Following The Map to THE 13TH
by John Everson

I'm really bad at faces and names. 

I blank on the names of people I've seen and talked to a dozen times... which is really embarrassing if they ask you to sign and personalize a book. It's not that I don't like or care about them, it's simply that my mind is a sieve! 

Which is why, when I started writing THE 13th, a novel with quite a few supporting characters, I really needed a way to keep them all straight. 

Enter... The Map.  

THE 13th takes place in Castle Point, a hillside town, and finds our lead character, David Shale, biking around to various spots in and outside of the town, as he searches for his missing girlfriend, Brenda Bean. Early on, I needed something to help me keep the street names of my little town straight, as well as the characters. So I borrowed the map of a small town from Google Maps, and proceeded in Photoshop to re-arrange and re-title the streets to suit my fictional town's needs. I pinned specific spots like David's aunt's house, and Castle House Lodge. And at the top of the page, I began to insert photos of people who looked something like the characters I was describing in the text. If you're one of my MySpace friends.... your photo might have been one of the line of portraits that took shape on the top of my map. I had to use somebody... and there were several thousand mugshots in my MySpace friend list to choose from!

I tend to do most of my writing in extended 4-5 hour sessions once a week while sequestered in a booth at a local bar (or, when on the road for my dayjob, at whatever Irish bar I can find). I joked in the acknowledgments of the book that THE 13th was written during my "World Tour of Irish Bars," since I traveled quite a bit in 2008, when it was written. Anyway, a printout of The Map went with me everywhere to keep me straight. And along the way, the character notes about each person in the novel grew. Beneath the photos I scribbled things like, "prone to popping her knuckles," "silver hair," "Boasts exceedingly bad luck in boyfriends."

A month or so ago as Lon, a friend of mine, began to build a micro-site dedicated to THE 13th, I said to him, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could recreate the character map that I used while writing the book as a feature of the site?"

It was a cool idea... but also turned into quite a project, since I couldn't publicly utilize any of the photos I'd snagged for my own personal map. Many searches through a royalty-free image bank later and we finally had a whole new slate of character photos that still felt true to the originals to me (Lon and I bounced dozens of photos back and forth in the middle of the night, asking things like, "hey, do you think she'd make a good Angela?" or "Do you think this girl shows too much skin to be in an asylum" or answering, "No, no... she needs to be blonde. Can we change her hair color?").

We finally launched the site, which includes a guestbook for reader comments and an excerpt of the novel's prologue, just in time for the book's release. It even includes some creepy music that I wrote and recorded a few years ago on the home page. The linchpin of the site certainly has become The Map, and I hope readers of the book will have fun clicking on various places there to bring up summary character descriptions and some photos of people who look kind of like how I envisioned the characters.  

For all my focus on creating a good visual character map, I wouldn't be surprised if I still managed to mess up somebody's hair color in the book, though.  

What can I say?