I sat down to write today, but have gotten sidetracked in doing some research. Whether or not that research is vital to the outcome of the story is questionable, but at the moment it seems absolutely vital for me to determine whether rice is grown in a certain part of the world my characters inhabit! :-D

I'm a bit of a stickler for realism, even if it is a fantasy world, so I like my "facts" to be accurate -- or as accurate as possible given that sometimes there is just no way of knowing one way or the other. This kind of research is a challenge to my librarian heart, however, and I'm having fun doing it, even if it delays actual writing. It seems to me that while I'm doing such research, the story is gelling in the back of my mind, and so the time spent in research is never wasted. Even if I don't end up using a fact I've researched, the work I did to find out about it seems to somehow add to the framework of the whole tale, and that makes it stronger somehow.

Even so, I'm going to try to wrap this research up soon, because I have a limited amount of uninterrupted writing time left today!