Post by Dabeagle on Feb 4, 2021 17:00:45 GMT -5
There is a curious story within a story about PCE, which some of you may find entertaining to a degree as it pertains to story development. Some of you undoubtedly know that I use images for inspiration from time to time. It may be to build the idea of a character, it may be a pose, a facial expression, a scene set in the image - any number of things that I want to hang onto and reference later. Sometimes, though, an image can lead me down a rabbit hole.
My narrator is sometimes not fully formed in my head, not so much as their friends or love interest. At some point I was clicking around on Pinterest and came across an image that was unique - a teen age guy lying back on the seat with a baby on his stomach/chest. In was unusual for he location, the pose, etc. Sometimes I use a reverse image search, especially if I'm thinking of using the picture and I don't know its provenance. This led me to, eventually, a picture sharing site by the fellow's girlfriend - and tons of extra images. I followed a thread from account to account and was shocked to discover that this girl had posted so much stuff on her account - a public account - that I knew her name, her high school, her boyfriend's name (the one who had been reclining) and one of the boyfriend's teammates from football and basketball, and that teammates sister's name. They boyfriend became the model for Brax, and the teammate became the model for Cole. However knowing how much I easily found - without trying to, simply looking to connect dots and locate better images - I didn't want to use an image like that.
I used a pose from another image of a lad sitting in a chair oddly, attempting to be sexy but not really able to pull it off - that became a silly pose Cole did for Drew.
The plot at the beginning was inspired by Cristopher Rice's book A Density of Souls, but in the end I didn't want to completely go that route and I changed course fairly early in. Also the scene where Drew watches Teo undress/dress is an homage to the scene from Skins where Sketch watches her obsession, Maxie, dress.
I currently have 400 images in my 'muses' file, so I'm sure there will be other things inspired by them.