Carrie Green's Wedding Dress

For weeks now I've been going through rewrites to an old novel I self-published years ago and am in the works of resurrecting from the ashes. As much as I love writing about other planets, forming intriguing plot lines, and creating chaos in my fictional worlds, I think the thing I love the most about writing fiction is character design. And with character design comes wardrobe design.

In the final chapters of my upcoming novel, Endangered Memories, one of my main characters, Carrie Green, is about to marry Jerad Montlier, one of the richest men in Anaisha. The novel's climax comes in around these scenes because my novel's protagonist, David Corbin, spends the majority of the novel trying to get to this wedding to stop it, both for love and to supposedly save the world. I know. Crazy!

When I originally wrote these scenes I didn't really give a whole lot of detail or attention to the wedding. I threw Carrie in a white dress, picked random colors for the reception tablecloths and called it a day. This time around, I'm being a bit more generous, giving some more meat to the bones of the story.

In each of my Expired Reality novels, novellas and short stories, I make sure that at least one object, one room, one character's clothing, has some reference to the colors black and red. I'm not sure what my obsession is with black and red, but those two colors make an unbeatable, gothic type combo and I thought it would be neat to incorporate the color scheme into Carrie's wedding dress.

Googling black and red wedding dresses, I was barraged by some interesting picks. Let's take a peak at them and see what I come up with. By the way, I don't take credit for any of these images, I'm simply using them as inspiration for creating my own wedding dress.

The thing I like about this first dress is the smoky look on the bottom. Kind of adds a mystic, fantasy element to the wedding, but the rest of the dress is too cluttered for me. 

Though this dress is more maroon and black than red and black, I kind of like the style with the alternating panels in the skirt.

I really like the flowing style of this dress and the fact that it seems to open in the skirt like a cape.Superhero style all the way!

What I like most about this dress is the design in the back, where it looks like the dress splits to reveal another layer. I also like the floral design in the front.

This dress is kind of neat with the red floral design in the bottom of the skirt (looks almost like flames), and the pattern in the bodice. The location of that red flower doesn't really cut it though.Weird.

Of all the images I searched, this one gave me the most inspiration for my wedding dress design...

What I like about this dress is the way it stays thin at the waist instead of blossoming out. I also like how the skirt acts as a shell of sorts to another layer underneath. I took this idea and decided to make the layer underneath black, with the shell being red. I like the style of the bodice - very elegant for a ritzy wedding - and I added my own black floral print going from the left waist up to the right breast, covering a good portion of the bodice. Carrie will have to do without the belt though.

Phew. Never thought I'd be designing a wedding dress in my lifetime, let alone planning someone else's wedding. Guess there's a first time for everything. LOL!