For a decade, I was a stay-at-home mom. I sent my husband to his law office, sat on PTA boards and baked cookies - great cookies. All of a sudden, I had no husband, no job, few prospects, and two small children who had grown accustomed to eating.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

If you're not in the hands of an expert editor, you really can go wrong in a lot of different ways.

You don't want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else's words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you're writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.