Claire Hadleigh

As promised, I'm back with some tidbits of info on another favorite secondary character who has appeared in several of my Regency romances -- the Dowager Lady Rutherford. I needed a character who would balance out Lady Caro (see last week's blog entry), someone who was smart as a whip, tough and yet hiding a soft side.  The dowager seemed to fit the bill for when she first appears in Snowbound Seductions , she's ornery, feared by all (even the duke) and willing to use her ebony cane like a Scottish claymore. So, the first British actress who visually inspired me, mostly for the dowager's physical attributes is Phyllida Law.  If you're an Acorn TV or Brit Box fan, many of you will recognize Ms. Law. Phyllida Law She's appeared in so many series and movies, and is also known as Emma Thompson's mother.  She is a wonderful actress and, to me, captures how I visualize the dowager. And in my work-in-progress, Wicked Wagers , we'll see a b

How do writers come up with the physical and emotional attributes of their characters?  Do we base our visions on movie stars or just random images that we find/collate from social media sites such as Pinterest?  Or is it a combination of both? These past months I've been working on Book #2 in my School for Sophistication , featuring Lady Caro Ashford and the Dowager Lady Rutherford as the school's tutors.  Although they're not the main characters, they're the ones that carry the thread through the series.  And they both also featured in the Merry Widow series, a previous series.  I enjoyed these two intrepid ladies so much that I knew I had to incorporate them in the second series somehow, and the idea of the school seemed ideal.  Literally, they had taken on a life of their own, as often characters are want to do -- guiding the writer is so many little ways -- "No, not like that, dear.  I want to be more like this;" etc.  The writer starts out with an ide