I had a panic attack when I woke up this morning. Not a real panic attack, but a Holy-Crap-Now-I’ve-Done-It moment. You see, my work-in-progress is set in November, in the United States. Canadian Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday in October, but because American Thanksgiving is occurring now (as in yesterday), I happened to hear or read that American Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Frankly, I can no longer remember if I heard or read that information sometime yesterday or if my muse decided to torture me with it upon waking.
The point is, I had to do a mad scramble to Google, because I always choose a year to set my fictional stories in, so I can print out a calendar and ensure I’m not forgetting something like, oh, that Americans celebrate Thanksgiving in November. And then I keep track of my scenes according to the calendar dates.
My WIP is set in 2007 (I don’t mention the year, I just use 2007 for plotting purposes). Last year, November had five Thursdays. This year, November has four Thursdays. Thanksgiving and Black Friday figure into my plot, so you can imagine my mini-moment of freak out. Ack, do I have to revise the entire freaking manuscript so that Thanksgiving falls a week later? Thank God for Google, because typing When Was Thanksgiving in 2007? assured me that I had properly researched American Thanksgiving dates last year and wasn’t just making up the extra Thursday after the holiday! (Forgetting what you have and haven’t researched is an unfortunate side effect of setting aside a manuscript to work on another manuscript, as was the case with this particular story late last year).
Of course now I’m obsessing over—how often does November have five Thursdays? Do I need to worry about this/mention it in my story? When (note the confidence) this book gets published, will American readers think, that stupid Canadian, she set Thanksgiving in the the second-to-last week of the month?!
Halloween also figures in this story, and I do mention several times that Halloween falls on a Wednesday, which should alert a clever reader that November 1st falls on a Thursday, which is how my WIP’s November winds up with five Thursdays… Is that clear enough?
And, by the way, yes, I do have PMS, thanks for asking.
aaaah – the little details that can drive a writer mad, mad I tell you!
LOL. Note how as a fellow Canadian, you have no answer to my dilemma. But I do appreciate the moral support! 🙂
Unless you’re writing the dates on every scene or a book set in a historical time frame, I don’t see why you need to mention the number of Thursdays in the month.
Thanks, Edie. I think I’ve finished obsessing about it. I have other things to obsess about now, LOL. (I’m taking your advice).