Writers have to gather the most eclectic collection of facts. I've had to research the highest altitude at which one can find butterflies, which trees grow in African deserts, and what Mongolian bowstrings are made of. Thankfully, my google-fu is great. Also, requesting heavy non-fiction tomes through interlibrary loan helps counterbalance the librarians' opinion of all those paperbacks with heaving bosoms on their covers that I also ask for.
A writer once advised me to network, not among others in the publishing industry, but rather students in all disciplines: biology, geology, architecture, and so on. I once emailed an ex-boyfriend because a writer friend of a friend of mine needed to know about atmospheric physics, which he happened to be specializing in. The ex and I didn't leave on the friendliest of terms, but I understood that the need was great.
It still wounds me a little when people assume that writing fantasy means you get to make everything up. No, the world needs to stay consistent, and everything still has implications. Whatever you create, you need to follow through on. Anyone who has studied history understands that consquences cascade; you can't just insert an element in the middle of things and expect everything else to remain unaffected.
I'm a fan of Barbara Hambly because she's the fantasy author who gets this the most out of anyone I've read. Things don't get much more fantastical than in her Darwath series, when the Dark rise out of the ground to hunt humans. Yet she doesn't wave her arms and dismiss it as magic. She gives scientific reasons for what happens — no, don't yawn yet, it's all the more satisfying because it makes sense: everything adds up, and the solution is not some random artifact that just happened to be imbued with the power to fix everything. Or an extra superpower, gained just in the nick of time.
And yes: for me, trying to achieve this all starts with having horsehide bowstrings.
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