In Which I Discover My Character Has Purple Hair

Guess what, everybody? I'm using Pinterest and Google Images to help with my writing research!  I got the idea from wonderful   Stephanie Burgis, author of the wonderful  Kat, Incorrigible series of middle grade Regency romances with magic.

Here's an example of how it's working for me. One of my characters, Alastair, is a rocker kid with dyed hair and eyeliner. When I did a Google Images search  for BOY EYELINER I found him! 



Is he not adorable? Love the ironic eyeroll! Must incorporate the purple hair!  After some sleuthing, I discovered that in real life, his name is Adrian Heard and he lives in Australia. But to me he's clearly Alastair Templeton, a British-born rocker, New York resident and magic-loving sidekick to my heroines. Here's what else I learned:

Alastair is an emo boy. That was the label for all the pictures of boys with eyeliner on Google Images.  I had heard of emo. I knew it was short for "emotional," that the term is often applied to music as well, and that my nieces and nephews considered it pejorative--meaning droopy and whiny and way too multiply pierced. But when I used Google Images to follow those pictures back to their host websites and starting reading, I discovered that some emo boys are kind of cool.  Like Alastair, these kids are romantic, sexually androgynous, obsessed with music, and playfully wry. Best of all, I saw an emo boy in a T-shirt that says “Haters make me famous.”

You guys, I’m totally stealing that!  That is, if I can tear myself away long enough to write it down. Do you keep an inspiration board? How do you fire yourself up for writing when you don't feel like it?