Character Sketches

One of the things I learned early on in writing novels was character sketching. That is creating a description and history of your characters in your story with words. I used to write it all down, but these days I keep most of it in my head---sometimes to the point where they keep me awake at night.

When I was a kid, I used to read piles of comic books every month, swapping with my friends so none of us had to buy them all.  I read mostly Marvel and some DC.  My favorites were X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Conan, and Silver Surfer. Later when I wrote The Aledan, I dreamed of turning it into a graphic novel at some point.  That's when I started drawing the characters in my stories for real. I even took art classes to get better at it. 

I got a book and learned how comics were drawn before they began to use computers to do it and I drew up a proposal for a graphic novel based on The Aledan.  That's before science fiction romance was treated as a sub-genre. They sent me back a nice letter thanking me for my professional proposal, but they felt The Aledan wasn't commercial enough (to be profitable).

If I'm on a hot into the plot, writing fiction comes to me almost like a movie in my head where I can actually visualize my characters physical features. So even though the graphic novel is not yet a reality, preparing the proposal got me in the habit of sketching my characters. The Aledan characters have been part of my projects for summer art group I joined this summer.

Below are three of the pencil sketches:

DELMRAN

LISHAAD

HANKURA

CHELLE

This is Chelle based on the cover of The Aledan.  This is how I have always pictured her.

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