The life of an Unpubbed

My hottie of the day can be found at this link:

http://www.compleatseanbean.com/

I love Sean Bean. Unfortunately he plays villains in most of his films, apart from a wonderful turn as Odysseus in Troy which should have been called Brad Pitt's thighs or Brad Pitt's butt, considering how much time was spent on Achilles, the camera lingering on his taut and toned body. Not that I'm complaining but the movie was called Troy and it would have been nice if the director and the screenwriter had spent more time developing the characters of the inhabitants of the city. But I digress. What does this have to do with the life of an unpubbed author?

Well Sean Bean is the inspiration for my latest hero, Philip St. Merion, Baron Treveryan. I first discovered the wonders of Mr. Bean through the movie Golden Eye, the first Pierce Brosnan Bond film. He was lovely and then on Masterpiece Theatre in the Sharpe series. There's something wonderfully sexy and broody about him. Also that wonderful Sheffield accent lurking just beneath the surface, despite the training at RADA.

He has a messy personal life, married and divorced three times, 3 little girls which somehow adds to his appeal. Of course, the hero in my book, has none of these things. Just a broken marriage to someone who fell in love with the idea of him, not the man he really was.

I'm a visual person. I need to have pictures of my hero and heroines, pictures of what I think their house would look like, what clothes they would wear. I keep a folder for each book with all that information handy so that I can refer to it as needed.

Right now, I'm in that stage of the book, where I wonder if I've gone off the rails a bit. My initial idea for the book was sort of a reverse 'To the Manor Born' where a romance novelist moves to a small English town, having bought herself a stately home and a title. Add in a dash of the Vicar of Dibley, the town would peopled with eccentric characters, and my heroine would try to turn the town on it's ear, pissing off the local lord who had plans for the manor that she bought since it abuts his property. He would spent the book butting heads with her, and she revives the local custom of the May Day fete.

Somehow along the way, when I changed the locale to Cornwall that all changed. I may go back to that idea at some point, but this book has taken on a mind of its own. I fell in love with the romance of Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier, Poldark, King Arthur, Tristan and Isolde, and I felt that my heroine would also fall in love with the idea of setting a book in such a place. A woman who was in love with romance, in love with love, and then finds the romance that she was always writing about in her books.

Still I've had a few moments wondering if I should go back to the original plan. See this is normally why writers use outlines! I on the other hand decided to just go with the flow, which has led my characters to taking me on a merry race, totally disgarding the plan that I had come up with for them, necessitating more research on my part, including a trip to Cornwall sometime this year.

I think I just need to finish this draft of the book, read it and then decide instead of jumping ship in the middle of the book.