PICTURE THIS: Scrolling through Pinterest one day, Tomi Adeyemi saw something that would change her life: “a digital illustration of a black girl with bright green hair.” The image, which burrowed into her subconscious, “was so stunning and magical” that it inspired her to begin an epic fantasy trilogy that draws equally from current events and African culture. The first volume, “Children of Blood and Bone,” which enters the Young Adult list at No. 1, “is an epic West African adventure,” Adeyemi explains, “but layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience. Every obstacle my characters face, no matter how big or small, is tied to an obstacle black people are fighting today or have fought as recently as 30 years ago.”

DRAWING FIRE: Did you know that the United States Army has an artist-in-residence program? No? Neither did the novelist Brad Meltzer, who discovered it while he was filming an episode of his cable TV show, “Lost History,” at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. “They were giving me a tour and showing me their art collection,” he says. “I kept thinking, ‘Why does the Army have all this art?’” Meltzer, an enthusiastic researcher, soon discovered that “since World War I, the Army has assigned at least one person — an actual artist — whom they send out in the field to, well … paint what couldn’t otherwise be seen. They go, they see, and they paint and catalog victories and mistakes, from the dead on D-Day to the injured at Mogadishu.” The idea for “The Escape Artist” — which debuts this week at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list — soon sprang into his head. “Imagine an artist-soldier whose real skill was finding the weakness in anything. ‘The Escape Artist’ started right there,” he says.

Other research for the book sent Meltzer to Dover Air Force Base, which houses “the mortuary for the U.S. government’s most top-secret and high-profile cases. I became obsessed with it. In this world, where so much of the government is a mess, Dover is the one place that does it absolutely right,” Meltzer says. “It is the one no-fail mission in the military. When a soldier’s body comes home, you don’t mess it up.” The most interesting thing he learned there, which he obviously incorporated into the novel, was also the oddest: “When your plane is going down and about to crash, if you write a farewell note and eat it, the liquids in your stomach can help the note survive the crash. It has really happened. Next time you’re on a plane and hit turbulence, you’re going to be thinking of me.”