The Rock Star Life

Keith Urban's web site provides a lot of information that can be useful for my novel. There's news about his latest music, tours and fan club, with a message board included. And you get to hear some of the music, too. Great for inspiration.

James Blunt's MySpace page is another look at the way a rock star's work life is organised. Good places to wander for ideas.

What kind of a woman is she?

THE ACHIEVER

Enneagram Type Three

The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type:Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious

Basic Fear: Of being worthless

Basic Desire: To feel valuable and worthwhile

Enneagram Three with a Two-Wing: "The Charmer"

Enneagram Three with a Four-Wing: "The Professional"

Profile Summary for Enneagram Type Three
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Self-accepting, inner-directed, and authentic, everything they seem to be. Modest and charitable, self-deprecatory humor and a fullness of heart emerge. Gentle and benevolent.
Level 2: Self-assured, energetic, and competent with high self-esteem: they believe in themselves and their own value. Adaptable, desirable, charming, and gracious.
Level 3: Ambitious to improve themselves, to be "the best they can be"—often become outstanding, a human ideal, embodying widely admired cultural qualities. Highly effective: others are motivated to be like them in some positive way.

Average Levels
Level 4: Highly concerned with their performance, doing their job well, constantly driving self to achieve goals as if self-worth depends on it. Terrified of failure. Compare self with others in search for status and success. Become careerists, social climbers, invested in exclusivity and being the "best."
Level 5: Become image-conscious, highly concerned with how they are perceived. Begin to package themselves according to the expectations of others and what they need to do to be successful. Pragmatic and efficient, but also premeditated, losing touch with their own feelings beneath a smooth facade. Problems with intimacy, credibility, and "phoniness" emerge.
Level 6: Want to impress others with their superiority: constantly promoting themselves, making themselves sound better than they really are. Narcissistic, with grandiose, inflated notions about themselves and their talents. Exhibitionistic and seductive, as if saying "Look at me!" Arrogance and contempt for others is a defense against feeling jealous of others and their success.

Unhealthy Levels
Level 7: Fearing failure and humiliation, they can be exploitative and opportunistic, covetous of the success of others, and willing to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the illusion of their superiority.
Level 8: Devious and deceptive so that their mistakes and wrongdoings will not be exposed. Untrustworthy, maliciously betraying or sabotaging people to triumph over them. Delusionally jealous of others
Level 9: Become vindictive, attempting to ruin others' happiness. Relentless, obsessive about destroying whatever reminds them of their own shortcomings and failures. Psychopathic, murder. Generally corresponds to the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Key Motivations: Want to be affirmed, to distinguish themselves from others, to have attention, to be admired, and to impress others.

Examples: Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Pauley, Michael Landon, Tony Robbins, Tom Cruise, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, Sting, Paul McCartney, Dick Clark, Whitney Houston, Ted Danson, Michael Jordan, Shania Twain, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarznegger, Billy Dee Williams, Kathy Lee Gifford, Truman Capote, and O.J. Simpson.

***This is the personality type I've chosen for Genevieve. It's amazing how easily the traits listed fit with my idea of her.

What kind of a man is he?

THE INDIVIDUALIST
Enneagram Type Four

The Sensitive, Introspective type:

Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental

Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance

Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity)

Enneagram Four with a Three-Wing: "The Aristocrat"

Enneagram Four with a Five-Wing: "The Bohemian"

Profile Summary for Enneagram Type Four

Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Profoundly creative, expressing the personal and the universal, possibly in a work of art. Inspired, self-renewing and regenerating: able to transform all their experiences into something valuable: self-creative.
Level 2: Self-aware, introspective, on the "search for self," aware of feelings and inner impulses. Sensitive and intuitive both to self and others: gentle, tactful, compassionate.
Level 3: Highly personal, individualistic, "true to self." Self-revealing, emotionally honest, humane. Ironic view of self and life: can be serious and funny, vulnerable and emotionally strong.

Average Levels
Level 4: Take an artistic, romantic orientation to life, creating a beautiful, aesthetic environment to cultivate and prolong personal feelings. Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination.
Level 5: To stay in touch with feelings, they interiorize everything, taking everything personally, but become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive, shy and self-conscious, unable to be spontaneous or to "get out of themselves." Stay withdrawn to protect their self-image and to buy time to sort out feelings.
Level 6: Gradually think that they are different from others, and feel that they are exempt from living as everyone else does. They become melancholy dreamers, disdainful, decadent, and sensual, living in a fantasy world. Self-pity and envy of others leads to self-indulgence, and to becoming increasingly impractical, unproductive, effete, and precious.

Unhealthy Levels
Level 7: When dreams fail, become self-inhibiting and angry at self, depressed and alienated from self and others, blocked and emotionally paralyzed. Ashamed of self, fatigued and unable to function.
Level 8: Tormented by delusional self-contempt, self-reproaches, self-hatred, and morbid thoughts: everything is a source of torment. Blaming others, they drive away anyone who tries to help them.
Level 9: Despairing, feel hopeless and become self-destructive, possibly abusing alcohol or drugs to escape. In the extreme: emotional breakdown or suicide is likely. Generally corresponds to the Avoidant, Depressive, and Narcissistic personality disorders.

Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, to take care of emotional needs before attending to anything else, to attract a "rescuer."

Examples: Ingmar Bergman, Alan Watts, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Paul Simon, Jeremy Irons, Patrick Stewart, Joseph Fiennes, Martha Graham, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Johnny Depp, Anne Rice, Rudolph Nureyev, J.D. Salinger, Anaîs Nin, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Lennox, Prince, Michael Jackson, Virginia Woolf, Judy Garland, "Blanche DuBois" (Streetcar Named Desire), Thomas Merton.

*** This is the personality type I've chosen for Ben. It suits my image of him, and I will use the traits listed to 'build' a realistic character of him, flaws (not too many, though - he is a romantic hero) and all.

Visual Feast

What a fantastic montage of images of Keith and Nicole. This should provide plenty of inspiration as far as setting, clothes and style in general. The music's great, too. Since Ben is a country music rock star, it's difficult to know what the music sounds like. The old idea of 'country music' isn't my thing at all, and puts him in a far different world to where I imagined him. I came up with country music as a genre for Ben because it had to be a field of music Genevieve wasn't likely to know. Big in some circles, but not completely mainstream.

Red Carpet Stroll

A clip from the 'red carpet'. Awkward kind of rapport between Keith and Nicole, but perhaps that's just the nerves.

Aria Awards Scene

Keith Urban is the inspiration for Ben. Early in the novel, Ben takes Genevieve to the Arias, and receives an award. This clip is a good visual cue for the setting, sounds, and clothes in the scene.