Interesting process . . .

My agent called me yesterday and asked if she was interrupting my writing. (She knows I'm on a tight deadline.) I laughed and said that I was at that moment cutting out little pictures of my characters and taping them all around my desk . . .

"You have an interesting process, Angie," she said.

I suppose it is. All I know is that I've done the little picture thing for the last four or five novels, and it's amazing how actually LOOKING into a character's face makes them become three-dimensional. I even had a picture of Sema when I worked on UNSPOKEN, and every day I'd look up at her and try to make her as real to the reader as she'd become to me.

It's always a little sad to take those pictures down and file them away, too. I feel as though I'm putting friends on a shelf.

Oh, where do I get the pictures? I have to thank Lisa Samson for the idea. She sent me to www.tonystone.com, where you can type in "female, alone, 40s" and get a slew of forty-something women to choose from. I just look for my characters until they pop out at me, I save to the computer, and print out wallet-sized. (Tony Stone sells graphic images to publishers, etc., for book covers, commercials, and the like. I found the gorilla that's pictured on the cover of UNSPOKEN at that web site, told my publisher, and they bought the license.)

The woman pictured in today's blog? Meet Mary Magdalene, or Miryam, as I'm calling her. I can see a world in her eyes . . .