Writing the Pre-Raphaelites in Slow Seduction

They say sometimes fiction becomes real. I’ve had the experience numerous times that something I cooked up in my imagination turned out to be real.
For example, in the BDSM novella I wrote for Entwined, Dear Girl, our heroine is intrigued by the small leather book she sees a man holding in his hands. Is it a small Bible? An address book? She later discovers it’s a cell phone case made to look like a tiny leatherbound book. About a year after I had written that story I was browsing Amazon.com and what did I find? Smartphone cases that look like small leather books! (Yes, I bought one immediately.)
The most recent example, though, of my power to make stuff up only to have it happen was during the writing of Slow Seduction. When the book opens, Karina has gone to London for the summer. A curator at the Tate Britain has brought her there to lead tours of a special exhibition of art never-before-gathered-in-one-place. In book one of the series, we learn Karina wrote her thesis on Pre-Raphaelite art. This exhibit is to be the first time so many pre-Raphaelites were ever exhibited together.
I totally made that up.
Except then I went on a trip to the U.K. (for the IASPR scholarly romance conference in York, England), which was going to give me one “tourist” day in London. And when I looked around to see what there was to see, I wondered if maybe a few of the pre-Raph paintings I talked about in the book might be on display.
And I discovered that a huge exhibition of never-before-gathered-in-one-place Pre-Raphaelite art was going to be opening at the Tate Britain shortly before I would arrive.
I even had the museum right.
So, of course I had to go see the exhibit! Which was marvelous. The Burne-Jones paintings I had picked out as Karina’s favorites while writing Slow Surrender were the finale at the end of the show! I spent several hours there, until hunger and thirst drove me in search of afternoon tea.
In the course of writing Slow Seduction, I was able to set many scenes in the gallery and in the museum.
What follows are photos of the gallery and museum with some of my descriptions on where they fit in the book. It will not be spoilery if you have not yet read the book, but if you have read it, here’s what the art I couldn’t show in the book looked like!