“Balloon face.” Mask on red balloon in decorative reeds. Abu Dhabi, UAE, 31 October 2010.
I’m a few days into NaNoWriMo by now, and I’m working on characters. So far, my favorite is probably the seductive but cold (and ultimately evil) Portia Lynn, whose stone-white face and emotional distance this mask makes me think of. In fact, I’ve now so associated this mask with Portia Lynn that, seeing it surrounded by the red balloon, I’ve decided to give my character red hair. (I’m a sucker for redheads and they usually turn up as love interests and fantasies in my fiction, but this time my redhead is going to be dangerous and sickening and corrosive. And still desirable. Sort of like a wild, evil Tilda Swinton, the way she looked in the 1995 Paolo Roversi photo or the second of the Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin photos in V Magazine.)
So, look for excerpts introducing Portia Lynn later this week, in the special NaNoWriMo Writer’s Notebook entry.
Actually, I took a slew of photos of this balloon, because it’s just so creepy, and I had a hard time deciding which image to post here. In the end, I let my wife pick the image (and, to quote the knight in The Last Crusade, she choose wisely), but just for fun, I thought I’d include a second page to this post on which you can view the whole gallery, including the images I digitally manipulated. To get there, click Page 2 below, or simply click here.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 