Photo-A-Day: July

"Character is story." --Elizabeth George

July's photo-a-day project came with a twist, an historical twist that is. My WIP, a middle-grade historical fiction, is set in mid-1800s Ohio. The challenge? Step back in time and attempt to capture images of things my character might have seen, smelled, tasted, touched, or heard. Such an exercise held out the promise of getting to know my character better.

And help bring her to life...

"It takes a long time (to write YA)...I have to let the characters live inside my head awhile. You have to know what's on your character's walls and what's in their closet--even if you're not going to use that in your book. It's a way of bringing your characters to life before they're on paper." --Paula Danzinger

"When characters are really alive, before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in action." --Luigi Pirandello

"Once we have begun it, we continue reading a novel largely because we care about what happens to the characters. But for us actually to care about these actors in the drama on those printed pages, they must become real people to us. An event alone cannot hold a story together. Nor can a series of events. Only characters effecting events and events effecting characters can do that." --Elizabeth George, Write Away

So without further ado, here's July's photo gallery, sample images of what a young girl might have encountered in a similar month 150 years ago--except that they were captured through the lens of a 21st century camera!

Of course I'd loved to have snapped a slew of others. A mule for instance. A hand-crafted checkerboard. A pontoon bridge and a hollyhock doll or two. But I'll leave that for the imagination--and the finished book :-)

Enjoy.

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