My project for this weekend was to find a picture of a couple. Since this is going to be public when it's finished, I had to look to royalty free images that could be purchased. Even so, I thought the task would take an evening, I'd be finished, and could move on to something else. This isn't what happened.
The parameters I needed for the picture included a vertical orientation of the image itself. It would help if the picture was full length or nearly full length of the people. The man and the woman in the picture both needed to be attractive. And the final requirement was that it convey suspense.
It was amazing how impossible these criteria were.
If I wrote erotic romance, I would have had my couple in less than five minutes. But I don't write erotica, I write action/adventure romance. This is where the difficulty started.
The first problem was finding pictures where both the man and the woman were both attractive. I can't tell you how many times one of them was gorgeous and the other wasn't. This problem wouldn't have been insurmountable because there were plenty of pictures with two good looking people, but my other requirements... Sigh.
By far, the biggest and most annoying issue was the suspense part of the equation. Almost every single picture showed the couple smiling. The few where they weren't smiling usually depicted the couple having an argument. Awesome. Just what a romance writer wants.
I spent the vast majority of my weekend on this search. I'm guessing 20 hours or so total. In that time I found a grand total of 5 possibilities and I don't know if any of them will work for what I need. I'm hoping I don't have to do this again--three days was enough.
I'll share more about what this was about when it's all done and ready.
