New Look for the Blog!

Do you like the blog’s new look? I’ve been intending to change it forever but just haven’t taken the time. Today I decided to play a bit, inspired by the French setting in Refiner's Fire, and I really like this theme. (By the way, I just discovered that if you're looking at it on a smart phone, it looks somewhat different, and the image in the header doesn't show.)

A while back I happened across some wonderful paintings by Italian artist Arturo Ricci, and for the header image I decided to use one I particularly like, L’Attesa or “The Expectation”. It reflects my characters and parts of Refiner’s Fire quite nicely. I’m thinking the couple on the left could stand in as Elizabeth Howard on the arm of Lucien Bettár, le comte de Caledonne’s son and thus Jonathan Carleton’s cousin. Ideally her hair would be darker since it’s a dark auburn, but good enough. Her escort does look like I envision Lucien.

The little girl with the older woman could sure be Abby and Tess Howard, though Abby is 13 in the story so would be a bit bigger. Then the man seated behind them would be Caledonne, and the couple seated beside the doorway would be their hosts, Caledonne’s daughter and son-in-law le marquis and la marquise Cécile and Eugène de Sevieux. This is undoubtedly as close as I’m going to get to these characters.

The more I look at this painting, the more I’m thinking about using it for the Refiner’s Fire cover. It’s in public domain and I found a fairly large image on Wikimedia that Marisa might just be able to do her magic on and make work. 

I originally intended to use a naval battle painting for book 6, but what do you think? Would you like to see this scene gracing the cover of Refiner's Fire? Please leave your comments and let me know yay or nay—for both the cover and the new blog design.

Visualizing Characters

A few days ago I ran across a picture that’s so close to how I visualize one of my characters that I’m almost giddy! Take a look at the beautiful portrait at the left. It portrays Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, who was commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Force that embarked from France in 1780 to fight with the American Continental Army against British forces.

Carleton’s maternal uncle, le comte de Caledonne, a French admiral who’s very influential in the court of Louis XVI, is mentioned a number of times in Crucible of War. He’ll finally make an appearance in Valley of the Shadow and will have a bigger role in book 6, Refiner’s Fire. So I was delighted to find this portrait of Rochambeau because he’s almost a twin to Caledonne! The portrait was not only very helpful when I wrote Caledonne’s description, but I also referred to it often as I wrote his scenes. It gave me a better feel for the character.

I’ve collected a number of portraits that are reasonable facsimiles for some of my characters. One of these days when I’m between projects, I intend to add pages to the series website where I can post pictures of both fictional and real characters who appear in the series. This will definitely be one of them.

Maps

I don’t know why, but I’ve loved maps ever since we started studying geography when I was in elementary school. I loved to copy maps I found interesting. Cartography, in fact, is another potential career I considered pursuing in addition to archaeology, art, interior design, and anything involving gardening or craft work.

It would be impossible to set the stage for the action in this series without accurate maps, and of course I use them extensively in my research. Below are a number of links to excellent online resources for historical maps that I’ve chanced upon. In addition to the Americans, both the English and French commissioned maps of the known areas of the North American continent and the action during the Revolution, and there are excellent collections of accurate maps online. I can spend hours studying them if I let myself. If you haven’t already run across these resources, I hope you find some of them useful in researching your own projects!

Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/guides.html

David Rumsey Map Collection: http://www.davidrumsey.com/index.html

Old Maps Online: http://www.oldmapsonline.org/#bbox=-75.421967,39.815342,-74.90973,40.089054&q=&datefrom=1000&dateto=2010

University of Texas Library: http://lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/index.html

World of Historic Maps (maps for purchase): http://www.history-map.com/