Did not stop to check out the meaning of any unfamiliar words. Did not try to correlate any of these ingredients with their availability to a particular time and place (which would have revealed that there was none). Just plunked them into a novel, which was edited and printed.

Think about this in the context of overwhelming impostor syndrome and anxiety about "getting it wrong" for basically anything I might attempt to undertake.

Even at the peak of Breath of the Wild's hype, I don't expect everyone in the world to recognize Zelda lore terms. But I also don't expect a writer "researching" for a novel to let so many completely unknown terms pile up in a single passage.

@AlexandraErin OMG I put more effort into my TTRPG notes for the benefit of five people.

@AlexandraErin I just told a non-online person about this last week. That was so fucking funny.

@AlexandraErin Less galling, but still quite funny: in 2005, comedian Chris Elliott included the fictional character Boilerplate (created by @bigredhair and @Boilerplate1893 ) in his novel as if it were real (or at least a contemporaneous hoax)

@AlexandraErin ...I take it the editor was interested in neither history nor video games....

@AlexandraErin I think about this every time I struggle to write a single sentence because the words don't sound exactly 100% right and I end up staring at a blank document for three hours

@AlexandraErin There was also a time Whitley Strieber mistook a 1979 short story by Dave Langford for an authentic account of a 19th-century UFO encounter and used it in one of his books without permission.

@AlexandraErin I get imposter syndrome from going to the grocery store, how is this guy even alive?

@AlexandraErin God that was glorious. That was a fun day on the internet.

@AlexandraErin But did any of his characters have Alexandria's Genesis

@AlexandraErin I will admit, I don’t know much about Zelda. But I do know Hylian has something to do with Zelda & I would have to double check the rest to make sure they exist.

@AlexandraErin I needed to be reminded of this today as I desperately make sure the car I'm writing it ON MODEL.

@AlexandraErin Wasn't this the guy who wrote a Holocaust book, trying to say the Germans weren't all bad, while doing absolutely no research about the Holocaust

@AlexandraErin That was John Boyne? Figures.

@AlexandraErin It would’ve taken 3 brain cells to realize you can dye stuff red with red rose petals would’ve been, yah know, much more believable

@AlexandraErin Extremely dubious recipe.

@AlexandraErin It was a hugely successful novel some years ago, forget which, set in London, with a sentence something like, "it was five oclock on New year's Eve and everybody was dying for it to go dark." I mean how long does it take you to find out what time is sunset in mid December!🤣

@AlexandraErin He's replacing actual Jewish authors as the school standard for teaching the Holocaust, we're so fucked