First, however, I want to, once again, thank everyone who has sent prayers and good wishes for Rachel’s illness and Phyllis’s back problems. Phyllis is improving; Rachel has stalled in a place of low-level and occasional wheezing, with congestion we just don’t seem to be able to break loose. So we’re off to the doctor tomorrow. Will keep everyone posted.

Now, to the final stage of my creation of a hero, which I think of as the movement from intrigued fascination to creative fruit. The beginning, of course, is the “raw material.” And to borrow a phrase from a recently enjoyed show . . . .

I think Trevor Eve is bloody brilliant.

And not just because I thought Jonathan Harker and Denys Finch Hatton were sexy beyond belief or that Peter Boyd is one of the more fascinating characters on tv. It goes much deeper than that, and over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying Mr. Eve’s acting technique with the same intensity of a scholar with a newly discovered Shakespearean folio.

Most viewers don’t think about (nor should they) the choices that go into every frame of film. Not only is the scenery, each prop, and every camera angle an intentional choice, but so is every twitch of muscle, raised eyebrow, or twiddled thumb. A line’s delivery is rehearsed more than once, with different inflections, until it fits the character just so.

What has caught my attention with Mr. Eve is how remarkably he alters his choices, even within a similar range of emotions – thus the fury of Duncan Matlock at the end of The Politician’s Wife is quite different from any of Peter Boyd’s explosive outbursts in Waking the Dead.

And if you really want a treat, take a look at these clips of his performance as Hughie Green, where he has captured a whole new level of smarmy creepiness.

What this does for me as a writer is to provide a visual smorgasbord of hand and facial gestures, hand movements, body slumps and stretches, struts and strolls, vocal inflections and emotional ranges. And, unlike people watching at the mall, I can freeze, rewind, and watch them again. All without the security guard at the mall thinking I’m creepy because I’ve been watching the McDonald’s counter for an hour.

As I created the plotline for The Bones of Gregory Miller, as I wrote more about my hero and heroine, the more I realized the hero was beginning to look like Trevor Eve. So some of his body movements and voice inflections (although not accent) will resemble Mr. Eve’s. But my Detective Carpenter will not be Peter Boyd or Albert Tyburn or Jonathan Harker.

He will be my own. That’s where “study” leaves off and “creation” takes over. He’s older and is a rare native Nashvillian, so he has childhood memories of the Parthenon at Christmas . . .

the Ryman when it was still the home of Opry. . .

and Opryland when it was still a park.

He’s a little bit obsessive, and has a thing about . . .

You get the idea.

Recently, I mentioned to a friend that I missed Tyler and Dee, the hero and heroine of The Taking of Carly Bradford. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You know they aren’t real, don’t you?”

Well, yes. Sort of.

But when you start with real people and all their foibles, you build real characters.

And that’s the goal of every good novelist.

So good night, Mr. Eve and Detective Carpenter. I know you’ll be waiting when I finally get to Chapter One of The Bones of Gregory Miller.

Only now, I’m the one doing the creating, based on all that has come before, all that God has placed before me in this buffet of creativity. And what touched my 8-year-old heart with Robin, what inspired me in Jonathan Harker and Denys Finch Hatton, what revived me in the aftermath of The Matrix still stirs my soul and makes my eyes glisten with wonder.

A sense of humor. Integrity. Determination. Eyes filled with dreams and emotion and drive. Respect for those around them, especially those they love. Layer in a bit of temper and passion, a painful past, and enough “scars” of maturity, and you began to sigh when they come around.

If a writer does her job well, from the first appearance of the hero, you want to know more. You immediately take on his cause, his journey, his goal. You want the hero to win the heroine in the same way he has won you.

Jonathan and Denys made one more odd swoop through my life in the late 1990s, before the actor passed out of my attention for a long while, in a short-lived show that aired on the PBS Mystery! series. I only managed to catch one episode of Heat of the Sun, mostly because the local PBS station appeared on my tv intermittently (I haven’t had cable since 1996).

I watched because it was set in Africa (see all Denys references above) and featured a character more or less based on Beryl Markham. I squinted a bit (“Why does he look so familiar?”), then moved on.

Fortunately for me, there was a writer in Britain, Barbara Machin, who was about to launch a hero that would do just what a good hero should. In about five minutes, he stirred my interest and would send me spinning in a whole new direction.

It also didn’t hurt that he looked like an older version of Jonathan, and Denys, and…

What goes around…

So note how much you learn about the characters in Waking the Dead from this clip. In terms of a script, it’s the equivalent of two pages.

TWO PAGES, folks.

This is why editors and agents beg for snappy openings, rapid development, and attention grabbing dialogue. Don’t just tell us what you love. Show us what your characters love. Show us who they are.

And what my new detective loves – and who he is as a man – is how I got from the inspiration of Waking the Dead, Barbara Machin, and Trevor Eve to Nashville and The Bones of Gregory Miller.

Stay tuned…

Do you believe that God is involved in every minute aspect of your life? Because of my faith, I don’t really believe in coincidences. I do believe He plants tiny seeds that take years to germinate. I do believe He puts mile markers in our passings to say, “Pay attention, this will come around again.”

I do believe He did everything He could to make me a writer. Among other gifts (and He’s showered me at times), He gave me an insatiable curiosity about people, a love of research and knowledge, a passion for a good story, and a whole series of teachers who turned me on to words, including one who gave a 12 year old rein to do her book reports about Shakespearean plays.

He also gave me a mother who tolerated a daughter papering the bedroom walls with photos of men. Lots of men.

My first celebrity crush was Robin, the Boy Wonder. (Don’t snicker; I was eight.) And not, mind you, the deliciously campy version as portrayed by Burt Ward on prime time TV. Nope, I went head over grammar school heels for the guy in the comic books that I pilfered from my brother’s closet. The stage was thus set for me to “bond” to a hero with some pretty classic traits: good looks, tragic past, strong morals and sense of honor and integrity, ready for action, intelligence, good looks . . .

You get the picture.

Also note that it was one of the few times that I went for the dark-haired one. I don’t know why, but I never totally understood the appeal of “tall, dark, and handsome.” My gaze almost always flitted to the not-as-tall blond in the picture. Possibly because I’m short and come from a family with a lot of blond men in it.

So while millions of women were sighing over Han Solo, I was moon-eyed over Luke. Robert Redford. (And to really show my age: David McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin.) But it didn’t have to be the lead in a movie or TV show. I went gaga over a whole series of character actors, such as Don Knight in The Immortal. Some of these gentlemen remained a mere shade on the screen back in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s because we didn’t have the Internet, just lots and lots of magazines. (I spent a lot of time in the archive section of my libraries . . . to say that I studied men would be a bit of an understatement . . . )

Then, in 1979, there came a film that was instrumental not only in the evolution of one of my 21st century heroes but a shift in the entire romance genre. It took more than a decade for tv and books to catch up, but there, in its little bat cave (again with the bats…), lay an image that would change the way we viewed vampires forever.

Look familiar?

BUT while women everywhere were dreaming of a sunset lover who could arrive in a mist and leave his women sated and breathless, my gaze wandered firmly toward Lucy’s erstwhile fiance and rescuer, the “not-exactly-blond-but…” Jonathan Harker . . .

Thanks, again, for everyone who’s asked, sent wishes, or good prayers for Rachel. She’s improving, bit by bit. I’ll post some pictures soon. With Rach, getting well always takes a long time because it occurs so slowly. But I do think she’s past any immediate danger, which is a huge step forward.

Finally, you remember all that dreaming I did on the 20th? Well, a lot of it was based around a new celebrity crush. The result was a 3,000 word synopsis that I wrote last weekend. Sometimes, I cast a book after the plot forms in my head – sometimes I start with the hero and work my way out. The time, the look came first, then a combination of characters, and finally my own twists on the hero resulted in the birth of a Nashville detective who’s temperamental, vulnerable, ambitious, and more than a bit driven about the one case he just can’t get out of his head.

How do you create yours?