Miranda and Theo

Photo: NejroN/Bigstock

 The photographer NejroN has 155 pages of images uploaded to Bigstock. He also posts on Shutter Stock and Fotolia and Dreamstime, among others, but I stumbled across his work on Bigstock. His website has just the basics--a very short bio, a portfolio of images and three ways to contact him. His work is fantastic--people, places, landscapes, up close shots of leaves and bugs. Concept shots. Models in costumes that don't look cheesy.  I'm using one of his shots on the cover of my upcoming novella Bride of the Midnight King and as I've mentioned, it was a particular photograph of two of his favorite models that has inspired me to create a whole new series. Last night I spent a few hours on the site looking through all 155 pages of images seeing what I could find. (I once found the PERFECT models for several characters in a book and didn't snap up alternate photos of them. And now I can't find them.) I will not do that with the characters I'm calling Miranda and Theo. They are vampires and like all the best vampires, they're incredibly stylish. (Think The Hunger meets Only Lovers Left Alive.)

It's funny, the photographer has paired his male model with a couple of different women, one a lovely redhead, but I am so wed to my vision of these people as Miranda and Theo that looking at those other pictures makes me feel like Theo is cheating on Miranda. Of course that could happen, in a relationship that's gone on as long as theirs has.

I cannot wait to start writing this series and I have to wait because my work is expanding to fill all the spaces of my life lately. But in the meantime, I have my images of Miranda and Theo and I have NejroN to thank. 

A Picture Launches a Series!

Photographed by NejroN

I spend a lot of time looking at images. I'm a fan of Pinterest (which was a total surprise to me) and I also like to browse the stock photo banks like Dreamstime and Big Stock. Because I've got a couple of books coming out soon and they need covers, I activated a month's subscription over at Big Stock and have been happily downloading images for the past week. And that's how I cam across this image. It's one of maybe a dozen using the same models in a variety of poses and (in the woman's case) vintage dresses.
I took one look at those photos and I saw a series about stylish vampire lovers (Think The Thin Man meets The Hunger). His name is Theo. Hers is Miranda. Or maybe she is Thea and he is James. Perhaps she was Russian in a former life,.
Perhaps he was a Robber Baron.
They've been together ... a long time.
I could find out their real names, but that would feel like I was stalking them. To me they are Miranda/Thea and James/Theo and they have inspired me to write a new series of books.  Thank you!