A little eye candy for your Saturday...

I've decided the hero of my new WIP looks a bit like Richard Madden, the actor playing Robb Stark in Game of Thrones.



He'd Regency up pretty, don't you think? He's an officer and it's a war story, so he can still be all scruffy and stubbly, just in a red coat with a greatcoat or cloak instead of leather and fur.

Heroines

My hands are healed enough that I'm starting to do serious work on my manuscripts again. I realized the novella I'd been working on was actually a full-length novel, and I wasn't sufficiently into it to take at least 80,000 words of time away from my historical fantasy WIP. My problem is that I start novellas thinking, "What's the most story I can pack into a word count under 50,000?" That naturally leads to stories that really should be novel length.

So I thought, "What if I take a short story idea, and if it really is a short story, I market it accordingly? But if, as so often happens to me, I end up with more story than I expect at the beginning, I actually will have a nice, reasonable novella." I brainstormed a bit and came up with a story with a straightforward conflict, no subplots, and a timeframe of a week or two to a month at most.

I wanted to go back to my Sergeant's Lady roots a bit, so I'm returning to a Peninsular War setting, this time with the hero and heroine both ordinary, non-aristocratic people. And since I've been watching Downton Abbey, I quickly pictured Jane Nolan, my new heroine, as looking like Joanne Froggatt, the actress who plays the housemaid Anna.



Jane is going to be a bit of a worrywart and serious to a fault, so those dark, solemn eyes seemed just right for her.

I had more of a challenge coming up with a visual for Cassandra Macdonald, the heroine of my historical fantasy. She had an unconventional upbringing, to put it mildly, and she's tall and athletic, too much so for the standards of beauty in 1810 as I understand them. When my Starbucks critique partners asked me for an actress who looked like her--they're fond of the casting game, for some reason--I drew a blank.

But today I thought, "Duh, she doesn't look like an actress. She looks like an athlete." So I poked around online a bit and decided she's built like Sue Bird:



Who has a gorgeous body, but I'm not sure how those broad muscular shoulders would look in the dresses of 200 years ago.

And in the face, she's more like Mia Hamm:



So I'm kinda doing that thing where a historical character feels plain when clearly she'd be a beauty by contemporary standards. On the other hand, it's not like her major conflict is going to be learning to accept her appearance and feel beautiful in the eyes of her Twu Wuv or anything...so maybe I can get by with it.

Writing Weekend (sorta): This is why I'll never get to choose my own cover models...

My tendinitis is gradually improving, so I'm trying to return to a normal life of work, writing, blog posts, and generally hanging out online.

This post is going to mostly be pictures, though. Eye candy...at least for me.

You see, I got an idea for a new novella, which I'm going to work on concurrently with my historical fantasy WIP. It's set in the run-up to the Battle of Waterloo, with a seasoned, weather-beaten officer hero.

I immediately knew my Harry looks exactly like Christopher Eccleston:



Just give him a bit more hair, put him in a red coat with a sword in his hand, and can't you just see him all intense and badass on the battlefield? I sure can.

And a man who looks good in a leather coat would also work an early 19th century greatcoat, dontcha think?



What a profile!



I think he'd look great on cover. Don't you?

...anyone?

::crickets::

Casting A Marriage of Inconvenience...

Now that I've got another novel scheduled, it's time for another casting post! (Also known as an excuse to post pictures of some hot guys.)

The hero of A Marriage of Inconvenience is James Wright-Gordon, Viscount Selsley. He's young, just 24, but he inherited his title at 15 and came into full control of his fortune and a seat in the House of Lords at 21, so he takes power for granted and is confident he can control everything in the world that most matters to him.

James is an unusual romance hero insofar as he's a bit on the short side, but he's still quite the hottie. I imagined him with a lean and compact yet powerful body, something like Ichiro Suzuki (who at 5'10" is only short by baseball player standards, but still):



But my half-Scottish, half-English hero is obviously not going to look like Ichiro in the face. James has dark hair, blue eyes, and rugged features, a bit like Ian Somerhalder:



Somerhalder's eyes are too light a blue for James, and his nose isn't quite aquiline enough. (That's sort of a Thing with me--you can pretty much spot my heroes by finding the guy with the most prominent nose in the book. This may or may not ever be reflected in my cover art...and my money's on Not. Even if I write, say, a biography of the Duke of Wellington, they'll probably use the Goya portrait for the cover, which is a fine work of art but NSM a literal rendition of His Grace's bone structure.)

Lucy, my heroine, is a delicate, elegant brown-eyed brunette. A lot like Natalie Portman:



She's quiet and deceptively meek, but we learn over the course of the story that she's learned to hide her natural strength and spirit growing up as a poor relation in a difficult family.



James's sister Anna, the heroine of The Sergeant's Lady, also plays a prominent role in Marriage. It's a prequel, so we get to witness the beginning of Anna's misbegotten first marriage to Sebastian Arrington. Back when I did my Sergeant casting post in April, I had trouble finding a contemporary actress who looks like my image of Anna. I still can't find anyone recent, but I thought of a good Hollywood Golden Age Anna--Vivien Leigh.

And Sebastian himself, as mentioned in my April villains post, looks like Ralph Fiennes, but with lighter blond hair.



Only he'd also have a mustache, because such was the fashion among cavalry officers then. Though I admit to struggling to picture him that way.

Since Marriage is a prequel, Will Atkins, the hero of Sergeant, doesn't make an appearance except for a brief mention in an epilogue that may or may not make it into the published book. (The draft I'm working on now to return to my editor by the 21st includes a long comment with the pros and cons of the epilogue, pitching the ball into her court, because I just can't make up my mind.) But I like Will, and he looks like Nathan Fillion (Firefly-era), and you really can't have too many images of Mal Reynolds, now can you? So I'll close with this:

Casting my novel: the villains

The Sergeant's Lady has two main baddies: Anna's first husband, Sebastian Arrington, and a young lieutenant in Will's Rifle company named George Montmorency.



Sebastian is a tall, dazzlingly handsome blond cavalry officer. Kind of like Ralph Fiennes, if you imagine him without that lovely smile and playing the part of a misogynistic control freak.



Montmorency is tougher to cast, since he's meant to be the sort of person who fades into the background. Best I can do is David Tennant...but he's far too adorable, and I was never a Tennant fan! (Christopher Eccleston was and remains my Doctor.) Anyway, if you hired him to play a bitter young man with a massive sense of entitlement, I'm sure he could ditch the charm and sweetness and make a good Montmorency.

Just for fun--casting my novel

I don't actually expect anyone to make a movie of The Sergeant's Lady, but hey, it's fun to dream! Also, I'm not a naturally visual thinker--I "hear" my stories more than I "see" them--so sometimes I find coming up with an actor or a period portrait helps me work in those concrete visual details that help a story come alive.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share some of the images I kept going back to when working on TSL. I'll start with the most important characters, the hero and heroine.

My hero, Will Atkins, was easy to cast. He's a 27-year-old sergeant in the 95th Rifles, an elite infantry regiment in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. (And, yes, one that will already be familiar to fans of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels or the TV movies based on them and starring Sean Bean.) He's a tough, experienced soldier, blessed with ample common sense, but he also has a chivalrous streak and a stubborn independence that nearly a dozen years in the army hasn't entirely eradicated. I wanted him to have a solid, reliable handsomeness, and I immediately thought of Firefly-era Nathan Fillion.



Will's hair is lighter and more of a red-brown, and his eyes are whisky-brown rather than blue like Fillion's, but if you take Nathan Fillion and imagine him dressed in Rifle green like this...



...you've pretty much got my Will.

My heroine, Anna Arrington, was more of a challenge. She's young, just 22, but she's also a survivor, coming out of two long years in an abusive marriage. She comes from a long line of Scottish nobility (her maiden name was Gordon), so I wanted her to look both Celtic and aristocratic. I knew she'd have dark curls and green eyes, and pale, pale skin with faintly rosy cheeks.

I first wrote TSL back in 2005, when The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe came out. When I saw it in the theater, I spent half the movie trying to figure out why the actress playing Susan (Anna Popplewell) seemed so familiar. Toward the end I finally realized why: she looked a bit like my Anna, but as a 16- or 17-year-old.



Then, years later, while working on another manuscript, I found another image that made me think, "Wait, that's Anna."



That's Hyacinthe Wellesley, a niece of the Duke of Wellington, painted in 1822. She's not as conventionally pretty as Popplewell, but the curly hair, arched eyebrows, aquiline nose, and overall posture and bearing are just right for my character.

So, that's my hero and heroine! Future posts will feature Anna's evil first husband, her brother and sister-in-law, Will's best friends, and more.