Originally published at Joely Sue Burkhart. You can comment here or there.
I’m looking for inspiration for my Given in Fire heroine, Koray. She needs to be extremely tough and strong. She does the saving and the fighting, not the other way around. Keldar is a hard land, a hard life, and she’s used to suffering thirst and brutal heat. Her coloring should be rather dark. I described Chanda’s hair color as the multi-colored scales of the Krait snake blended with threads of fire, and Koray would look somewhat similar. She might fight with scimitar or knives, but she has magic, too. An image strongly associated to her is a white snake, and she can be just as poisonous as a Mamba, as she’ll discover in the story.
The inspiration can be a real actress/model, a role from a movie, a fantasy art rendering, etc. as long as I can see it online and print a copy for the storyboard. I’ve googled and searched to no avail. So many of the fantasy art sites return the damsel in distress with the big beefy barbarian — and that is soooo not Keldar. She’s more Aiel than anything (aka Robert Jordan) but that’s not right either. Any recommendations?
The hero of Given in Fire was easy. I wanted a cultured Prince look, sexy but not with the typical warrior attitude. Yet despite his princely upbringing, there’s a serious darkness in the hero. He’s suffered torture and exposure so great that his mind may be broken. After watching The Dark Knight, how could I not take a look at Christian Bale? The fire in this one is especially inspiring and the wild, crazy look in this one is spot on. However, NOW he’s not real thrilled with “Ranulf” as his name. Not happy at all. He’s adamant that is not his name and I should go back to the drawing board.
Dang characters.