Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

1. You find yourself making jokes at the expense of President William McKinley.

2. You are irrationally offended by period dramas and movies showing actresses with smooth legs and underarms, because women did not start removing their body hair en masse until after World War I.

3. You recognize more late 19th century slang terms for genitalia than anyone should.

4. You have to go back and edit your vocabulary to be less confusing to modern audiences who know the words to mean something completely different than you do (e.g. your eighteen-year-old hero has just finished "college").

5. You're more excited by the discovery that a tiny museum with equipment from an 1880s baking powder factory is only an hour and a half away than you were by your birthday the week before.

6. You are eternally grateful to railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt for monopolizing all of those lines and putting them on a single convenient, color-coded map.

7. You feel strange writing a person's name without honorifics.

8. You know more about horse-drawn carriages than you do about automobiles, and more about corsets than you do about modern cuts of jeans. (Related: You see pictures of Disney princesses like Belle, Aurora, and Cinderella and immediately think of the word, "crinoline.")

9. Before you use any word or phrase even vaguely idiomatic, you feel the compulsion to check its etymology.

10. You are unconsciously aware that every single character in your fluffy romance is secretly a sexist, racist, antisemitic and insanely privileged SOB.