hugh, I cast thee out!

I have a week to go before my deadline book is due, and even though it's not finished I feel no panic, no tightness in the chest, for this book has gone on rather swimmingly for me so far, especially when compared with my last book, which seemed to take forever to find its footing.

And I know exact why. It all came down to casting the hero.

Casting isn't as easy as picking a pretty face, a favourite actor, a guy with the same name as your hero, or a name out of a magazine. It isn't even as easy as picking a handsome guy with the right colour hair. Hero casting is precise, delicate, and can hinder as well as it can help.

Trish Wylie and I were chatting today and realised that we had boht made huge errors of judement recently while trying to use the same hero pic that ended up biting us both in the backside! When I found this picce of Hugh Jackman I was beside myself. It's gorgeous right? And evocative as all get out. So I stuck it on my wall and labelled it Danny, my new hero. Trish saw it and wanted it and stuck it on her wall and labelled it Connor, her new hero.

We were both wrong.

My Danny was a pain in the butt. From day dot. He never quite knew who he wanted to be. Soft or hard? Aloof or warm? A good guy or a bad boy? I knew he had loved the heroine from a distance for years but how could I pull that off without making the guy a doormat. Even little things only added to the fact; his floppy hair, his puppy dog brown eyes, his loose, laid-back style. Everything this picture gave me only made Danny weak. It had nothing to do with Hugh himself who is just perfect hero material, but it had everything to do with this one picture and trying to stick it into a Danny sized hole. I knew it. I even blogged asking for a call to arms for readers to help me rename the guy thinking that might make all the difference!

In the end, I but the bullet and recast him myself. I found a picture that spoke to me, that had an edge, an element of danger, a glint in the eyes, the hint of a smile and enough cragginess to make him seem out of reach. Then I went back to the beginning and rewrote just Danny. I changed his hair, his eye colour, his resolve, his personality, the clothes he wore, the shape of his mouth EVERYTHING! And the rest is history.

A MILLIONAIRE TO THE RESCUE will be an October 2007 release in North America and the United Kingdom with outher countries to follow.

Trish Wylie, Fiona Harper, Anne McAllister, Margaret McDonagh have all done recent posts about hero casting as well. Check them out! And if ever in trouble, you can always check out the Pink Heart Society's Male on Monday!!!

18 DAYS UNTIL LAUNCH OF PROJECT CHICKLET...