A retired librarian called me out on my timeline errors in chapter 3 of my historical fiction novel last Tuesday

She read the first 30 pages at our monthly meeting in Seattle and said 'no steam locomotive would have been running that route in 1887' and now I have to redo half my research, has anyone else had a reader spot a detail that wrecked your whole plot?

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ruby_grant5h ago

Oh gosh, I once had a beta reader point out that my character couldn't have gotten smallpox in 1872 because the vaccine was already around, and I basically had to scrap the entire first half of my book!