Character Collages

As I've been working on the proposal for my historical YA, I've realized that some of my characters are coming up as a bit flat and I realized that's because I didn't have a clear idea of what they looked like. I tend to be a visual persons, so it helps if I make a collage with pictures of what I think the characters might look like.

So I've been combing the web looking for people, not necessarily actors, that I think look the most like the people who are populating my fictional world. One of the most important characters is Victor Delacroix, who is the total hottie French professor at Brearly College.

Now I looked at a lot of pictures of Frenchmen but the closest to what I think the character looks like is Gabriel Aubry also known as Halle Berry's baby daddy. I mean the guy is smoking hot. So what if he's French Canadian? Victor's father is a French creole from New Orleans, and he grew up in between Paris and Lousiana.

Victor is kind of a rebel as well. He throws out the curriculum that the school has set and instead is having the students translate Baudelaire and Verlaine, and reading from Flaubert as well as Dumas. He tells them about the Impressionists and Toulouse Lautrec. I might even bring up the Dreyfus Affair at some point.

There is a innocent flirtation between my heroine and Victor, but he's twelve years older than her, and it is a YA so there's no sex. Just lots of possibilities!

Question of the day: Do you ever use pictures of real people to inspire your characters? Do you ever make collages with the houses and people that populate your books as a visual aid?

Halloween Madness

Halloween is two weeks from this very day and for once I'm actually getting started early trying to find a costume, instead of waiting until the last minute and then throwing something together, when I discover that all the good costumes are gone.

I don't know why, but I feel such pressure to have an amazing costume. Probably because my friends always come up with most outstanding costumes. One year, my friend Lucia, went as Desdemona, complete with a pillow on top of her head, and white make-up, and Maria went as the corpse bride. The year before that Maria went as Ophelia complete with drowned weeds.

Last year, I just wore a black evening gown, strapped a fake gun in a holster to my thigh, along with some stuff from the Spy store and went as International Woman of Mystery, Femme Fatale.

Now this year, I have a dilemma, what to go as? I had high hopes of going as the Empress Josephine but unless I can persuade my friend to make an appointment a the Costume Collection here in New York (where I can rent a costume for $45), I'm out of luck. I have a particular dress in mind which makes it even harder. It should be black and gold (I look really good in those colors). Alas, the only other Josephine costume I could find on the web was sold out (clearly other people have had the same idea as moi!).

So I thought of purchasing this lovely Carmen Mirandesque costume that I saw on the In Character costume web-site. It's outrageous, and unexpected, but do I date? Or do I play it safe and go as a saucy pirate wench? There's kind of a been, there done that quality about being a pirate wench. I went one year as a female buccaneer, so I'm kind of repeating myself. Plus since Pirates of the Caribbean, Part 472 came out this summer, everyone and there mother is probably going to go as a pirate (like the year that Cat Woman came out and everyone, including some guys, went as her.)

Or I can wear this costume, and go as Lola Montez, who I blogged about over at Scandalous Women this week. It looks exactly like the costume that Lola used to wear on stage when she did her infamous 'Spider Dance,' in various locales. The dance was so outrageous and considered vulgar, that Lola would be booed by the audience. At least by the men who were distracted by her shapely ankles, and magnificent bosoms.

So, Cha-Cha or Lola Montez?

EKM