Sunday, November 05, 2006

Help! I need a face!


Where do you get the faces of the people in your book?

Personality is easy, I think, but physical appearance is sometimes tricky to get down right.

I keep a notebook (see smiley notebook there, on the side) where I paste in pictures of people that I've found in magazines, newspapers, on the Internet, etc.

But sometimes they just aren't quite right. I'm struggling with that now. I'm doing a proposal for a book in a series, and the hero has to be physically scarred. This will reflect his emotional scarring, too.

I've been considering giving him a missing leg or arm, but this was in the early 1900s, and I'm hazy on the use of prosthetics at that time, if any were available, how mobile he'd be, etc. If anything, I may have him missing an arm with some attendant scars with it.

Since he's a WWI veteran, I was considering mustard gas scarring, but I think that was mainly internal (i.e., ruined the lungs). Then I thought that I'd have some facial scarring -- maybe a bayonet wound or sword wound, something just bad enough to cause partial blindness? Anyway, he's sort of embittered and mad at the world, and that's reflected in his appearance and his personality.

I'm pretty sure what the heroine will look like. She's a sunny, optimistic type, sort of a cross between Rachel Ray and Sally Field. Except she'll have light colored hair, I think.

But Mike -- he's got me stumped. Anybody got a good pointer to a web site with some pictures of gloomy people? I just need to glance through some non-smiling faces and I'll have one of those 'ah ha' moments, I know it.

J


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