Blood River: meet the cast of my novel, in miniature
An updated version of this post is now available on my personal website at Turbocharge your writing inspiration with these character visualisation tools.
What feels like the millionth draft of Blood River has been delivered to a handful of agents, which felt like a good time to recreate the characters as 3D models at HeroForge.
Visualising characters helps me to consider them from a different perspective, integrating their stories and histories to create a snapshot from a novel. It also provides an anchor when you’re writing and revising, and you suddenly forget whether someone had blue eyes, exactly how they wear their hair or the details of an outfit.
Unfortunately, I have no visual artistic ability. Words is ma thing.
Ideally, I’d have a desktop version of the sort of character creator you use at the start of games like Fallout 4, and the closest I’ve come is Reallusion’s Character Creator 3. It will give you photo-realistic 3D models, but it’s designed for the gaming and FX industry so it’s hugely overpowered, and at $199 for the basic package it’s outside my budget. Also, there’s no Mac edition.
MakeHuman is a free community-driven alternative, and while it’s powerful, it’s also more than I need and the learning curve is vertiginous. Charactercreator.org is another community project that creates 2D models, which I’ve had some fun with.
Then I found HeroForge, where you can visualise characters in 3D to be printed or cast as 30mm-style miniatures used in tabletop gaming. You can pose everything from humans to frogfolk (I don’t need them, but it’s good to know), set them in a bit of context with clothes, accessories and the base they stand on, and paint them. The rendering model gives the perfect resolution for my needs and the range of outfits and gear ranges from fantasy to the far future. You can screenshot your models (which is exactly what I want now) or order 3D models for an expert to work up in pro software like Blender.
So, after a day’s work, it’s time to meet five characters from Blood River.
1 Tara. A businesswoman from Yorkshire who finds herself on the run in the jungles of Borneo when a bloodthirsty animal spirit takes over one of her fellow volunteers on the Orangutan Survival Trust’s summer programme. Tara is tough and resourceful, but even being an HR consultant has never forced her to do things as dark as this.
2 Maya. Zoology student Maya thought the rainforest would be three weeks of light work, laughter and wall-to-wall wild orangutans; no-one told her she’d find unexpected love and have to fight for her life. And no mobile signal — WTF is that even about?
3 Alison. Maybe a claustrophobic jungle outpost wasn’t the best place to heal a head full of voices and rest a giant libido, but that all changed when Rimadan jumped into Alison’s head and the voices went away. The leopard-spirit asked for just one thing: kill the outsiders. [Rimadan is supposed to be a clouded leopard; HeroForge gave me a cat familiar.]
4 Pembu. He’s the greatest hunter in his village and the rightful heir to Rimadan’s power and knowledge. There’s just one problem: Rimadan’s old host has gone missing and left the ancient spirit in the body of a woman who has no idea what she’s really carrying.
5The Balian. Ruling a village that’s remained hidden from the outside world and communing with the ancient spirits of the rainforest is no easy task; and then two outsiders wander in, expecting you to help them with their problems. Little do they know that they’re the problem, and your solution is harsh, but the village always comes first.
I was going to write a serious look at the revising process or how I put together my agent queries, but there’s plenty of time for that — this was fun! Serious resumes next week.
Why I’m no longer writing on Medium
Medium has changed a lot since I began using it in 2016, most importantly the pivot to a paywalled platform where free content seems to be almost invisible. It doesn’t suit the way I blog, and with several novels in the pipeline I’ve decided my own site at alexanderlane.co.uk gives me more flexibility.
My 5x5 travel content will remain on Medium for now, but anything about writing or adjacent to the themes of my stories can now be found on my new site.
