Last night I dreamed about the book. I was in the battle scene that I had just started writing. I think its because I’ve been searching the internets looking for images that look like the characters. I think it might make them feel more real if I could not only see them in my mind, but also see them in an image on the screen.
Surprisingly, there are very few images out there that do justice to the characters. What I find are pieces of images that fit, as if I need to make them into a hodge-podge mosaic. One of the images I came across that fit was an image of Alice from Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland. She is wearing a full suit of armor and heading out to kill the Jabarwock (sp?).
You can’t see the full suit in this picture, but I found it striking in that (aside from the ornate flourishes) it is set up like armor should look on a female fighter. Usually, they will have some crazy breast plate with … well … breasts.
In reality, such a design focuses the force of a chest strike onto the sternum, instead of deflecting it away. Not a good idea. Crushing your ribcage because you got hit (or fell down) in battle is embarrassing.
Even worse, the “armor” is sometimes nothing more than a leather bra.
While it makes for entertaining pictures, having one’s belly and vital organs so vulnerable never makes for a safe defense. It’d just stupid to draw them in any scenario for serious fighting. The poor woman shown above died 23 seconds into her first fight after being stabbed in the stomach with a fountain pen.
But notice Alice’s armor:
The chest plate is slightly curved so that a chest strike is deflected to the sides. Normally, the wearer has padding underneath to absorb the impact, because (despite what you see Clint Eastwood do) when you get hit in the chest, its going to hurt if there’s just bare metal against you.
And notice that it covers her body. No belly hanging out, or some open back thing to show rippling muscles. Just armor plate, with a flexible design so that she can move. The only thing missing was her helmet. I think they had one and removed it so that you could see her face. It seemed like the armor was carefully designed by someone who knew about battles and armor, and I would bet that they would have insisted on the helmet. To be honest though, I have not watched the movie yet. Maybe it appears later?
So anyway, I wrote part of the battle scene and had a crazy dream about it and someone was wearing this armor. I woke up tired and frantic. Crazy, I know. I find myself getting stressed about writing because I have too many ideas going around and I cant decide which way to take it all. I end up getting mental gridlock. Bleh.