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• London. Oh, how I love London. And just like Sara, for a while it was my home. Fortunately I've been able to go back a few times, but I still can't get enough of the place, so any excuse to set a story in London takes me back to my favorite shops, streets, museums, and galleries.
• Sara is an artist--and I try my best to follow in her footsteps. Of course she is much more highly skilled than I am (she makes her living as a professional portrait artist), but it was fun to imagine the kind of paintings and style she preferred.
• The Theosophical Society. For many years I've been intrigued and interested in the work of Helena Blavatsky and the society she founded. Even if you're inclined to regard (or dismiss) her writing as sheer myth and storytelling, it's mythology on a grand scale. The language of metaphor, symbolism, and "what if" helped me imagine the possibility of Sara and my other characters inhabiting parallel universes and realities.
• From the TS, I was introduced to the work of Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, especially his costume and set designs for the Diaghilev Ballet, which then worked its way into my plot line as well.
• Editor Ellen Datlow and her great anthologies of speculative fiction. Whenever I've come across these books I've devoured them. After several volumes I was inspired to write my own paranormal tale. The result was Overtaken.
• My favorite pieces in the Datlow anthologies seemed to stem from fairy tales, and my favorite fairy tale of all time was, and is, Lona by Dare Wright. So it was natural that I asked myself the question: What if the Princess has to rescue the Prince? Hence the disappearance of Sara's new husband, Miles, and the primary story problem.
• Greece. Okay, I've never been to Greece, but I've always wanted to go and I wanted Sara to go there too. The best way I found to start my research was with magazine cut-outs and collage. Collage helped me to "feel" where Sara was once she arrived there, and how she would react to her environment. It also provided me with some specific details I would never have found just by reading about the country.
• Color; and the year my mother made hats. This is probably my most obscure motivation for writing Overtaken, but all of my life I've loved color, the more unusual the shade the better, and I think it stems from the time when I was in the first grade and my mother studied hat-making from a Hollywood dress maker. Every day after school we would go to the woman's house which was filled with the most fabulous fabrics, trims, and furbelows I have ever seen then or since. While my mother learned the intricacies of wiring Gainsborough-style brims, I got to play in the walk-in closet and try on the seemingly endless array of netted petticoats and gowns in every color imaginable: peacock blues; poison apple greens; Jezebel scarlets. I was in heaven! Now, as an author, I was able to relive that wonderful time by giving my heroine a similar immersion into her wardrobe, environment, and artistic palette.

Back in November I speculated as to whether or not a book containing photography, and just photography, could ever win a Caldecott Award.  Today my thoughts turn elsewhere.

Just yesterday I sat in on the Penguin Young Readers Group librarian preview for the May-August 2011 season (round-up to come).  The folks there had to go over a wide variety of books and in the course of the discussion we came upon an adorable picture book by the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  Yup.  John Berendt himself.  Normally I don’t truck with adult authors who try to weasel their way into the lucrative children’s market, but that’s usually because all their books sound the same.  Either they’re doing a younger version of what they usually write or they place a slight twist on Alice in Wonderland/The Wizard of Oz.  Nine times out of ten this is the case.  Berendt . . . he’s different.  First off, it’s hard to accuse him of the flaws of his fellows when the title of his book is something as innocuous as My Baby Blue Jays.

(By the way, during the last Simon & Schuster preview I took one look at Liz Scanlon’s Noodle & Lou and proclaimed that, “It is my personal opinion, as it has been for years, that blue jays are a seriously unappreciated species of bird.  Seriously, name me all the famous blue jay picture book characters you can.”  The universe, which has a twisted sense of humor, has now handed me a whole new blue jay product just to watch me squirm under my own words.)

What does any of this have to do with today’s topic of Photography & Fiction?  Well, outside Mr. Berendt’s window sat a nest of blue jays, so he figured he’d photograph them and add in his own, as the catalog calls it, “narrative skill”.  Skill aside, this book is considered nonfiction.  Staring at the book in the catalog got me to thinking.  Nonfiction.  Most photography in children’s books could be classified as nonfiction in a way.  We see a lot of them appear each season.  They do not lack.  But what about picture books that use photography and are fictional?  How common are they?  How often does one run across them?  Children love photos, after all.  So why are they so often relegated to the informative Tana Hoban / baby board book areas of the library?

This question doesn’t come entirely out of the blue.  Recently I met for lunch with an author/illustrator who told me that he was seeking out fictional picture books of this sort.  They are rare. Sometimes it seems as though Nina Crews is the only person who’ll touch the genre with so much as a ten foot p