So Where Have I Been?

Oh where have I been? It's been a busy week. I'm on deadline for Meeting Destiny by Nancy Strange and have Wicked Sinner by Charity Parkerson on for next deadline waiting for me.

Meantime, I'm working on my novel. I've not talked much about it but I've not wanted to until I have it a little more solid. I can give you some tidbits about what I'm doing for the background and work that I have needed to get ready to write. I've been dreaming about these things for, literally, months. I go to sleep and the story keeps coming out. Now I've been putting it on paper. At least this first part has been the old fashioned way, pen and paper.

I know the name of the ethnic group in the stories, Galno. They are a race of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh human warriors and vampires who are almost extinct due to a mysterious portal that has begun to open up and pull the Galno into it, either by capture or because the person is evil by nature, or has attempted suicide. Those who go into the portal are changed into what can only be described as ghostly vampiric evil entities resembling those they used to be. What they really are is yet to be discovered.

The Isle's Galno have no idea if there are any other Galno from anywhere else on the Earth and when they are forced away from their island homes, they head toward the North American continent and they find a few clues of other Galno but none living.

With that thought through and put down into writing, then I had to come up with characters. And OH did I come up with characters. I did this probably the weirdest way possible. I started with names. I picked out names of males and females and then of families that would be native to those three countries. This means a lot of Ap and Ferch Welsh names and Mac's for Scottish and Irish. Once I found the names, I divided them into families, took out one or two for those who were evil (gotta have bad guys), and then started looking for pictures online for them.

I found pictures for each name. Now, you will never see these people because there are a LOT of big name people in the list. I wasn't really judicious about keeping it to non-known people, sometimes because I had no idea if the person was famous or not, other times because the person just "fit" the image I had in my head. I'm quite sure Prince Harry of Great Britain would frown on having his picture, with a different name, in a book or on a website without permission, but he's in my photo gallery because I needed a cute redhead. I needed a lot of redheads and dark headed people and I ended up with 56 total photos.

Then I had to figure out what the picture and name made these people like. And what they would be doing. So a biography and a set-up for the book was written for each and every character, both good guys and bad guys. As I wrote, each character seemed to wake up and start telling me their story and what they were going to be doing. I may have had an idea about what I was going to do with them but they oftentimes had the last laugh as they changed my story to suit themselves. But it got much more interesting!

So now I sit here, blogging before having to pick up my Beloved and before my grandkids get here, with a full community of good guys, a cabal full of not so nice guys, and a portal full of bad guys waiting for me to put pen to paper and get their story out there.

Oh, and with 56 characters and so much material, I've already seen the light in the tunnel, it's the oncoming series train. Oh yeah.

I need to get busy writing, and reading, and stay off Facebook and out of my email and away from World of Warcraft. I have work to do!