering tree or large bush would be nice but not necessary.

She has somewhat offbeat tastes, so anything off the beaten track would be great, but it has to make sense for the climate.

Thank you!

neveryourgirl

Hi everyone,

MCU fanfic writer here! I need some advice on bruises and non-serious gym injuries/injuries from sparring or the like. Especially people with medical and/or martial arts backgrounds, please weigh in!

Character context: two non-superpowered hero characters (think Hawkeye or Black Widow), both are women, the injured character is in her early to mid-20s and has trained in different martial arts since she was a preteen

Scene context: It's basically a sex scene. Character A and B are long-distance and haven't seen each other in a while. Character A pulls up the other’s shirt and finds a fading bruise on her stomach. Character A asks about it. Character B replies that it’s a gym injury, because she got distracted during a kickboxing class. (The distraction was that she kept remembering a sex dream from the night before.) The moment is supposed to function as a brief interruption. It's basically 'not a big deal,' because they are both used to worse injuries, but it still makes character A pause, because like, Babe, why do you have a bruise I don't know about?

Injury details I've included: I described the bruise as “fading” and a “yellow-green mark.” It “hurt like a bitch” the first few days, but she can barely feel it now.

Timeframe-wise, I’m thinking the injury happened maybe two weeks ago, but I could change that. It’s not actually mentioned on page.

I have a feeling some of my details might be off? I did look up the different visual stages of bruises healing, but I have zero medical background, and all I know about kickboxing I learned from my google research.

So, my questions now are:

1. Does this injury make sense within the martial arts/kickboxing context? Is the bruising and pain level realistic? Or am I over- or underestimating it?

2. Does the timeframe make sense?

3. Would what I imagine as a kick to the stomach leave a bruise like that without causing more serious damage? Like, would the force necessary to leave a bruise also cause other injuries?

If this combo of injury and cause of injury doesn’t work, I’d also love to hear alternative suggestions if you have any!

Of course, this is Marvel, so there’s some major leeway since we repeatedly see characters without superpowers be kicked or fall from questionable heights and get back up again. But I really like to have my medical facts be as accurate as possible. (And if I feel the need to deviate, I at least want to know the factual realities I’m intentionally deviating from.)

isostone

Hello! I'm currently working on a project for a character who is a amateur (but enthusiastic) cartographer. They exist in the world of Outer Wilds, a game with multiple simulated planets(none more than a few kilometers in diameter). The simulated planets each have their own gimmicks (i.e Brittle Hollow, a hollow planet with a black hole in the center. Its crust falls into the black hole during gameplay, and most of what you can explore is under the crust).
How might I go about mapping these places in a way that'd be accurate and believable in the sense that my character could have drawn them up while exploring? What sort of notes should I be taking?

bluerosekatie

Hello!

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who added details, this is the result! (Locked to AO3 users to avoid AI scraping)

I have been looking into chocolate toxicity as it occurs in birds, since I want to write a scene where a human character with significant amounts of bird DNA tries chocolate and regrets it. I'm not planning on killing her, but I do want to figure out an accurate amount of chocolate to give her for it to make sense. Looking at the treatment methods, I would probably want a milder case of theobromine poisoning but enough to be a close call, if that makes sense. How much chocolate do you think she'd need to have, and what would be the proper course of treatment?

perdita02

Hello everyone, I'm writing a bit of a Dracula fanfiction and I'm having trouble researching what chloral hydrate feels like to use, most sources I look up just say "it's a sedative, and here are all the negative side effects."

The types of things I'm looking to know: does it flat-out put people to sleep or could someone remain awake if they tried? Would a person using it stay unconscious through something painful happening to their body (ex., a vampire bite), and if they woke up, would they still be groggy and have difficulty moving? Does it cause the pupils to contract or dilate or anything? Are there other externally visible effects? Does it have any mood-altering or euphoric effects? How risky is it when mixed with alcohol, and what kind of synergy do they have? Answers to any of these would be much appreciated!

malymin

Hello!

Writing a fanfiction taking place inside of a fairy-tale kingdom. In-universe, the fairy-tale is a literary fairy tale (aka has a singular author, not a true folk tale), written by a German author, some time in the 18th century at earliest and the 19th century at latest. The author character lived and died in a fictional town heavily based on the real world town of Nördlingen. I'm writing a scene where a character from the fairy-tale setting is feeling guilt about having been "weak" against a supernatural, corrupting force, and is scared that force is still possessing or influencing him.

Most of the information I can find on the topic of exorcism, prayers against demonic/bewitching/etc influence, repentance for having practiced witchcraft, renouncing demonic temptation, etc I can find on my own are specifically resources aimed at modern-day Catholics living in English-speaking countries. (That is, when they're even remotely in the ballpark of what I'm looking for... new-age and non-Christian solutions, while interesting, are not helpful for what I'm writing.) However, I know that a large percentage of Christians in Germany are some flavor of Protestant. Even when it comes to Catholic-majority regions like Bavaria, there might be things that have been done there in the past that would not be recorded on an English-language website for English-speaking Catholics - especially folk beliefs and traditions not officially condoned by religious authorities.

Region:

Least specifically looking for stuff from German speaking countries in Europe
Most specifically: looking for things from the Swabia region of Germany, within the state of Bavaria

Religion:

Christianity mainly, maybe some Germanic pagan stuff if I branch out.
Protestant or Catholic
Not just solutions ideally condoned by local religious authorities, but folk beliefs and practices

Historical Placement:

Ideally, not newer than the 19th century. If people didn't believe it prior to, idk, 1925 or something, it's not as useful to me.
Must have been practiced at some point after the Christianization of the region, at absolute earliest.
However! Customs and beliefs that are not strongly attested to in reality, but that appear in fictional and folkloric depictions of the past or present written (or transcribed from oral tradition) within the "target range" (such as "pre-christian times" as they'd be seen in Wagnerian operas, or "feudal society" as depicted in both the feudal period's own courtly literature and later literature), are also helpful, as the fic I'm writing is set within an author-created world that would be influenced by such pre-existing and contemporaneous fiction's distortions of reality.

I hope this isn't too specific. If you know something in this ballpark but don't think it's "good enough" for my nitpicky criteria, please share anyways so I can learn something new! ^_^;

Current Mood: curious

4monadonis2

Doctors and Nurses, I need some help trying to figure out some specifics about a character waking up from a cardiac arrest incident.

What time frame can a teenage patient be reasonably expected to stay unconscious after successful defibrillation from an in-hospital cardiac arrest incident (compressions beginning within minutes of it starting)? How much would this differ from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest incident?

Would something like this prompt you to put such a patient on IV nutrition and/or urinary and rectal catheters? If it would take some amount of time to determine these as necessary treatments, how long would that be?

Would a patient being unconscious change whether or not ice packs are used to reduce swelling around broken/bruised ribs (from CPR)? If they are still used on an unconscious patient, how often would they be changed?

countryhorror

Hello little details,
Two of the characters in the story I'm drafting get abandoned in the woods by their parents. They're about 10 years old when that happens and at the start of the actual story they're 13/14, with ideally only a couple of months passing after leaving the woods. I have not worked out the exact details, though since I'm working in a fantasy setting I have considered having fairies kidnap one or both of them to explain the timeframe.
So far my research has only yielded cases where the isolation started way too young for my time frame, or the child in question was gone for only a few days.
I assume social skills *will* be negatively affected by isolation, but to what extent? Are there any other major psychological effects I should keep in mind? Any behaviors you'd expect to form after the period?
Thank you all in advance !

isabrella

Hi all!

I'm writing a piece about a precocious young teen who is playing a game about a plane crashing with her friends. It takes place in our world, in the 2010s. In the game, her friend pretends to be the pilot but the MC is going to correct her language from generic kid speech ("code red, we're going down!" etc.) to very specific pilot jargon because she knows all about plane crashed. I'm wondering if anyone could share what kind of jargon pilots might use during a plane crash? Any kind of crash is fine, but it would be good to know if the jargon was specific to e.g., engine failure.

Thank you!

biofreak659

Hello all! I am looking for any good overviews of medieval tutors of either royalty or nobility. England and France (and other Normanish places) are preferable, but any information is useful at this point. I'm particularly interested in the qualifications of tutors, and some politics involved in their appointment. Teaching schedules would also be useful. Thanks!

voidbeetles

Hi!

One of my current writing projects is set in a civilization that has, for thousands of years, lived in a sort of large scifi underground bunker. They have easy access to water, very little access to soil (they're able to compost biomass, add minerals, etc, but that will only get you so far), and no access to sunlight (grow lights will have to suffice) - for these reasons, I imagine that their agriculture system is mostly hydroponics-based. Though I've done a little research on hydroponics, I'm having difficulty extrapolating this information to my worldbuilding, mostly because a lot of the info I've found relates to singular plants without giving a good sense of what fares better/worse compared to others. And also just because I have a hard time wrapping my head around plant cultivation in general, I think. I was wondering if anyone here had any insights! (Or suggestions of topics/resources to look into more!)

The big questions I'm thinking most about are:

Compared to, say, the modern Western world, would certain foods/food groups be underrepresented or over-represented in this fictional world's cuisine? (for example, I imagine that rice might be the main staple, as flooding rice fields is pretty important to cultivating it... and that potatoes might not be such a good choice, as their "main thing" is growing beneath the soil?)
What effect would this have on the plant fibers that are most commonly used for making clothes (and other fiber technology like rope)? That is: how would cotton, linen, hemp, etc fare? Would a certain one of these plants be more common? More expensive? Quicker/easier to grow/harvest on large scales? (This question is especially relevant because my protagonist has an interest in textiles.)

illuminist

Hi folks! I'm brainstorming a paraplegic character (gunshot wound in the past) in an urban fantasy setting. The tech level is modern (smartphones, wifi, etc) and the character has terrakinesis abilities: mentally lifting rocks, shaping and warping metal, transmuting one substance to another.

Do you have any ideas on what features would be cool to have in a fantasy wheelchair? Currently I'm thinking of a floating office chair that responds to mental commands, but I'd love to hear suggestions. Thanks!

elisheva_m

The big melodramatic action climax of the lakorn I'm writing involves a gun fight (tropey genres x 2, realism is a bonus). Key characters escape, but it's too much to ask that it's unscathed or that they all only have grazes.

What's a good location for a gun shot wound which, let's say, requires stitches but can plausibly be expected to heal without complications? Arm or leg as they had the magical protection of body armour and being main characters. They've made it to a safe location with supplies prepared in advance and with the expectation of bullet wounds. One in particular has been around violence for over a decade and has experience.

I have a good enough idea on graze wounds for my needs - these really are "little details" in the lakorn and I'm just trying to calm the melodrama a bit with something heading in the vague direction of realism :D :D It's been harder to figure out a wound which conveys "serious" (ie stitches as an emotional stand-in for surgery) but won't be difficult to treat for someone with good supplies and experience.

So rather than asking if this or that might work for you all to tell me it won't, I figured i'd just ask for suggestions on the location(s) from the start :D :D

TIA and thanks for replies to my earlier question.

snailslime

I'm writing a story and a key moment in my protagonist's backstory is when she was thirteen and accidentally shot her twin brother in the head during a hunting trip with their father. I was thinking about having her get sent to some sort of juvenile correction/mental health facility until she turns eighteen, but I wasn't sure if this was accurate to how United States law works regarding these types of situations. Also, would any sort of serious legal repercussions be unrealistic given this would be something that happens within the family, and if so, would it work better if the brother was instead the child of a family friend? Any info would be helpful!

elisheva_m

About how much time would it take for someone to partially recover from three gun shot wounds, including one to the abdomen and a fair bit of blood loss? The character is around 30 years, in very good shape physically and was treated quickly, although not in a hospital. Partially, in that he's able to get around on his own alright but not fully fit again, with some concern for aggravating the injuries.

Also, about how long before there's little reason to worry about aggravating the injuries? I need to put a scene in that window and some details of their conversation will depend on how far along the bigger timeline they meet up. It doesn't really matter but I'd be happier if I had a reasonable time frame to ground this in.

Given the state of AI generated slop, I'm appreciating the need for a community like this all the more. This is something I know nothing about so AI could certainly take me for a ride. Another subject I do know more about has gotten so polluted. Thanks for being here and for any help.

Edit: You've all convinced me that he won't survive the organised crime trope of having their own doctor/surgeon and avoiding hospitals, so he must have gone. That information is black-boxed from us though for narrative reasons, so hypothetical readers can add in whatever makes them happiest for tropes or medical accuracy. I only mentioned it because it's narratively important his recovery not go too quickly and I thought blood loss + less supply for transfusion might affect it. My working assumption was that he received whatever surgery and antibiotics were needed but not top tier care.

This period of the story is crucial for the main characters' emotional arc so the timeline there is what's important rather than where he was treated. Six weeks works well.

Thanks for all the replies. Much appreciated.

blueinkedfrost

Any medical conditions from 1700s continental Europe where a wealthy person would have a better prognosis compared to a poor person?

I'm looking for a condition to kill off a poor middle aged woman, one where a wealthy woman of the same age would have been more likely to survive with period appropriate treatment. Until her illness and death, the woman was a labourer and quite physically active.

jomarch

My characters are traveling from London to Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1590. I figured they could ride on horseback to King's Lynn and take a ship to Berwick (or?), bur I don't know: how long would a sea journey like that last and what type of ship would be used? All I could find was that a ship called Anne made that journey quite regularly a few decades before that - I'm guessing it could still be doing it at that point? How long would a ship like that operate for?

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kutsuwamushi - About Little Details
goddess47 - Manga (Anime) series info?
timemidae - Catholic school 1940's Quebec
elisheva_m - Tech/code question
donut_donut - Plants for Garden in the French Pyrenees
neveryourgirl - Bruises sustained while kickboxing: pain level, realistic causes, healing time
isostone - Mapping of multiple in-game planets
bluerosekatie - Theobromine/chocolate poisoning in a human-bird hybrid character
perdita02 - Effects of chloral hydrate
malymin - Protection from, and exorcism of, supernatural evil in Germany (medieval to 19th century)
4monadonis2 - Cardiac arrest and follow up treatment
countryhorror - Effects of living in the Woods on Older Kids
isabrella - Plane crash actions/speech
biofreak659 - Medieval Royal Tutors
voidbeetles - A Hydroponics-based Agriculture System
illuminist - Urban fantasy wheelchair features?
elisheva_m - Gun shot advice
snailslime - What happens legally when a 13 year accidentally shoots and kills her brother
elisheva_m - Recovery time for gun shot wounds
blueinkedfrost - Medical treatment in 1700s Europe
jomarch - Travelling by ship in tudor England

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Little Details

Institute of Fictional Research

Recent Entries

Sticky: About Little Details

Manga (Anime) series info?

Catholic school 1940's Quebec

Tech/code question

Plants for Garden in the French Pyrenees

Bruises sustained while kickboxing: pain level, realistic causes, healing time

Mapping of multiple in-game planets

Theobromine/chocolate poisoning in a human-bird hybrid character

Effects of chloral hydrate

Protection from, and exorcism of, supernatural evil in Germany (medieval to 19th century)

Cardiac arrest and follow up treatment

Effects of living in the Woods on Older Kids

Plane crash actions/speech

Medieval Royal Tutors

A Hydroponics-based Agriculture System

Urban fantasy wheelchair features?

Gun shot advice

What happens legally when a 13 year accidentally shoots and kills her brother

Recovery time for gun shot wounds

Medical treatment in 1700s Europe

Travelling by ship in tudor England

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