I love Google. The world's data is at my fingertips, and I can find out almost any bit of information in ten seconds. Need to know the scientific Latin name of the golden cowry? Check Google. Need to know the breed standard of the bearded collie? Check Google. I have no idea how I ever survived without it.
I'm working on Kindred today, trying to get it up to 15,000 words (the halfway point) before knocking off for the weekend. The heroine is a leopard shapeshifter, and I made an offhand comment at some point about her pupils being slits in her cat form. I happened to be wandering through Barnes and Noble yesterday and saw a calendar with a leopard on the cover. I noticed its pupils were round, not slitted, so I figured I'd better check that detail. Sure enough, when I entered the search terms "pupils" and "big cats" into Google, I instantly discovered that although small cats have slitted pupils, big cats have round pupils. I didn't know that. But there's no excuse for getting it wrong when I have Google at my fingertips. Even if I didn't know it, some reader somewhere does know it, and would be dragged out of the story if I got that fact wrong.
The moral of this story? Even if you think you know a fact... check it anyway!
I "knew" they were rounded because my latest has jaguar shifter and I Googled jaguars -- really have fun with the Google images section. But, not having a small cat at home, I never thought of those differences. I like running into information like this, and Google makes it so much easier to find.
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