An Altered Book

I've already talked about the collages I do for my books, and the travel journal I'm doing for this particular Theodosia book, but I also wanted to talk about something I started doing a while back. It's similar to a collage in that it helps me access the story world in a much more, loosey-goosey creative way, without the specific writing tasks I expect to accomplish with the travel journal (voice, descriptions, travel logistics). This altered book is really more about helping me stay fully immersed in the world, while giving my mind something else to focus on besides the words on the page.

And here I must insert my disclaimer, that I am a rank amateur in the world of altered books, but I do have fun.

So first, I had to find the right book to alter. How thrilled was I to find the above book at the library's used book store--it's even a translation of an Arabic poem! How perfect.



This first image was my first experiment. It's very simple, but again, I was surprised at how much fun my subconscious had ruminating while my fingers were busy "building" something from the story world. This image is just a mood piece for the first book, touching on picking up Mother from the train station.



This next picture was trying to evoke the sense of showdown I felt when writing Book Two, involving the Dreadnought, the Serpents of Chaos, and a certain prophecy regarding a red sun...




And lastly, a scene in the catacombs, with all those mummies...



While I will confess to being all thumbs when it comes to art, I do love collaging. I love the whole "found" thing aspect of the art form, the junk turned to jewels element of taking used and discarded trash and debris from lives lived, and using that to create something beautiful and evocative.

It reminds me very much of writing, actually.

As a writer, I collect mental junk, a face here, a look there. The snippet of conversation I overheard at the restaurant. The scolding I heard the mother give her son at the grocery store. The surprising sight of a teenage punk driving his 80 year old grandmother around in his hyped up jalopy. A sunset. A birdsong. A remembered feeling from when I was seven years old. This is the sort of detritus I collect in my head, where it rolls around for years, decades sometimes, until it becomes tumbled and smoothed and juxtaposed with other things and becomes something entirely new.

Best of all, the girls in the basement LOVE it a lot, and it gets them all juiced up so I can write and write and write...

Collaging: A Novel Approach

So you all know I like collaging as a way to help bring my story world to life, and I've shared some of the past collages on the blog. This time, however, a regular collage didn't seem to be working for Theo Four. For one thing, collages are big and tend to evoke a story world rather than represent it, and for this Theo book, I needed factual specifics. It takes place in Cairo and Luxor in 1907, both real places and real times, so I am somewhat constrained by, you know, reality. And in order to write about it, I need to see it. But if I paste the old photos I find on a collage board, they become lost or overwhelmed.

Well this weekend, I stumbled upon a fix to this conundrum. I decided that instead of creating a collage board for this Theodosia book, I'd create a travel journal such as Theo herself might have kept to record her trips.


(Sorry about the glare.)

So now I've been cutting and pasting all the old photos I've found in my research into this book, then making notations and observations in Theo's voice next to each picture.





This is doing two things. It's a great way to accumulate all the research visuals I need in one place and in chronological order, and it's allowing me to focus on seeing them through Theo's eyes. It's really helped me "get into the mood" for writing this book.

My Current Obssession

Because the truth is, I become obsessed with my projects and I need to absorb them through all of my senses. Since I am very visual, I often create a collage of images that helps put me in the world of the story. Here is the collage for the one I'm working on now:


Yes, it's fairly ironic that there are so many old men in there when it is a YA, but what can I say? Most of the men of political power in Medieval France were old. Or at the very least well-seasoned. Some of the images are thematic, the masks for example, and obviously many of the images evoke the decadence of a royal court rather than feature the correct historical costume, but it works to get me in the story when I need a jump start, a touchstone, if you will.

Wolf Collage

This is the collage I made when I was working on WEREWOLF RISING. When the characters were in wolf shape, I was having a really hard time keeping them straight in my head. Which wolf looked like what? So I bought a big, coffee table book on wolves from the remaindered section of the book store and tore out the pages and found the wolves that looked like my characters.

I was stunned to realize just how much variety there was in wolf's faces, once you started looking. Also how some seemed so distinctly feminine and others were obviously guy wolves.

The big picture in the center of the top row with the wolf standing in front of the tree in the snow is Luc. Suki is next to him on the right.

Ranger is the black wolf in the top left corner, and Luna is the white wolf just below him. Just below Luna, the third picture down on the left, is Nuri. Doesn't he just look like the class clown of wolves?