Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Great to have other folks joining in!  

I'll bring the Brazen Hussies blimp to all the bookstores and will use
it if conditions permit.  (We had a near-tragic re-enactment of the
Hindenberg disaster at a Booksmith signing, where there was a close
encounter between the blimp and a ceiling fan.  The blimp got sucked
into the updraft, caught in a blade, and spun furiously (making a
Thurberesque thwapata, thwapata, thwapata sound and spraying blimp
ballast (pennies and beebees mostly) all over the store), until its
battery flew in one direction, the gondola flew in another, and the
blimp envelope flew in a third.  Thanks to the wonders of plastic, the
blimp survived, but I am more cautious about where I fly it.)  

As for more authors, my initial response is "More? More?  Are you
kidding?"  On the other hand, I always wanted to write a romance under
the pen name Joyce James.  I figure she would have automatic name
recognition.  I imagine people scratching their heads and thinking,
"I've heard of her.  Didn't she write literary stuff about Dublin...?" 


I'll return with the suggestions on how to keep books in print and
thoughts on Wild Angel's style and intentions after work.  I've got to
run to the Exploratorium now, and play some games.  We're working on a
book of math activities for middle school kids, and I'm working on
games just now.  Gotta run.  More later.
  

    
It's a rough job.
  

    
I'm glad that someone does it though!! My kids and I adored the
Exploratorium on our visit to SF this summer. I liked being able to see what
was going on in the shop.
  

    
Email from Michaela Roessner:

Here's a posting for the ongoing dialog/interview with Pat Murphy on topic
90:

Although Pat is supposedly a Brazen Hussy, she's probably too modest to
mention that if you live in the Bay Area and want to meet her, that the
perfect opportunity is this coming weekend. She and the other two Brazen
Hussies are going to be doing a mini-signing/reading tour, beginning with
Dark Carnival Bookstore in Berkeley starting at 5 p.m. on Friday the 13th;
then Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco on Saturday the 14th, also
starting at 5 p.m.; finishing up Sunday with Kepler's bookstore in the
south bay at 5:30 p.m. (Kepler's is a signing-only.) Pat gives terrific
readings, not to mention that she's very generous with sharing
entertaining anecdotes, and answers all non-scurrilous questions openly
and forthrightly.

Cordially,
Fellow Brazen Michaela Roessner

--
http://www.brazenhussies.net/Roessner/
  

    
What a great itinerary that is!
  

    
Via email from Pam Keesey:

Hi Pat, Hi Everyone,

Thanks for inviting me to comment on the connection between
women, wolves and werewolves. Pat, you've pretty much hit it on
the head. In my experience, women feel very connected to wolves
not only because of the freedom they represent. As you mentioned,
women are also drawn to wolves because of their essential
wildness, their animal nature.

There are also a lot of other parallels between women and wolves.
For example, wolves have been maligned and misrepresented, this
dangerous reputation leading, in part, to the endangerment of
wolves. Their lifestyles and habitats have also been threatened
by the encroachment of "civilization." Wolves are very
intelligent creatures. Wolves are also volatile when threatened
and fiercely protective of their young. In mythology, it was a
wolf mother who raised Romulus and Remus who then went on to
found the city of Rome.

As far as the werewolf is concerned, it's really the animalism
that most women seem to find most appealing. Werewolves live by
instinct, listening to inner urges and acting on them. While
vampires rely on seducing their prey (the classic femme fatale
approach), werewolves are proactive, taking what they want when
they want it without thinking about it, planning for it, or
strategizing.

I've had women tell me that they actually find the image of the
werewolf more erotic than that of the vampire because the
werewolf is more visceral. There's the sensation of "the change,"
of course, but there is a full-body awareness in the werewolf,
more instinctual, more carnal, more lustful than other images of
women as mythological creatures.

It's this wildness that women find so appealing, I think. Women
often relate to both wolves and werewolves as the animal within,
living outside society's imposed restrictions on who a woman
ought to be.

Thanks again for inviting me to join the discussion!
Pam Keesey
http://www.pamkeesey.com
  

    
Now that you mention it a wolf is warm blooded, a vampire seems as if it
might crave blood because it is cold. And wolves have such beautiful eyes.
  

    
I'm so glad that Pam Keesey could stop by and join the discussion. 
She mentioned the eroticism of "the change" of the werewolf's change
from woman to wolf.  That's something that I found very compelling when
I was writing Nadya--the Wolf Chronicles.  One of my favorite short
passages in that book deals with the change:  I'm going to be terribly
self-indulgent and type it in here.  I just can't resist.  For those of
you who always wanted to be a werewolf, here's a description of the
Change.

"       You want to know how it feels, to go through the Change?  It begins
with warmth, as if the moonlight on your skin carried the heat of the
tropical sun.  But the warmth comes from within you, not from outside. 
You can feel your heart beating and your blood surging through your
body, pounding in your veins and arteries.  The moon pulls on your
blood as it pulls on the ocean:  you are caught in the tide, a riptide
that you are powerless to resist.  Your body burns with the heat and
you breathe faster, moaning sometimes.  There is something you want,
something you need—you know that, though you cannot yet describe what
that something is."  
        "You cannot tell if this feeling is pleasure or pain.  Those words do
not apply.  You feel a new intensity (surely it could not have felt
like this on the last full moon).  You feel like you might be dying or
you might, at last, be coming to life.  In this moment, the two seem
much the same.  And maybe you want to stop, you want to call out "No,
no, no, this is too much.  I can't..., I won't...."  But what it is
that you can't or won't do is lost in clouds and darkness, because no
words come to you.  Words are going away, rushing away from you, a
babble that no longer has meaning or value.  You are poised on the
brink, on the knife's edge, at the precipice of the mountain, at the
edge of the cliff, and you are staring down at a new world, a world
that you never imagined existed."  
        "And when the Change comes at last, it comes with an inexorable rush,
like the rush of orgasm.  You cannot control it.  Your body has made
its decision, and the you that thinks and talks and plans and believes
that it controls so much, that you is carried along, like a straw in
the river's current.  The river is sweeping you away into the unknown. 
And there is no stopping the river, there is no turning back."  
  

    
Oops.  Almost forgot I left some earlier questions unanswered.  Here
is the list of ways you can help keep books you love in print.  (Just
to give credit where it's due, some of these are from my fellow brazen
hussy, Michaela Roesner; others are gathered from other women writers
and readers.)  These tips were part of a brochure produced for Wiscon,
a feminist SF convention held in Madison Wisconsin each spring.  The
printing of the brochure was paid for by the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial
Award, an award given each year to the work of SF or fantasy that best
explores and expands gender roles.  (for more on the award, check out
www.tiptree.org)  

Anyway, here are the suggestions:  

10 WAYS TO KEEP BOOKS YOU LOVE IN PRINT

#1
Review the book you love online in a newsgroup, on a webzine, on an
e-commerce site, or on a personal web site. This is an easy way to tell
a lot of people about a fabulous book. People pay attention to
reviews.  Hey--authors read reviews.  With a good review, you can make
an author's day.  

#2
When asked what you want for your birthday, or Hanukkah, or Christmas,
or any other gift-giving occasion, answer with your favorite author's
current book.  

#3
Give books as presents. If someone has a favorite author, buy that
author's latest title. If the gift recipient doesn't have a favorite
author, buy a book by an author you like. If your friend likes the
book, you've done the author a big favor by creating a new fan. 

#4
Ask for books by your favorite author at your local library. If the
library doesn't have a book, request it. Checking a book out of the
library helps establish that there's a demand for that author's work. 
Demand leads library systems to buy books. 

#5
Tell writers how much their work has affected you.  Go to
readings—even if you can't afford to buy the book. Urge your local
library bookstore or your school to invite the writer to do a talk, a
reading, or a class visit. Sometimes writers just need to know that
someone is listening.  

#6
Talk about books and authors at work, among friends, and in other
not-necessarily literary environments. If you belong to a writing
group, recommend your favorite authors to the group.  If you add a book
to your reading group, tell your favorite bookstore what you've done
and buy your books there.  The bookstore may put them out front on
display. 

#7
Point to good books in the bookstore and tell people, even total
strangers, "That one is great." If you see someone looking at a copy of
a book you like, encourage them to buy it.  


#8
Carry around a copy of a book you love. Read it on buses, in waiting
rooms, and in other public places. Be prepared to wax eloquent about
it—spontaneously or only when asked; that's up to you. 


#9
Just because a book is out-of-print doesn't necessarily mean you can't
get it.  Lightning Print Inc. is currently asking for suggestions for
books to reprint.  You can vote now at their web site: 
http://www.lightingprint.com/scripts/TitleRequest.asp?nav=bookstores.

#10
Nominate your favorite authors for awards. Any year that you are a
member of the World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate and
vote for the Hugo Award. Nominate gender-bending works for the James
Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (http://www.tiptree.org/) and works with gay
or lesbian content for the Lambda Literary Award.  If you subscribe to
Locus Magazine, you can nominate works for the Locus Poll and Survey. 
And yes, it's worth taking the time—awards make a difference to an
author's sales and that helps keep books in print.  

Above all else, keep reading!
  

    
OK, now I'll finally get back to emilyg's excellent question:  
"Did you consciously decide on how you'd emulate the pulp style, Pat?"

That's such a good question that you forced me to go back and take a
look at the characteristics of the pulps, which I compiled back when I
was teaching a class on Science Fiction at University of California at
Santa Cruz.  I did not, mind you, look at these characteristics when I
was writing Wild Angel.  But now, after the fact, I figure that they
can help me figure out exactly what I was doing.  

Here are the characteristics of the pulp stories and magazines of the
20s and 30s, extracted back when I was playing professor.  A work of
pulp fiction:    

1) Includes a hero with whom the reader can identify.  
2) Employs an action/adventure formula with threats that are overt and
physical, not abstract and thoughtful.  There's good and evil and not
a lot of gray areas.  
3) May create characters that have so firm a place in the culture that
the images and conflicts they summon could be considered archetypal.
(Tarzan is an example of this)
4) employs straightforward, idiomatic language, often quickly written
prose.
5) reinforces the general culture. (At the time, this meant white guys
were smartest people around, women must be protected, foreigners are
dangerous, etc.)  

In Wild Angel, I was consciously doing #1 and #2, while striving for
#3.  As for the prose itself, there was no way I was going to attempt
to imitate Burroughs' prose.  I mean, consider this sentence plucked at
random from Tarzan:  "Never had the ape-man fought so terrible a
battle since that long-gone day when Bogani, the great king gorilla,
had so horribly manhandled him ere the new-found knife had, by
accident, pricked the savage heart."  Whew!  No, I wasn't going to try
that.  In There and Back Again, Max emulated the style of Tolkein, but
Tolkein was a good writer.  Burroughs was not.  

Moving on, I played with #5--the villain is a white guy, the hero is a
young girl, the native Americans are among the best people.  One of
the reasons that I wanted to play with classics of fantastic
literature—such as The Hobbit and Tarzan--is to introduce to these
worlds characters and ways of thinking that were more in line with my
own.  

That's what I can tell you about what I was trying to do.  I didn't
want to borrow style from Burroughs, but I did borrow the wild abandon
with which he constructed a plot.  I had a great time writing about the
Clampers, the traveling circus, the Temperance lecturer, and the
encounters among these groups.  (One of the things I remember best
about the Tarzan books was the way Tarzan was always racing across the
jungle, from one group of travelers to another.  There were always
multiple folks lost in the jungle, getting into trouble and requiring
rescue, providing an opportunity for much adventure.)  

emilyg also asked:  "Did you mean to avoid updating it to a more
contemporary, sort of "post-modern" self-parody?"

I'm not sure what you mean.  The shift in attitudes does constitute an
updating, as far as I'm concerned.  I really wasn't after a
parody--Wild Angel is an unabashed action adventure book, not a parody
of one.  Does that answer the question?  I hope so.  If not, try asking
again from another angle, and I'll try another answer.  

Oh, yes--one other borrowing from Burroughs.  His work emphasized
return to a pastoral environment, escape from claustrophobic urban
culture.  Wild Angel definitely fits that description, I think.  
  

    
I sat down with "Wild Angel" fully intending to find all kinds of
interesting observations to add to the discussion here, but I have to admit
that I just got caught up in the yarn, finished it straight through in a
day, and enjoyed the hell out of it.  Now that I've read some of the
thoughts presented here, I'm starting to think about it more, but so far
that hasn't diminished my enjoyment measurably.

I was never a particular fan of Burroughs.  My favorite Tarzan stories were
Johnny Weismuller movies.  I have read more Doc Savage books than I
generally admit to, though, and they're about as pulpy as it gets.  I think
you wrote a heck of a pulp, Pat.  I'll come up with something more profound
as the conversation develops, I hope, but meanwhile I hope it's ok if I
thought the book was a lot of fun.
  

    
It is a fun book.

Remarking on your #5 (and there is a much stronger, Dances-with-Wolves
strain in today's general culture about Indians being among the best
people): the Indians are among the best people in the book (though there are
a lot of really swell good guys in it).

But the Indians don't stick around very long.  Long enough so that a modern
reader can allow herself not to quibble _too_ much about Sarah being able to
pick up English as a teenager, long enough to explain why she knows some of
what she does about weapons--but then they go offstage.

What does an Indian have to do to get equal billing with a traveling circus?
Or is it just out of their control?
  

    
Hey, Shaun, it's more than OK that you thought the book was a fun
read--that's just great.  I'm glad to hear you got caught up in the
yarn.  

In a way, this project has been, in part, an excuse to write a couple
of books that I figure would make excellent reading on the beach or on
a plane.  You know, those books that you pick up and read in one
sitting without stopping for breath. It sounds like I succeeded in that
for you, and that makes me very happy.  

I'm really hoping that all this analysis of pseudonyms and pulps and
metafictional conceits doesn't ruin anyone's enjoyment of the books. 
First and foremost, I intended both There and Back Again and Wild Angel
to be good reads, books that swept the reader away for a time.  You
know, good, old-fashioned, escapist literature.  Hey, I lived on that
stuff as a kid (growing up in the suburbs in an unhappy household, I
would far sooner have been swinging through the trees or blasting off
through space).  

I should probably say something about "escapist," lest I be
misunderstood.  "Escapist" is usually regarded as a slam, as in the
phrase:  "trashy escapist literature." But I don't share that view.  I
find in my lecture notes on the pulps:  "All art provides unearned
instant gratification:  a gratification necessary to our psychic
well-being.  C.S. Lewis was once moved to observe that the only people
to whom the word "escape" is a pejorative are jailers."  

Pulp literature (you know, that trashy escapist stuff) is often
regarded with disdain.  But hey, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
wrote for the pulps. There's good beach reading and bad beach reading. 

Writing There and Back Again and Wild Angel was, for me, part of
acknowledging and accepting the roots of the science fiction genre and
of my own affection for it.  As a "literary science fiction writer,"
I've spent a lot of time saying, "No, the stuff I write isn't like Star
Wars.  No, not at all."  Now, There and Back Again is like Star
Wars--at least in the superficial, action-adventure, blast off across
the galaxy stuff. 

But there's something else to this, too. Why write a pulp,
action-adventure story that just carries the reader along and doesn't
really make him/her think?  Well, it's a sneaky way of changing the
world.  

I don't know if anyone out there has read a book by Carolyn Heilbrun
called "Writing a Woman's Life."  In it, Heilbrun talks about how we
live the stories we read and hear.  She writes:  "...it is a hard thing
to make up stories to live by.  We can only retell and live by the
stories we have read or heard.  We live our lives through texts.  They
may be read, or chanted, or experience electronically, or come to us,
like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand.
 Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all...."

On an unconscious level, we accept fiction as real (especially during
our young, impressionable years). The stories we read sink down into
our unconscious minds and shape our view of the world.  If, as in the
classic pulps, men get all the starring roles, that becomes an
unconscious assumption to be battled.  

As a writer, my job is to tell stories that you believe.  If I do my
job well, you believe these stories on a very deep level.  As a writer,
I present my view of the world.  My view is one with strong women
doing interesting and adventurous things, and I'd like that view to
become part of the popular unconscious.  As Martha pointed out,
"Studies show that most people (men and women) in our culture tend to
think there are more women when the number of women is over about one
third."  The direct way to change that is to keep pointing it out.  The
sneaky way is to keep write books that work to change it on the
unconscious level.  

But if I wrote the books just to do that, I'd be writing propaganda,
and that's not what I'm up to.  I'm trying to tell interesting stories
filtered through my perceptions of the world--and I'm using the pulp
tradition and a metafictional conceit to do it.  

For people who haven't read Wild Angel or There and Back Again, I
suggest that you try to put all this theorizing from your minds when
you read them.  Just read the story.  When I conceived of this, I hoped
it would unfold like an extended joke where each book works in its own
right but adds up to something bigger.  

Whew!  Scratch a writer and you find a whole lot of theories.  Anyway,
on to Martha's question:  "What does an Indian have to do to get equal
billing with a traveling circus? Or is it just out of their control?" 


It's tough to compete with a traveling circus.  Once I brought an
elephant to California, I had to use her.  My apologies to Malila's
tribe.  Maybe they'll get a bigger part in some future Mary Maxwell
story.  In Nadya--The Wolf Chronicles, the native Americans played a
much more significant role.  But in Wild Angel, I just couldn't stop
Gyro Serunca and his traveling circus from taking center stage. 

By the way, I must warn other writers about introducing an elephant to
a novel.  Ruby was a very well-behaved elephant, but I found myself
constantly concerned about where she was, what she could eat, all the
details of an elephant's life.  My advice to young writers:  Don't
introduce an elephant into your novel unless you know what you are
doing!
  

    
I once wrote a favorable review of a fat clever horror novel, and at a
convention later on the author of the book came up to thank me for the
review.

I told him cheerily that I'd thought it was good beach reading for smart
people.

He looked at me with an unreadable expression, and I think he thought I'd
insulted him somehow.  I hope he didn't think that; really it wasn't an
insult at all.  It's like saying these books are fun to read--but you can
see why people worry you'll take offense!

Everyone should feel free to continue to jump in; here's another little
question from me in the meantime:

In your good-guys/bad-guys pulp novel, was it fun to make one of the wolves
a bad guy?  How much different was it writing wolf characters than human
characters?

(Okay, maybe not _too_ little a question.)
  

    
I guess many people equate "beach reading" with light weight and
therefore trashy.  But I think something can be light, but not trashy. 
I won't go on and on about that (I feel like I've held forth with
theories quite enough for a while), but I'll refer people who are
interested to an essay by Italo Calvino (who was, incidentally, a
pataphysician).  The essay, titled "Lightness" is in Calvino's "Six
Memos for the Next Millennium" and it begins:  "I will devote my first
lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold
the values of lightness.  This does not mean that I consider the
virtues of weight any less compelling, but simply that I have more to
say about lightness."  

As for writing wolves as characters, that was fun.  Very interesting
to try to convey attitude with no dialog, to use wolf body language to
convey personality.  I spent a chunk of time with my Wolf Ethogram
propped open by my keyboard.  An ethogram is a catalog of wolf
behaviors and the conditions under which they occur.  This one is from
the folks at Wolf Park in Indiana.  It describes situations and then
details the body language that accompanies them.  For instance,
"Airplane Ears" (one of my favorite behavior names) is when a wolf's
ears are "held out to the side, inner surfaces down, like the wings of
a plane."  This behavior occurs in situations of defense and
submission, care giving and care solicitation, and greeting.  

So I would figure what was going on in a scene, figure out what the
roles of the various wolves would be, then figure out what behaviors
would be exhibited.  Then describe all that in a scene without using
the terms from the ethogram, since most people wouldn't immediately
know what an "Agonistic Pucker" or  "Play Face" looked like.  

Oh, yeah--I also had a great time rereading Jack London's "Call of the
Wild" which I had read when I was a kid. I remembered some excellent
fights among the sled dogs.  Just as good going back to them as I
remembered.  

I enjoyed making one of the wolves an out-and-out bully and bad guy. 
One of the joys of working in the pulp tradition is being able to paint
parts of the world as black and white, rather than shades of gray.  
  

    
One of the consequences of getting caught up in the story the way I did is
that I really didn't notice that there was no dialogue among the wolves.
Sarah seemed to relate and communicate with them so effectively that the
descriptions of the wolve's behaviors became a sort of virtual dialogue, I
guess.

Actually, it was really good writing that did it, I think.  Now I've got to
reread the book.  Enjoying it so much made me miss so much of it.
  

    
What a wonderful compliment!  

I figure that there are many things that I do in my writing for my own
satisfaction, really.  The careful attention to wolf behavior--making
sure I was describing wolf body language well--may fall into that
category.  

But it also may be important to the reader.  But one of the things I
tell my writing students is:  the more unbelievable the situation, the
more carefully and accurately you must describe it. I figure scrupulous
description of detail helps draw a reader into suspending disbelief in
an impossible situation.  
  

    
Okay, here _is_ a little question.  "Wild Angel" has a map at the beginning.
I have to confess, I never ever look at maps when I'm reading the sort of
book that has them: I trust the author, more or less.

But they're a big tradition in genre, especially in fantasy.  What made you
decide to have a map in the book, and is it the map you used in constructing
the story?
  

    

(I never look at them either, and now I'm wondering if any author has ever
just stuck a map at the beginning of book that had nothing to do with the
story.  And if anyone noticed.)
  

    
What a great idea!  I'll file that one away for future use. ;-)

I used a number of maps for reference while I was writing Wild Angel. 
Another one of those efforts at verisimilitude, probably more for my
own benefit than anyone else's.  I had to make sure that the events I
described--the journeys from one place to another--matched the
territory.  I realize that 99% of my readers won't care, but I do.  

I find maps of Gold Rush California particularly appealing for the
names of the settlements.  (I don't call them towns because some were a
single shack or hotel.)  Who can resist places like Gouge Eye and Red
Dog and Humbug.  I was very disappointed that Humbug changed its name
to North Bloomfield sometime in the 1860s (I think).  They wanted to
have a post office and there was already another town that had the name
of Humbug.  So they settled on Bloomfield, but someone else already
had that.  So they tacked on "North" and ended up as North Bloomfield. 
Seems like a failure of the imagination.  I mean, they could have been
Northeast Humbug if they were going to go adding on directions to find
a name!

Maps in books are definitely a fantasy tradition.  The only one I ever
studied at length was the one in The Hobbit.  I wanted to put a map at
the start of There and Back Again, since a map of the wormholes
figures in the book so prominently.  But I couldn't figure out how to
draw anything that would come close to the map described in the book,
so I steered clear.  

One amusing bit about the map (and a town) in Wild Angel.  All the
towns descibed in the novel were real except for Selby Flat, which, as
near as I can figure, was a hoax.  In 1906, a San Francisco publisher
published a book titled "Diary of a 49er."  The book was published as
fact but was later revealed to be fictional.  Most of the events in
this diary take place in and near Selby Flat.  I could find no
historical records of the town, which made it the perfect setting for
my tale.  So I borrowed Selby Flat.  

The novel I'm currently working on, Adventures in Time and Space with
Max Merriwell, takes place on a cruise ship traveling through the
Bermuda Triangle.  I am very tempted to include a map at the front of
the book--but I can't decide whether it should be a map of the voyage
(with warnings of "here be dragons" and blowing winds) or a map of the
ship itself, with all its decks and restaurants and recreational
facilities.  Cruise ships are like floating resort hotels and you
definitely need a map to get around!  (I went on a cruise for research,
so I know!)
  

    
I should mention that anyone who wants to can jump in with questions for
Pat: I don't need to hog the mike!

Pat, I wonder if you could talk a little about the lead male viewpoint
character in the story, Max, the artist who ends up being the first white
person to talk to Sarah after she's made a life with the wolves.  Max
happens to be a real sweety (one with dark secrets in his past).  Where did
he come from?
  

    
Hey, for once I have a short answer.  I really haven't a clue where
Max came from.  He just wandered out of the hills, leading a mule named
Wordsworth.  All I knew about him initially was that he always named
his mule after a poet whose work he considered over-rated. His
character (and his dark past) developed along with the story.  
  

    
Well!

Then I'll ask similarly about Mrs. Selby.
  

    
Mrs. Selby is an amalgam of many women I encountered in reading about
the Gold Rush. Since there so were few women in the diggings, men
really would travel for days to see one--even someone as stout and
matronly as Mrs. Selby.  And many of the women who came to California
set up boarding houses--or made their fortunes by doing laundry, baking
pies, and performing other "womanly" tasks for men who were far from
home.  

When I was writing Wild Angel, my understanding of Mrs. Selby's
character emerged from my first description of the bar room of Selby's
hotel:  

"The walls were hung with pale pink calico that had been printed with
roses of every size and variety, ranging from delicate blossoms smaller
than a baby's thumb to cabbage-like blooms the size of a man's head.
The cloth draped elegantly around a massive mirror, brought all the way
from New York to San Francisco by ship, and from San Francisco to
Selby Flat on the back of a mule." 

"Mrs. Selby took very good care of that mirror. Every morning she
wiped away the dust and polished the glass. Then she polished the cut
glass decanters and the jars of brandied fruit that stood on the shelf
in front of the mirror. The floor was dirt, of course, but that dirt
was hard-packed and Mrs. Selby swept it each morning. The room was
furnished with benches and tables constructed from rough-cut planks.
Mrs. Selby had wanted nicer furniture, but she made do by draping the
tables in bright red calico to hide the rough wood."

When I teach writing, I sometimes have students describe a character's
home or car.  "Don't describe the character," I tell them, "but show
me what the character is like by showing me where they live."

The description of Mrs. Selby's bar room gave me a clear notion of
what Mrs. Selby was like.  She was trying to make things nice.  She
wanted to bring civilization to the wild lands of California.  She
wanted things to be elegant, but she's really rather down to earth. She
was sentimental (the roses told me that). She was nurturing (her
careful attention to all the details of the room told me that.)  

I figured all that out later.  But my very first knowledge of Mrs.
Selby came with the image of those calico roses.  
  

    
From these last two answers, it sounds like you must often create characters
by starting with a striking image--lengths of calico, a mule with a silly
name--and feel them out from there.

Do you ever start with an image that doesn't turn out to go anywhere, and
have to start again with the character?