Borrowing a Spark

I honestly say I haven't built out a character based on a celebrity. Entirely. That's because I'm using characters they've played, instead. Or I pick a look from over here and aspects of a personality from over there and munging them together to generate my characters. I might isolate an attribute and assign it to someone in one of my books, but to pick up a person wholesale, change a name and a hair color and call it good? No. Can't. I think it's mostly because I don't actually know these people - the celebrities, I mean. I only know what I get to see and that's the characters they play. I'm aware that those characters come from the actors, themselves, but - eh. Welcome to me overthinking. Maybe it's the acting degree. But. If you want a list of the people I've taken as inspiration - that's a loooong list. A long list. It's a list populated by a sordid history of aesthetic crushes. 

Lupita Nyong'o, Tom Hiddleston, Brendan Frasier, Taika Waititi, Vico Ortiz, I mean. I could go on forever with this. There is nothing I've seen, music I've heard, or places I've been that hasn't shown up in a story.

My favorite tea shop turned into a tattoo parlor for Nightmare Ink.

Anyone who works out how to force blogger to let me insert a two -column table into the page and put photos in it gets a cookie. I doubt it'll even let me do that with html at this point. ARG. Anyway. 

If you read any of my stories and you think you recognize a personality quirk in a character, you may well be right. But I'll deny it like mad and tell you it's entirely a product of my own imagination. Yet the truth is that when I admire someone's body of work or a specific look they cultivated for a role or a shoot, it's impossible for me to subsequently create something of my own that doesn't pay homage to whatever struck me in the first place. I guess I'm borrowing a spark from someone else's fire to see if I can't kindle a fire of my own.