Photo Organization Podcast

One of the organization podcasts I listened to (and to be honest, at this point I have no idea which one it was) had a photographer on to discuss how to organize digital photographs. This is another area where I feel I'm struggling.

Her system. She puts her photos into folders by year, then month, then date. Like she'll remember the picture was from Christmas 2019 and she can go to the December 25, 2019 folder and find what she's looking for.

I already organized by year. I plan to go in and organize by month. I don't take enough photos to need to go down to the day level.

Curate, curate, curate. If you have 15 pictures of the same thing, pick the best and delete the rest. If something is blurry, someone has their eyes closed, whatever isn't good, get rid of it.

I am very bad at doing this. I will make an effort to do this when I go through the photos.

Backup to an external hard drive. No explanation needed here, right?

I have my photos on the cloud and backup to a different cloud backup service. I should use my external hard drive. I'll have to make a better effort at this.

Photobooks. She said she does photobooks regularly with her pictures. She had children, so I'm sure that's part of it. I can't remember how often she said she does this, but I'm thinking each individual can decide for themselves when to make their book.

I've never done a photobook. I'd probably have to put years' worth in a book, but it might be interesting to have them handy to view.

This podcast had a lot of helpful, actionable advice. I wish I could remember which one it was. I'll have to investigate and re-find it.

Vision Board

The planner I use has a couple of pages to create a vision board. I generally leave this blank and I left it blank in 2020, too. Until July.

In July, I decided it wouldn't hurt to put a few pictures in of what I want to accomplish. Like the picture says to the left: Dream Big. So I set out to print some pictures and tape them onto the vision board pages.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it seems like a waste of time. I always have too much going on and wasting a couple of hours to find, print, and tape down the right photos didn't seem like the best use of my limited resources.

On the other hand, it was actually kind of cool to see my goals visually.

Not all my goals, of course--there was only room for two of them--but I liked being able to look down and see what I did fit on there.

It's funny because every book has a file on OneNote where I save all kinds of pictures. I have pictures of the characters, where they live, sometimes what car/SUV/truck they drive. I have pictures of locations including buildings, restaurants, the rainforest, etc. I have pictures of secondary characters. I have pictures of clothes. Anything, really, that will inspire me.

But I don't do this for myself. Maybe I should.

Well That Escalated Quickly

I like pictures when I write, and as I was working on Wicked Intention, I realized I needed a picture of Finn's (and Ryder Wicked Obsession) commanding officer. And I found someone. This immediately triggered the thought, Captain Nguyen needs a story.

Of course, at this point, Captain Nguyen didn't even have a first name.

He couldn't be part of the arc with Finn because that's already planned out and has two other heroes waiting to finish the storyline. I've been living with these guys (and their heroines) for years. Also, there was no way to squeeze in another story. The captain needed his own arc and that meant I needed two more stories to make a second trilogy.

Book 1 is the captain. Book 3 was easy, too, because I'd been toying with this h/h almost as long as with Finn and his heroine. That left Book 2. After a quick review of Ryder's story, I had that hero, too.

Next I needed first names for my guys. That went quicker than expected. I don't get to choose names for my characters. They pick them, but sometimes they're a pain in the process. When I wrote In the Midnight Hour my heroine made me look for weeks before she said, "that's my name." :-( You don't want to know how many baby name books I paged through, how many websites I visited before I finally had her say that was her name.

Sometimes I get lucky and my characters tell me their names. (Mika Through a Crimson Veil) Most of the time, though, I'm left looking at names until I get an indication that I found it. This time, that went quickly.

Now I needed two heroines for the heroes of books 1 and 2. They appeared and pointed out their names quickly, too. Very unusual. Of course, I did try to talk heroine 2 out of the name she said was hers. It's too strange, I said. It has mythological baggage I said. I tried to find something similar or with the same flavor, but she refused all suggestions. I've learned to just accept and move on.

I even had a little bit of plot for the three book arc come to me. This was over a couple of hours on Sunday and a couple of hours on Monday. Boom! In less than 24 hours, solely because I needed a picture of Finn's captain, I ended up with another three books to write. That did escalate quickly.

Happy Days

My dad was up in Minnesota in December because he was having an estate sale. He's been living with me for a little over a year now and we're working toward selling his house and moving him in with me for good. But while he was home, he found more old family pictures.

This is kind of amazing because when he and I had gone up last April, we'd brought boxes and boxes of pictures back to Atlanta. We literally shipped 21 boxes from Minnesota to Georgia and almost all of them had at least some photos in them. Many of those boxes were at least half full and my front room is still loaded with boxes my dad needs to sort through yet.

But yes, he found more photos. He said my mom had put them away and he handed me the envelope to look through.

They were all pictures of me as a kid. How awesome is that?

One of my favorites shows my mom sitting in the kitchen and I'm standing next to her on the chair. I couldn't have been more than 18 months, I think. I was really still a baby. Mom was smiling up at me and I was smiling too. There's a second shot of that same scene, but this picture includes my grandfather and he looks as if he's laughing uproariously.

My other favorite is me wearing what appears to be my dad's hat and my mom's jacket. :-) The picture (sadly) got scratched up because it's been floating around loose for years.

This got my dad going on other photos and he kept handing them over to me to look at. One thing struck me: I'm smiling in almost all of them, even when I appear unaware that there's a camera there. Baby me, toddler me, little girl me--always smiling. I thought it was pretty cool to have a childhood that happy.

Happiness Photos

The Happier podcast had a new challenge: Take a picture every day of something that makes you happy.

That's a cool idea, I thought. I have my phone with the camera and I'll just take pictures. And then I started thinking about it. I don't take pictures very often to begin with. A couple of years ago, there was some challenge out there to simply take one picture a day and I failed that miserably.

Frequently, I don't even think about taking a photo until well after the fact. Sometimes well after the fact. This has happened more times than I can count.

Sometimes I do think about taking a picture, but my phone is either 1) at my desk 2) in my bag 3) somewhere totally inaccessible in that moment. The desk one happens to me at work. Like every year Delta Technical Operations purchases and assembles bikes for Toys for Tots. There are all sizes from the tiniest child to young adult and these bicycles line the main hallway every December. I like to take a picture of it to share on Facebook or Twitter, but I don't think about bringing my phone with me until I see the bikes.

While the bikes certainly fall into the Things That Make Me Happy category, they're long gone now and children are (hopefully) happily riding them. That wouldn't have counted for the challenge anyway, though, since it's supposed to be 2017 things.

Sometimes I think we can too caught up in recording everything with a photo that we forget to experience the moment. Experiences should be felt, not merely photographed. But in all honesty the primary reason I decided not to do it was that I knew I'd fail and that wouldn't make me happier. Maybe someday I'll give it a shot, but for now, I'll just focus on things I have a chance of accomplishing.

Polish Mansion

I was looking for pictures of mansions today and I found one that left me stunned. It's in Poland and comes complete with 14 bedrooms, 25 full baths and 14 partial baths. O_O I'm trying to figure out what someone would need with that many bathrooms. That's more than double the number of bedrooms. Now I can see the tactical advantage of having conveniently located bathrooms throughout the house, but 29 of them?

According to the listing (it's for sale), it also has a guest house, stables, tennis courts, carriage house (with real, antique carriages), a helipad, a private airport, a home theater, a billards room, staff quarters, a wine cellar, and 2 polo fields. Yep, 2 of them. It also has an indoor arena for practicing polo in the winter.

If you'd like to look at it yourself, here's the link, but I can't promise it's still active. For all I know, mansions like this fly off the real estate listings. :-) Since I don't move in these circles, I have no idea.

By the way, the stables can hold 60 horses. I know, right? But apparently polo tournaments are held there in the summer and all the visiting polo players probably need space for their horses to spend the night. BTW, there are summer and winter paddocks--whatever that means. I don't know anything about horses either.

The property is stunning both inside and outside, but the exterior is especially extraordinary. I seriously need to have a hero or heroine visit/live in a mansion like this.

Image-Centric

I like to collect pictures as I write a story. It's easier to keep track of things if I have a visual reference. I like floor plans for homes/apartments, pictures of vehicles and places, but most importantly, I like pictures of the characters, particularly the hero and heroine. Not only does this help me keep track of hair and eye color, but it also offers me insight into who they are as people.

The only thing I don't like is looking for the pictures. :-/ Mostly I hate looking for pictures of the hero and/or heroine. It can take forever and I have a patience problem.

This all came into play when I was looking for pictures for the Work In Progress (WIP). I actually found the heroine fairly quickly--sometimes I get lucky--and I picked a picture for the hero. Did you notice the difference for the two characters? I found one and picked the other. I bet you can guess what happened: The picture I picked didn't work.

Oh, I tried to make it work. It's good enough, I argued, but it wasn't. Finally, I had no choice except to go looking for the real hero. Yes, it did take forever. But the guy I found ended up being exactly the right one to portray my hero.

New problem--the book is part of a trilogy and all three heroines are in book 1. I still need a picture of heroine 3. She did not turn up quickly. I'm also uncertain if the image I have for hero number 2 is right. If I'm wondering, it probably means I don't. Hero 2 is in book 1, too, and has already been in a scene. Despite this, I don't have a strong sense of his appearance. I hate when that happens.

Fake Photos That Went Viral

I've seen most of these.

That's Luke

The characters demanding my attention right now are not from the story I'm supposed to be writing. Not only are they from another world entirely, but if I did write them, there are around seven other books I'd need to write first. I have them planned out and it would be correct chronologically. None of that seems to matter.

To try to get them to stop bugging me, I started writing one of the scenes they've shown me. I didn't get far before I started looking for pictures of them.

Usually, I need to write two to three chapters before I look for pictures, but I know this couple well already, so I guess that's why it was different. Looking for character images is not normally a lot of fun and it wasn't this time either. I still haven't found the right image for either of them.

I know Cam doesn't have long hair, but I stopped at a picture of a guy with shoulder-length brown hair anyway. If the face is right, I can sometimes manage to find a picture of the model with short hair.

Before I can even get a really good read on his face, though, Cam says, "That doesn't look like me. He looks like Luke."

I'm like Luke? Who the hell is Luke?

My brother, he tells me. Okay. I knew Cam had two younger brothers, but I had never gotten their names. Now I have them name of one more. Luke Brody. I'm guessing this means he has a story, too. :-/

Sparks

I have a board on Pinterest that I titled Sparks. I pin here sporadically, but this board is for those pictures that make my imagination stir.

There doesn't have to be a story spark there or even a character spark. I just wanted somewhere to save pictures that made me go, hmmm. This board has no rhyme or reason to it. There are pictures of people, there is art, and concept technology. Fairies, dragons, the grim reaper, steampunk, and well, you get the idea.

As I looked at some of the pictures today, I couldn't remember why I pinned them. This time around they didn't make my brain start humming. But this only happened with a few pictures.

I'm thinking this could be a really cool method of writing prompts. Instead of a sentence, use a picture.

And maybe that's what all the pictures I save for each story I write is all about...stirring the imagination.

Non-Fashion Passion

I have a cousin who can put on a pair of shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, spend all day outside in July in the heat and humidity and still look polished enough to go to the opera. On the other hand, I can spend two hours getting ready to go somewhere fancy and ten minutes later look as if I were standing outside in the heat and humidity all day. Since I fail at glamor and always have, my personal style is comfort.

Luckily, the heroines I've had come in to talk to me have mostly been casual dressers themselves. And then there was Maia from In Twilight's Shadow. She had that casual elegant look down pat and she wore dresses and skirts. I ended up spending a lot of time online trying to find outfits for her.

Shona from Edge of Dawn dressed up a fair amount in her story, too, now that I think about it. Okay, so I've had two heroines that have forced me to  dress them up.

In an effort to be prepared for future heroines who might want something more than jeans, I've begun pinning all kinds of gowns on Pinterest. I'm hoping to avoid any frantic searches online.

Stock Photography Hell

Enemy Embrace was exclusive to the Crave the Night anthology for six months, but now that time is up and I went in search of royalty-free photos for a cover. I've lamented before about trying to find cover images and it hasn't gotten any better. Most of the pictures out there simply won't work.

• Smiling people? No. Not for the kinds of stories I write.
• Scrawny men. A lot of the men in these pictures are either scrawny or unattractive or both. Why can't stock photographers grasp that both the man and the woman need to be good looking?
• Poses too staid or poses too explicit. Some of these pictures look like portraits that people would put up on their fireplace. Conversely, there are pictures out there with all kinds of skin showing. I don't write Erotic Romance, but even if I did, the book sellers aren't going to show a cover that might offend customers.

These issues leave a handful of photos out there and authors are using and reusing them, which gets kind of old. The problem is there's nothing better and there's little choice.

But me? I have an extra layer of difficulty. You see, I frequently write multicultural characters and Enemy Embrace has one of them. My heroine is Latina.

I find it oddly ironic that just last week someone blogged at Heroes and Heartbreakers about how white romance is. It left me sputtering because of the 14 stories I've had published, 6 of them have had a hero or heroine who has a multicultural background. A quick use of a calculator says that's 43% of my published work.

Anyway, considering the hell I've had to go through to find stock images for these couples, I'm exceedingly aware that photographers who shoot photos I can use are few and far between. After hours of searching, I found 3 pictures that might, possibly work for this story, but none of them are optimal. It's frustrating.

For those curious about my multicultural characters:

The Power of Two - Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese
Through a Crimson Veil - Mika is 1/2 Japanese
Dark Awakening - Kimi is all Japanese-American
The Troll Bridge - Troll is part Filipino and part African-Caribbean and part Hawaiian
Demon Kissed - Bree is part Latina
Enemy Embrace - Nicole is part Latina

From Idea To Story - Part 5

This is part 5 series of blogs that will run through how I take an idea and make it into a story. This is my process and it might not work for everyone. It might not even work for me on my next project. The one thing that I've learned is that my process will (and has) changed over the years. Sometimes drastically.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Despite being exhausted after a long and stressful week at work, I knew I wasn't getting to bed anytime soon. If you recall, this is the day that the tornadoes swept through the country and Atlanta was in the sights of a series of storms moving in from Alabama. Nasty storms with a history of tornadoes, hail, and high winds. Storms made me nervous in Minnesota where we generally don't get the violent tornadoes like the ones that go through other areas of the country. And in Minnesota, my house had a basement. The place I'm staying at in Atlanta? No basement.

So I was nervous, anxious and knew it was going to be a good long while before I would be able to sleep. I put the nervous energy to work for me. One of the things I did was begin looking for the hero to the WIP (Work In Progress).

It actually didn't take too long to find a guy that looked like my hero. Kind of. I ignored the kind of whispering through my brain and saved his pictures to my hero file. He's not exactly right, a little voice said. I assured it that I would take a second look at the pictures on Saturday and make a decision after I'd slept.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

It only took a quick look while I was drinking coffee to know the guy I'd found wasn't going to work. The good news, though, was that he was very close to my hero in appearance. I also took another look at the heroine's pictures. I waffled. Again. I decided I would look for women's pictures, too. Maybe I'd find the right model or maybe it would convince me once and for all that I had the right image of my heroine.

The hero didn't prove too difficult to find. That's not to say I found him immediately, but I've had searches that have lasted forever and I'm happy to report that I found the right guy within a relatively short period of time. For the record, he's not that similar to the original, Friday night man, but there's a sort of similarity.

I resumed the heroine search. I had tab after tab after tab filled with modeling agencies. I opened up even more tabs with models I wanted to take a closer look at. Most of them weren't right. My heroine is fairly young and I was able to eliminate some because they looked too old. Then there were the models that looked as if they were thirteen. I crossed them off the list, too.

Finally, I had four or five models I wanted of whom I wanted to see more pictures. One of the models' names was Lauren something or other. When I did a search of the modeling database, a Lauren came up that wasn't the one I was looking for, but she looked like my heroine. Potentially.

As I went through the photos and culled out the models I wanted a closer look at, a certain pattern began to develop. They all looked very similar to the original model that I was waffling over. That made me confident that I knew what my heroine looked like, it would simply be a matter of finding the one that really fit.

After more study and consideration, the final choice came down to the original model and the Lauren model that I wasn't looking for, but found anyway. It took tabbing through their pictures a few times and putting them next to the picture of the hero, but I finally knew I had my heroine.

It was the Lauren that I found accidentally.

From Idea To Story - Part 3

This is part 3 series of blogs that will run through how I take an idea and make it into a story. This is my process and it might not work for everyone. It might not even work for me on my next project. The one thing that I've learned is that my process will (and has) changed over the years. Sometimes drastically.

Sunday Night - February 26, 2012

I always like pictures of my characters when I write and I went searching as soon as the names were set. The hero's personality had come through loud and clear and I had a pretty good idea of what he looked like. I figured he was going to be hard to find, so I started looking for the heroine first.

This might have been an error in judgment since I didn't have a good grasp on her appearance or personality at this point. Still, I figured I'd know her when I saw her. I started out thinking she had some red in her hair. A search through auburn and redheaded models didn't turn up anyone who clicked. I expanded my search to other hair colors.

It wasn't quick, but I found a model that I thought was my heroine. I began a search for more pictures of her and put them all in a file for this book.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Doubt started to creep in. Was this model really what my heroine looked like? When I got home from work, I opened the picture file again and went through every shot. I waffled.

Waffling isn't good. Waffling means it probably isn't the heroine.

I continued to waffle for the rest of the week. I liked her and she was perfect. Really. Only I found myself wanting to email my friends and ask them for their opinion. That really didn't bode well.

Stock Photos and Cover Art

For the past couple of months, the Crimson City authors have been working on getting the series up in ebook. It's been an interesting process. I'd formatted a couple of short stories for ebook, but this was a full-length book and a novella. It was more work, but I also learned a few tricks to speed the whole thing up. And just to prove I'm a geek beyond all hope, I enjoyed the formatting. Mostly. :-)

Finding stock photos for the cover artist was much more difficult.

There are so many issues with stock photos. First, pictures of men and women grinning happily are not going to work for cover art. Especially if they're wearing business suits. I haven't written a character yet who dresses up like that, although I think I have one in the wings. Maybe. We'll see if that lasts once I get into writing his story. And I write stories with suspense. Grinning people on the cover don't work. Neither do people wearing phone headsets, holding money, using a laptop or the myriad of other poses rife on the stock photo sites.

Then there's problem two--both people need to be attractive. It happened over and over again--I'd find one attractive person, but they'd be paired up with someone not so attractive. Why do so many photographers use one model that would turn heads and put him/her with a model who is plainer? Or if both the man and woman are good looking, the guy is scrawny. Muscles and looks are important for book covers.

I had an extra issue at work on the Crimson City covers. Both my heroines are of Japanese heritage. Both their heroes are of European heritage. Yeah. There was one photo that was perfect. Sexy clinch. Asian woman. European man. And I'd already used it for the Power of Two cover. (Which will be coming in ebook eventually.)

The cover artist cut off the heads of one couple so you can't see the woman isn't Japanese. This is what we're going with for Through a Crimson Veil. And I spent hours and hours (time I definitely don't have) combing the stock photo site for something, anything we could use for Dark Awakening. I did find one picture with an Asian woman, only she was paired with an Asian man. My cover artist performed a miracle, but he was replaced.

Is it seriously too much to ask for stock photographers to put a good looking, muscular man with a good looking woman together in a pose that's sexy without being Erotica sexy? A pose that doesn't involve grins or any piece of business equipment? Is it too much to ask that some of the couples come from two different ethnic backgrounds?

I love writing multicultural characters, but getting covers made for those books is excruciating. I never found any picture that could even remotely work for Troll in my story, The Troll Bridge. Troll is multi, multi, multicultural. His heritage is part European, part Filipino, and part African-Caribbean. Yeah. You'll notice that cover only has a woman on it. She at least looks something like his heroine.

As I contemplate future stories that I have in mind, I'm already dreading what their covers will look like. It's not only authors publishing on their own or republishing their backlist who comb the stock photo sites. New York publishers are using stock photos now, too. What kind of cover will I end up with for my hero who's Eurasian? What about my Polynesian/European hero and heroine? I have a couple of Latina heroines and one hero (all in different stories). Changing their backgrounds won't work. My characters are who they are, but cover images...::shudder::

Adjustments

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about searching for royalty-free photos online and what an ordeal it was. I had a few people ask me why I was taking the time to look. Now that things are in place, I can answer this question. If you've visited my website previously, you would have noted that the anchor image was the running couple from my Crimson Veil book. They've been replaced.

Check out my website's home page to see the new couple!

The new picture fits in so seamlessly, it looks as if was always there, doesn't it?

Even though it took forever to do the image search and even though I didn't find another running couple (who weren't smiling), I think the new image works really well. I like that they're holding hands and that the woman is in front. To me, it looks like they're partners and I usually write heroes and heroines who work together as a team. They're even wearing dark clothes.

In other news, I'm working on edits for Shadow's Caress, my Feb 2011 release from Nocturne Bites. It looks as if the title is set now and I'm relieved that I don't have to brainstorm more ideas. Titles are really hard for me, and for some bizarre reason, I've been able to keep about half of the ones I've come up with. Go figure.

Frustrated

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.

Picture Perfect

Recently, I spent some time going through my files for published books. Not the WordPerfect files where I did my writing, but my image files. It was really interesting to go back and see how many pictures were filed for which books.

For Ravyn's Flight, I discovered three pictures--one of the hero and two of the heroine. It was one apiece for The Power of Two. I had more pictures for Through a Crimson Veil. Tons of the heroine and dozens of the hero and a handful of Venice Beach, where a couple scenes in the book take place.

The numbers of images dwindled again for my fourth and fifth books before exploding with book six, In Twilight's Shadow and Edge of Dawn and In the Darkest Night had even more. That gave me an oh moment. :-) Oh, yeah, this is when I upgraded to high speed internet.

The vast majority of my story comes to me by "hearing" it all inside my head. I can "hear" the characters' internal monologues, I can "hear" their conversations with each other. Some authors talk about things unfolding like a movie for them, but I've never had that. I might get glimpses, but they're more like snapshots than movies. That's why finding the right images is so important to me.

There's a stage I call Pre-Book when I go looking for pictures of my heroes and heroines. A lot of times I don't know what I'm looking for, but I trust I'll recognize the h/h when I see them. I always have in the past. Sometimes they surprise me and they look nothing like I expected, but once I get a that's me, it doesn't matter. If it doesn't fit my preconceived notions, that's too bad.

This happened just recently with a new idea that burst into my brain. The hero ended up with very light brown hair and the heroine has almost-black hair. If you'd asked me before I found the right models, I would have had that the other way around.

I also like to find house plans and pictures if the h/h are going to be in that setting a lot. It keeps me on track for moving them through the house and it helps me with consistency.

But back before I had high speed internet, looking for pictures was torturous and slow, which, I guess, explains why the early books didn't have nearly as many images as the latest. I love my high speed internet. :-)

Weirdness

I've mentioned before that I go looking for pictures of my characters. It's part of my pre-book process and one of the benefits is that it helps me keep their appearances straight all the way through the story. There have also been times when a picture has helped me discover a character trait that I might have suspected, but didn't know for sure. Like Deke. I suspected he was a smart aleck, but I didn't know just how much a part of his personality this was until I found "his" picture. Then he flooded me with his personality.

I rarely use actors because they're too well known and I want the pictures to be of more anonymous people. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's harder to believe they're really my people when you look at an image and think, Orlando Bloom.

But as my search for my characters has become more sophisticated--as in I've become more practiced and have more resources bookmarked--a weird thing has started happening.

Normally, I check out modeling agency websites to cast my characters. Too many of them have smallish pictures and I always want to look at as many images as I can find. (BTW, agencies, do you seriously think disabling right click stops people from saving pictures? Hello? I can use a bookmarklet to get by that, or if you go with Flash, I use a screen capture. Or there's OneNote and it's fabulous screen clipping feature. All you're doing is inconveniencing me, not stopping me. But I digress.) Anyway, in the past, most of the agency sites I found had only the model's first name, but more and more have their last names now, too, so I do a search to see if I can turn up more pictures.

This is where the weirdness starts. Once I find a model that my character says is them, they become MY character and when I Google to find more pictures and turn up the model's Facebook page, it's just strange. Because I don't think of the models as "real" people with lives, they exist solely to become my characters. :-) Of course, maybe it's my mindset that's causing the weirdness.

But here's an example. I found pictures of the latest characters to invade my head and did a search to locate more shots of them. The model who is my heroine has a Facebook page...with friends. It's happened before, but it still weirds me out. The other strange thing is the picture she chose as her profile image is the same one I chose as the key image for my heroine. With dozens of pictures, I always choose one image that's the primary reference and stick the others in another folder for reference if the need arises. I also post the primary images on a personal website that no one can find in a search, so that they are private. I don't want to violate copyright, although I'd love to be able to share them on my blog.

It's easier for me, though, when the models stay unreal. Then it's easier for them to become my characters in my mind. The fact that this heroine's model has a Facebook page will fade and she'll become my heroine again, but it's still freaky to me when this happens.

Freeze Frame!

Before I get started, I'd like to remind everyone that Carolyn Jewel is giving away a copy of My Wicked Enemy to a lucky commenter on her post. I mirror this blog in four different places and Carolyn has generously offered to give away a second copy--one on MySpace and one on Blogger, so if you haven't commented yet, what are you waiting for? The drawing will take place June 10th.

Now on to my Sunday night post:

I spent most of Saturday on two things--making notes on the world I built in my short story, Blood Feud and looking for pictures of two sets of heroes and heroines.

The notes on Blood Feud were necessary because I have ideas for two more stories set in that same world, but I couldn't remember all the details that I'd put in the short story. The thing that surprised me was how much I'd forgotten. Or maybe it shouldn't surprise me since it was due on the same day that my book had to be turned in to Tor and I was really thundering on the pages. I ended up with four pages of notes.

On Friday, the characters in these two stories finally gave me their names, and that means it's getting close to time to work on them.

Armed with notes and my characters names, I attempted to put together a short synopsis. Yeah, I know, but I can do short if I really have to. Sometimes. :-) But I kept running into a problem. While I knew general information about the characters and kind of had a bead on their attitudes, I didn't feel like I had a good grip on them and that tripped me up on the synopsis. That meant it was time to go hunting for character pictures.

Ah, yes, either one of my favorite things to do or one of my least favorite depending on how long it takes to find the right images. For one couple, I already had their pictures on my hard drive and they were actually together in the shots. Yea!

Immediately, I started getting information that I didn't have before, especially about the heroine. That's why I love having the pictures. I know when I've found the right one and it just unleashes a torrent of information.

Couple two, however, wasn't going to prove this easy. I thought the hero would be easiest to locate because I had a good idea of his personality and I believed that I had a good idea of what he looked like. It was his heroine that I found first. She was a surprise. Younger-looking than I expected (keep in mind she's supernatural so while she looks young, she isn't) and...moodier. Very much at home in the night, which I knew, but the picture that best represented her really underscored this.

As difficult and time consuming as it had been to find her picture, her hero's was even more difficult to locate. I thought I knew what he looked like. I was wrong. I didn't figure it out until I kept circling back to two men--both who had longish blondish hair.

I thought he had dark hair. I thought it was worn conservatively short. I thought he looked older than about 23, even though I knew he was a paranormal dude, too. Once I finally was able to give up what I thought I knew and go with the guy that felt the most right, things clicked for me with him, too. Surfer dude. Who'd have thought? Obviously, not me. :-)

And this took all day. Literally. Today, I worked on my WIP (Work In Progress) instead of either of these stories, but I don't look at it as wasted time. Now, with these images clear in my head, I'll have more to mull over and mulling is always productive.