This feature could be considered both a procrastination and a useful tool. A lot of us writers like to find faces to go with our characters. Or images that remind us of scenes in our WIP. Having a visual representation often helps get us into the Zone for working on a scene. I first started looking at iStockphoto for an image to use on the new blog (and it is, in fact, where I got that pretty magnolia). Then I used it to look at wolf pictures with some idea of eventually using one in a header on the author website I haven’t made yet (really, it was just a way to kill time and look at pretty pictures). In any event, this morning, I’ve been doing a search of blond men trying to find a face for Conall, my hero. So far I haven’t found one yet (and some of the stuff that comes up under a search for “blond man” doesn’t seem to meet the criteria of being blond or a man, but I digress).
BUT, I did make a discovery of their Lightbox feature. Lightbox allows you to save photos to what amounts to an album. You can make as many albums as you like. They seem to have created it as a way to sort of save possibles or projects before you buy or just to keep track of your favorites. As I often sift through THOUSANDS of images and don’t want a zillion bookmarks cluttering up my list, the idea of being able to save stuff there is very appealing. So I created one for the Mirus world (Mirus is Latin for extraordinary and is the overarching name for all paranormal races in this world I’m building). I haven’t found an image of Conall on two legs, but I’ve found quite a few others that will be other characters in future books. I really like this concept of being able to save all the images to one place. Yeah, you’ve got that overlay of “iStockphoto” over all of them unless you buy them, but it’s just for getting my head in the right place, so I don’t care so much about that. I’m sure I’ll be wasting lots of time later looking for locations and other characters. In the meantime, I’m back on the hunt for Conall’s face.