Fiennes Character Designs

One of the biggest challenges, after figuring out a mental picture of a character, is translating that onto paper. 

Helen always had thick, curly brown hair and an expressive face. Her dramatic eye rolls and stubborn questioning were accented by big, round eyes and well-shaped (but not thin) eyebrows. When I tweaked her face shape a bit, I turned to a website on hairstyles for different face shapes. For more complicated expressions/poses I use stock photos, but my basic picture of her has been pretty consistent for the past six years.

Perhaps because he's a quieter character, Reuben did not have many distinguishing features for a while. When I started writing the book, I thought of him as a tall, but otherwise unremarkable middle-aged white guy. A few extra pounds, some chemo-induced hair loss later on, but nothing memorable. 

When I tried drawing his face, though, I ended up modeling him after a younger Paul Sorvino. I realized that a round face and somewhat prominent nose helped make Reuben look more similar to Helen, but dissimilar enough that she could still share some of her mother's features.

Donna Bianci (the labor and delivery nurse who delivered Helen and later becomes an oncology nurse) was also a challenge. My mental picture of her is a pediatric nurse from Children's Hospital Boston in Waltham. But in terms of personality, she has elements from three different nurses I've worked with (all of them were named Donna). Since she reminds me of four very real people, I wanted to make her visual design from scratch. It's still in progress.

Katie and Chloe Green (two sisters who appear much later in the book), like Reuben, seemed to come alive in the drawing process. They were written as short, blonde, and petite, but their faces were unclear. Looking at my current sketches of both of them, I was most satisfied with how much they resembled each other, and with how their expressions came out. Sometimes that can be the hardest thing to nail in a picture.

Pictures below.

Ordination Punch Recipe

In addition to my volunteer work, I have been doing events support at a large Protestant church in Boston. Most weeks, I do basic housekeeping around the church kitchens (a commercial-size kitchen and two small kitchens) and organize the coffee hour supplies. The holidays obviously bring special events on Sundays and during the week, from the Christmas pageant to a lenten adult study series. I have also had the pleasure of setting up the receptions for two ordinations.

Both of these events were marked by large amounts of fancy finger food and non-alcoholic punch. The original punch recipe, which was used for several years at coffee hour, consisted of a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale, 1 bottle of fruit punch (64 oz), 1 can of pineapple juice (46 oz), and a package of rainbow sherbet (1 quart). My preference is to use 1/2 a bottle of fruit punch and 1/2 a bottle of cranberry juice cocktail to give the punch a little more tartness, since it is basically sugar water.

Directions:
1) Mix fruit punch (32 oz), cranberry juice (32 oz), and pineapple juice (46 oz) in large punch bowl.
2) 5-10 minutes before serving, take sherbet out of freezer to thaw.
3) Five minutes before serving, add ginger ale (2 liters).
4) Add sherbet to punch. Mix well so that it is well distributed through the punch.

A Playlist for The Fiennes

One of my favorite resources for writing, besides Wikipedia (a great source of moderately-detailed information on drugs and diseases), is well-chosen music. Having a song in the background that reflects the mood of the section or a character's personality I'm working on helps me visualize the scene, intensifying the actions and dialogue.

Often, I turn to my bookmarks in Firefox for a "mood" song not in my iTunes library (mainly instrumentals from James Horner and late 90's/early-to-mid 00's pop, depending on the scene).

I also have an iTunes playlist, mostly of 90's and 00's pop and alternative, for this very purpose. Most of the songs I think direct relate to Helen's stubbornness and passion ("Fighter" and "Beautiful" being two of the main ones), while others voice her envy of her peers' less stressful lives ("Could be Anything" and "Where Does the Good Go"). There are also "triumph" songs for the high points when Reuben and Helen manage not just to survive, but to come out stronger than before.

To see the full playlist, click on "read more."

January 2007

As you may have noticed, the excerpts from The Fiennes are not back-to-back. This piece is set during Reuben's second bout with leukemia. It has been the hardest section to write on an emotional level, but I also felt like I got closer to understanding my characters. Comments are welcome.

How "The Fiennes" Evolved

I started the first version of The Fiennes in my senior year of high school, inspired by my rabbi's description of serving a very small congregation that met in a YMCA. The small town setting of the first version (and the current one) was primarily based on my parents' hometown in central PA. In both versions, Helen is the epitome of the fiery, rebellious teenager, rarely shy about voicing her feelings.

In Version One, Reuben was a widowed rabbi who had a habit of sermonizing in the grocery store, especially about the ideas perpetuated about femininity by women's magazines, while Helen happily read Seventeen and Cosmo. Through Reuben, and the (tiny) Jewish community in Zion, I showed the challenge, as best as possible, of maintaining one's Jewishness in the context of a non-Jewish society. Meanwhile, Helen and her friends (Lydia and Cassie) showed the everyday challenges of adolescence and young womanhood. I had started writing about how an unexpected diagnosis with chronic leukemia changed both Reuben and Helen's lives towards the end of my senior year of high school.

Throughout my college years, I wrote small story fragments designed to go with Version One, but did not take the time to integrate them into the larger whole. As I drifted further and further from the big picture, though, I took more and more time away from the story.

But Helen and Reuben lingered in my imagination. The summer before my junior year of college, I started doodling comics about Helen as a college student. Reuben was no longer a rabbi, but a cook. I decided that Helen's hometown was too small to believably support a synagogue, even though I really liked the image of Reuben as a rabbi who lead prayer services at the Y.

During my "gap" year between college and nursing school, I wanted to revisit the storyline of Helen taking care of her father while he has leukemia. After skimming the hundreds (I hate to think how many) pages of old drafts and story fragments, I ended up starting from scratch. It was a little strange to see how much some characters had changed, but even more so to see how much Helen had stayed the same. She is still talking back to her peers and adults, and sometimes getting into trouble for it, but her honesty and loyalty still pull her through. I hope that after I finish this novel (whenever that happens) that I can keep telling her story.

Putting Google to Work

For the past six months, I have been shadowing nurse practitioners (NPs), RNs, and anesthesiology residents at the preoperative clinic of a Boston hospital. 

During one of the appointments I sat in on today, the patient and his son had come from outside the U.S.. The son acted as an interpreter, and gave me and the NP a list of his father's medicines. While some of the medicines' names corresponded to the generic names used in the U.S., several of them did not. The software used by my hospital to make patient medication lists only knows U.S. generic and brand names.

What began as a challenging, but less than productive guessing game ("What's Losec?"/"It's for his stomach") changed with Google. With the NP at the computer, I fed the medication names to Google, and translated the foreign generic names to something we could use. While Losec happened to sound very close to its American trade name, Prilosec, the rest of the American drug names bore absolutely no resemblance to the foreign drug names. There was one drug name which looked (to the NP) like the generic name for a prescription medication, but turned out to be acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Using this information, we were able to write the patient's medication list for the day of surgery so that it had the American and foreign drug names side by side.

In the my hospital's operating rooms, we have a number of tools for "smarter" health care delivery, from sponges with bar codes (so we don't lose them in a patient) to robotic instruments.

Before today, I wouldn't have thought that the phone I use to read Dear Prudence on the bus could be used to make a bilingual medication list.