Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website. The website and app allow users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting."
I've decided to use the "pin-boards" to highlight books in the Collective Obsessions Saga, naturally. The boards feature cover art, of course, but also display various images which inspired physical aspects of fictional characters within the novels.
As I've stated many times before, I mapped out a detailed family tree to avoid inconsistencies throughout "Collective Obsessions" and created spreadsheets to track character quirks and descriptions. The books became one enormous project which involved more than twenty years of writing and research, with several pit-stops in between as I carried out my own life. At various times through the long haul, the spreadsheets were done in Word Star, Word Perfect and now Microsoft Word – which is probably more telling of my age than of the lengthy writing process.
Since I'm a writer often inspired by images, my spreadsheet for "Collective Obsessions" became naturally larger as time progressed, but also included thumbnail pictures of people I felt represented my fictional characterizations. The images were not indicative of true personality traits of real people by a long shot, but rather a general idea of what I envisioned as the “outer shell” of each character. For instance, I based John Larkin's appearance on actor David Selby, who portrayed Quentin Collins in the Dark Shadows television serial. The physical aspects of Mayor David Azoulay, who appears in Hearts Desires, The Twilight and Megan'sLegacy, was inspired by Mark Feuerstein, star of the USA Network series RoyalPains. Colm and Mike Sullivan, who are described as closely resembling one another in the various storylines, are based on Jason Connery as he appeared in Robin of Sherwood.
Each major character had their own snapshot, which rarely changed over the course of the years.
Thanks to Pinterest, I'm now able to share the mind's-eye images of my fictional characters. As each book in the "Collective Obsessions Anthology" is released by Club Lighthouse Publishing through 2013, I will continue to add photos to the individual pin-boards.
Be that as it may, I would like to emphasize that all eight books in the Collective ObsessionsAnthology are works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely co-incidental.
