Dressing my heroine.

Okay, so this must be one of the dorkier parts of my writing process: shopping for my heroine. Not really shopping, but looking through a bunch of magazines, online clothing stores, that kind of thing to find clothes they would wear.

Usually, I end up going with one style or line of clothing. Selah, who is the Guardian heroine for the upcoming WILD THING novella, fit BCBG Max Azria’s Spring 2006 line. And because she can create any kind of clothing she likes (ah, to be a Guardian) cost was really no problem. (Cost was no problem for Colin, either, and dressing him was quite fun — even though I don’t mention a lot of the details in the book, because I don’t want to overwhelm the story with name brands and a list of what he’s wearing all of the time, I know exactly what he is wearing, where he shops, all of that.)

Not so much for my new heroine. Charlie isn’t going to be running around in Prada, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a certain style that she likes. (And, since she maxed out her credit cards a few years ago with some irresponsible spending, I assume she has a few great things in her closet.) She’s originally from NYC, but she’s transplanted to Seattle. And though she used to run with a fashionable, artistic crowd, now she’s trying to be very low-key, but she still has a certain look that is modern, somewhat casual, but not at all sloppy (I think it might be called boho-chic).

One of the things I love about magazines are pages like this:

That give me a “look” and a whole bunch of matching options. Now, not everything here would work for Charlie, but a lot of it would. So I have tons of pages like this in a file at home and posted up around my desk. Luckily for me, my husband subscribes to a bunch of magazines, so I have lots of them to look through.

For her job, she wears something much more simple: a pair of sneakers, and a Metallica t-shirt with the sleeves and collar ripped out. And these pants, which I found at Bluefly.com:

And I know that when she sits down on a cold bench she can feel the temperature through the cotton, and when she has to run from a bunch of vampires, she’s not going to be caught up in skirts. And she’s got a great coat (which, okay, is Prada, but I figure she can buy a knockoff somewhere):

But she knits her own caps (it’s a skill she learned in a correctional facility — she also makes throws for her sofa). And after her first encounter with vampires, she starts wearing this:

Which, ironically enough, I found on Nora Roberts’ site after I did a Google image search for crosses. It was the first one that popped up. And she doesn’t wear it as a pendant, but wraps the cord a couple of times around her neck like a choker. Unfortunately for Charlie, vampires in my world aren’t affected by crosses.