REALITY OR REALISM?

How much realism do readers want and expect in a novel? Authors worry about this all the time. Some go so far as to check things like sunrise and sunset time tables, and the GPS location of a certain building in the city where their story is set so their references are accurate.

I say, lighten up my fellow authors! It IS fiction, after all. That's what the willing suspension of disbelief is for.

While I do agree we need to make the guns and explosives accurate, and I do tons of research for my own books, I don't get all bent out of shape if the author of a book I'm reading puts Tom's Tavern in Golden instead of Boulder. In fact, I can't think of a single novel I ever gave up on because the author made something like that up.

After all, it's the story that counts. I try to make my stories compelling and fast moving even if I have to ignore reality at times. I will always put the story first.

After all, one of the first things we learn when we begin writing fiction is that it doesn't have to BE real, it just has to SEEM real.