"Dump this guy," said a professional editor I hired in 1999 (Tom Case of White Horse Press). Henry Eisen was just a minor character, so I deleted him. Fifteen years later I happened across an old photo of my grandfather as a young man:

Emily Henry, you’re going right back into my novel.

I want to meet this man in the photo, this familiar stranger, who I knew only as a bald little man in OshKosh pinstripe bib overalls and crooked hands. His fingers were deformed by rheumatoid arthritis, supposedly a consequence of Scarlet Fever, during which he allegedly insisted on crawling to the milk barn to make sure nobody screwed up the job. My dad (competent at all things, from infancy) at age ten took over most of the farmwork thanks to his father’s debilitated hands (and whatever else Grandpa suffered). Why didn’t I inherit those teeth strong enough to bite a dent into a ten-penny nail? Not a cavity in all his life, while his wife had to get dentures.

Grandpa, I want to walk into the Tall Corn tavern on Main Street, play a hand of Schopfskopf (why didn't you teach me that card game in my childhood?), and share a pitcher of beer.

You never owned a telephone even though you died in 1975, or I might have called to ask,
“Do you have Prince Albert in a tin?” (Of course you did; that was all you smoked in that pipe!)
“Well, you’d better let him out! Bwa ha ha!

You’re immortalized now in a landscape Tim did (you didn't get to meet our husbands, Grandpa, nor did you live to see Julie buried only a year after you) in pastels, you with that pipe clenched in your jaws, silhouetted against a flaming sunset.

Grandpa, you were the cutest little old man ever. We loved you to bits. (I know: Grandma thought you were such a hardass, and back in the day, you probably were. But we never saw that side of you.)

Only one son, one great-grandson, carries Emily Henry’s genes (but plenty of granddaughters do). Our son Miles inherited those European cheekbones.

HUG YOUR GRANDPA (and Grandma!) while you can.

(Mom's Uncle Chris, WWI)
Novelist, scientist, photographer, wife and mother Elena Giorgi @eegiorgi creates book covers from her own photos and by photoshopping jpeg images for sale online. She’s been working with me to create a cover for “Ironwolf.”

Authors:

Who haunts your fiction?

Quite often, when I come across a minor character who outshines everyone else in a novel, I'll mention that to the author, who will often admit that person was modeled after dear old Dad or great-Aunt Whoever.