My characters come alive ...

The island of dreams

I recently visited our house in Cyprus for a two week holiday and I found myself looking at places with a different perspective.  My characters, particularly my main protagonist Emily, seemed to invade my thoughts when I was in locations that I wrote into the book.  It was almost as if she'd taken on a life of her own and really existed.

For a start, a newspaper asked me to set up an author pic in Cyprus, so I chose to go to Petra Tou Romiou at sunset and I got my husband to take a picture of me against the backdrop of the famous rocks:

While I was there I could almost see Emily and James wandering across the beach, stopping to build hearts in the sand.  There were so many hearts everywhere – could I see some with an E and a J inside?  It's such a magical place to go to – if you ever visit Cyprus, make it a priority to go there at sunset.

Then I realised that we'd timed our holiday to coincide exactly with the Red Arrows.  They come to Cyprus every year in April to practise their routines.  It obviously wasn't deliberate on our part, but there they were, flying over the peninsular of Akrotiri.  What was fantastic was that someone living at Akrotiri now and who had read the book, invited me to visit the camp (you can't just wander on, even if you are an ex-RAF family).  As we approached the security gate, the Arrows flew directly overhead.  We ended up on one of the beaches and while we were eating lunch, the Reds did another practise routine and low and behold, I was able to take a picture of the heart, a key moment in the book.  If you look carefully, you can just make out the planes at the bottom of the heart on each side.  They made such an impact on Emily when she saw them directly overhead in Aphrodite's Child and once again, I began to believe Emily was in her married quarter garden, right now, looking up.

Later on in the holiday, I stopped at the top of the hill to look down on Curium Bay.  It was sunset and the view was spectacular:

It was at sunset that Emily and Luke walked and talked and came to a pretty important decision on this very beach.  If you look at the picture, they stopped at the middle taverna; could I see a couple walking along the beach, not touching, not looking at each other?

Of course, no I couldn't, but it's strange how characters in a book come alive.  They exist in the author's head, but once they have been imagined, they 'live' within the pages of a book and in the minds of the readers.

It's great to put fictional characters into real places – they can also exist in the air, the sea, the earth of that location.  Like Aphrodite ... she exists in the minds of the people strolling along the beach at Petra Tou Romiou ... people ask her for help to love someone forever and to procreate.

Now, for me, Emily, Luke, Charlie, Amy, James, Sophie and Sam exist on the island – they may be characters from a book, but they live in people's minds and in the imagination forever.

They inhabit the island.  They do.

See you next time.