Beth Alvarez's Blog, page 6

Finding an aesthetic voice

It’s different from finding an authorial voice, and in a way, it’s been a lot more challenging. Where an authorial voice is something that sort of blossoms naturally, based on the way you think and speak, finding an aesthetic voice comes from finding visuals you like, and developing new skills around them, and… then what?

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I mean taking bookish pictures to share on social media. This has been an interesting experience for me, full of strange growing pains and a realization that I like a lot of different aesthetics and have trouble settling on just one.

Lately, my photos have been a little more dark and moody, incorporating colors from my site and that I feel suit my overall “vibe” – but I’m always torn. What if that’s not really the best aesthetic for my work?

 

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Because I also like bright and airy. My writing space in the front room is very bright, with white and gold French Provincial furniture and cherry blossoms on the ceiling. A gold and glass chandelier and a big window with a window seat that’s a perfect bright place to read. It’s fresh, encouraging, and inspiring.

But I can’t seem to bring the two aesthetics together.

 

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Maybe I should invert my efforts, and instead of light stuff on top of the dreamy dark, I should have deep blue flowers and other things against an airy white background?

Don’t know. I’m lost, and that’s weird, since I have a lot of practice doing photography stuff with my dolls.

Building scenes for Bookstagram photos certainly is its own experience and a unique adventure, and I’m sure I’ll get better at it, but I really wish something would go ahead and click for me aesthetically… even though exploration is fun.

What do you think? Which would you choose? Light, or dark?

Table plans

So it’s a new year, and things move on whether I’m ready or not, so it’s time to start thinking about this spring’s events. I’ll be setting up a table for my first-ever in-person signing, so I’ve got to prepare! I have a lot to figure out, and I’ve only just started stewing over it.

I have some of the basics – the big ones are obviously the table and the books – but there are a lot more fine intricacies to figure out beyond that.

I still need a tablecloth.
I need to figure out how many copies of each book I should take.
I’ll need bookmarks and stickers and treats for the table.
I’d like to have an information sheet that explains the content of each book, so parents can easily see which ones are suitable for teen (or preteen!) readers and which ones are best left to the adults.

But the hardest part is figuring out how to present so many books in a way that makes them easy to see.

I need verticality. I’ve got a standing banner. I’ve got a table banner, too, but not yet any way to connect it to my nonexistent tablecloth.

I need a way to put books on display, to group books by series, and make it easy to see which ones can be read alone and which ones have to be read in order.

And of course, I need some good pens for signing with, and I need to figure out what to wear.

I guess the first thing I’ll start with is taking inventory of the books I have here for signing already, since I keep my site shop stocked, and after that comes a tablecloth. I’ll probably share my practice runs on social media as I experiment with setup and layout, so be sure to check my Facebook page or author Instagram to see how things go together. We’re less than 3 months out, so I’ve got to get it done soon!

More details about the event will be forthcoming if you’re interested in attending, too, so stay tuned…

Losing count

A weird thing happened after I finished writing Paragon of Light. My daughter looked at me and asked, “So how many is that?”
And I officially had no idea.

Novels, novellas, long epics – they all feel sort of the same when they end, which is odd, in a way. I’ve always been a little bemused by the lack of excitement that comes with finishing a book. It feels like it should be a big win, a great triumph, something that leaves me over the moon excited. Instead, it’s always felt more like just checking off a task. There’s always something left to be done afterward, and being done with a book doesn’t feel like much.

It feels like even less when you can’t even remember which book it is.

Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I couldn’t figure it out, and that was a whole new sense of weird. It was just another thing finished, another thing done, and now it’s on to the next.

December’s break is here, and Paragon of Light ended up being just under 108,000 words, which was a bit shorter than I originally anticipated. I’m actually glad it didn’t run too much longer, because it was a book with a lot of moving story threads, heavy foreshadowing, and deep character growth. It’s the bridge, the pivot point that changes everything for the characters and their destinies, and while I’m excited to dive in and work on Paragon of Shadow soon, I’m going to get all the edits done first so I don’t muddy the timeline in my head… like I’ve muddied my count of how many stories I’ve written.

So, help me count.

Which novellas should count as “books” when I’m doing my tally? All of them? Some of them? Only particular ones?

Once I figure that out, I’ll have a better idea of how many books I’ve written now.

Just in time to start another one.

Story Outlook for 2024

Paragon of Light ran longer than I expected and some issues that cropped up at the end of November meant I needed some extra time to finish, but the book is moving on to editing now and everything is on track for it to be released early in the new year. So that means it’s a good time to look at and revise my publishing plans for the coming year.

It’s normal for me to change plans a bit as the year progresses, but this year had more bumps in the road than most. I’d planned to write and release 4 books in 2023. Ultimately, I ended up writing 3 but only publishing 2 of them–The Spymaster’s Prize and The Artificer’s Wife. Late summer saw some books getting freshened up, but new covers and formatting doesn’t make a new book, so they don’t count.

For 2024, based on my productivity levels in the past year, I have a relatively simple goal: Write 4 books, and publish 3.

Obviously, the year will kick off with Paragon of Light, since it’s already written and just needs polish. With luck, this one will be ready by the time my birthday rolls around. So that’s published title #1 in the bag.

After that is when things get a little murky, because the order I write things in won’t be the order they’re released in. I’ll be diving right into writing the next Spectrum Legacy book, but as I mentioned previously, publishing those books needs to slow down for various reasons.

That means after Paragon of Light, my next book release might not be until summer, but when it does land, it will be an all-new fantasy romance story, and my first-ever fairy tale retelling.

So what about book release #3? Well, depending on how things go with the fairy tale and Paragon of Light, it might be Spectrum Legacy #5 (Paragon of Shadow) or it might be the start of a potential new series, one with books decidedly shorter than Spectrum’s installments have been. Paragon of Light took a lot out of me and ended up being much longer than I anticipated, and while that’s fine, it’s nice to write shorter things, too.

Regardless of which book ends up going out, release #3 will probably happen in late fall next year. Ideally, I’d like to space out my releases so they land every 4 months or so, but who knows if that will happen? This year’s releases were much farther apart than I wanted, so I can’t make predictions for how next year will go. With fortune, there will be fewer unhappy surprises, fewer health challenges,  and more time for writing and resting, but I can’t bank on that.

That’s why building up to where I’ve got an extra book waiting in the wings, finished and ready to go out, is one of the big goals for the year. It will give me leeway for if problems like year’s arise again. I don’t think I’ll be getting back to my 2020 levels of productivity any time soon, where I published 9 books in the span of a year,  but hey.

It should be a step in the right direction.

Close, but far

I sat down for a long day of writing on the 25th. It was my first day writing after a week of being terribly sick, so I didn’t have high expectations, but my husband had given me the whole Saturday to myself (in exchange for a Saturday he took for himself in October) so I would be able to catch up on everything I wanted to do but couldn’t.

By the time I ran out of steam and decided to call it a day, it was just before 4 PM and I’d done a total of 5 hours of writing, bringing in north of 6,000 solid words and creeping across the 50,000 mark for November. Happy NaNoWriMo to me. I hadn’t participated last year; I didn’t have the time. I wasn’t sure I’d have the time this year, since I lost the first week of November and then lost a week to being ill, but somehow, it all came together.

Paragon of Light is close to done, but the book is running longer than I projected. At this pace, it will take another 2 weeks to finish, which means it will finally head off for edits after December 9th and should be ready for the world to see it some time in January. I may aim to have the release somewhere near my birthday, but now that the book is really real and I have something to show for all the work I’ve done this month, I’ll be sharing the cover with my newsletter subscribers… and sharing it with the rest of the world after me and my editor figure out a realistic timeline for when the book will be finished. No rushing for this one!

With all the trials I’ve had this fall, I’ll probably take a week or so off in December to catch up on other things. There are Christmas crafts to make, cards to mail, a tree to put up, and a bathroom to remodel while we try to conquer the extremely discouraging discovery of extensive black mold. We’ve demolished the hardest part, but I still have a whole ceramic tile floor to chisel out before I can start scabbing in new wood and picking out tile for the rebuild. Now that I consider how much work that will be, I think two weeks might be more realistic.

Fortunately, edits are usually the easy part for me; I expect I’ll be able to fly through pretty fast, and the moment Paragon of Light is done, I’ll be diving into the next writing project. I’m excited to continue Spectrum Legacy, but I’ll have a short story to share soon, and I’m looking forward to that one, too.

For now, I’m enjoying a quiet moment in a quiet living room watching the rain and the leaves falling down. We skipped all the pretty weather and went straight from the end of summer’s heat to a wet and chilly fall, so I feel like I got cheated out of my days of writing outdoors or sitting with the windows open, but we’re doing extra decorating for Christmas and I’m close to having another book done.

If you’re subbed to my newsletter, you’ll get the first peek at Paragon of Light’s cover later this week. And if not… well, you’ll just have to wait.

Preptober freebie: Printable NaNoWriMo 2023 calendar

So you’ve got plenty of stickers for your calendar tomorrow, but what about a calendar? That’s the one thing I hadn’t made yet… a calendar page for my planner that would make it easy to track my NaNoWriMo progress. I like simple ones that can be customized with washi tape and lots of color, and a lot of the designs I saw were pretty busy. So, I made my own!

Each day is dated for 2023 and is ready for me to write down how close I got to the 1,667 word goal, but there’s a spot at the end of each week to write down overall progress for that week, too, so I can see how close I am to being on track. I find this method less stressful than seeing the big numbers of the overall goal on each individual day, so I can focus more on one day at a time.

Click here to download the printable PDF.

I use 5.5 x 8.5 inch paper in my planner these days, which is half a sheet of regular printer paper here in the US. If you print it on a full sized piece of paper, you can cut it in half down the middle and it’ll work fine in an A5 planner. Otherwise, I guess you could print it on a full sized piece of paper and have a great big calendar in a 3-ring binder!

If you missed my other printable freebies, you can check out this page here to see everything I’ve shared, both this year and last. This calendar works well with the milestone stickers, both the glittery color versions and the black ink splat versions. It also pairs well with last year’s word count tracker that breaks down your 50k into 100-word cubes to fill in with a highlighter or pen. I hope you’re ready to write now–I know I am.

Happy Halloween, and good luck in November!

Preptober freebie: Printable kawaii writing stickers

I’ve been having fun drawing lately, something I haven’t had time to do for a long time. One of the side effects of that is lots of little doodles when I’m sitting on the sofa with my daughter in the evenings. This time, that resulted in this cute little set of drawings.

They make an adorable set of free printable stickers, don’t they? I’ve always loved kawaii styled stickers, so it’s about time I drew some of my own. This set features an open and a closed book, a pencil, an eraser, a teacup, and a timer–perfect for your writing sprints!

You can download a printable PDF of this sticker sheet by clicking here. The sheet is 4×5 inches, so you should be able to fit four on a single sheet of sticker paper.

NaNoWriMo starts in eight days, so I’ll gather up all the freebies I’ve shared into one little index post then in case you missed anything.

Happy writing!

 

Preptober freebie: Free printable ink drop word tracker stickers

Last year, a lot of people enjoyed the word count milestone stickers I shared, which I was using for my own NaNo project. Some people were excited to see I’d expanded them this year, too! But they are awfully colorful… and that doesn’t work for everyone.

If you’re looking for a more plain free printable word tracker sticker, this one’s for you: This is a set of stickers that go all the way up to 150k, in a nice, neutral font overlaid on a series of ink splatters. Perfect for a frenzied month of writing!

If this one is more your speed, you can download this sticker design as a PDF and print them to your heart’s content. Make sure you scale them for your printer–you can probably get 4 to a sheet if you’re cutting them apart by hand, but you’ll get fewer if you’re using scan and cut type thing like what my Silhouette Cameo 3 offers!

Click here to download the PDF.

I’ve got another freebie coming next week that’s ideal for my lovers of cute things, so stay tuned for that.

Preptober freebie: More word count tracking stickers

Last year, I shared some stickers I’d made for myself for NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I’ll be able to participate this year, due to where I am in the drafting process for Paragon of Light. I guess I could just write until the end, but I don’t think I’ll be doing 50k in November, one way or another.

All the same, I enjoy having milestone stickers to put on my calendar. Last year, I shared a set of free printable stickers for tracking your NaNoWriMo word counts that go up to 50k. But my own books almost always run longer than 50k, so I decided to make stickers in 5k increments up to the top of what I typically write.

So, now, you can print your own stickers to keep marking milestones all the way up to 125k words!

Aren’t they fun? They’re made with the same sort of glitter background as the first set, so they can be used together to get your longer projects done.

Click here to download a printable PDF to make your own stickers.

I’m making a few different kinds of stickers and such to use for trackers this month, so I’ll be sharing some more soon… and then I guess I’ll compile a list of them for easy downloading in time for NaNo.

Happy writing!

Site restructuring ahead

Ahoy! It’s been a while since I’ve run cleanup on this ship and I’ll be honest, some maintenance and cleanup is a bit overdue. While I’m prioritizing writing, I also want this place to be a nice representation of what I write, so I’ll be taking some time off from words to do some digital housekeeping.

Most of the site won’t be changing, just getting thorough updates. There are book pages that are missing titles. I used to have an art gallery where people could see art for my various book series, and it vanished a couple years ago. I’d like to bring it back, as well as establish well-organized sections for additional information I’ve put together for each book world through the years. All my fantasy stories have world maps, but they’re not available? What’s up with that?

So those are a couple things that will be changing. The other section that’s going to get a complete overhaul is the little area on the menu labeled Dolls. I’ve had a lot of people ask in the past why I don’t separate my doll stuff off to its own website. There are a couple reasons.

One, I don’t see my dolls as something that can be separated from my writing, since the doll hobby started as a way for me to bring to life some unique physical representations of the characters in my stories.

Two, keeping a separate website and keeping it updated is clearly a terrible idea, because I already struggle with keeping this one! It’s way easier for me to keep it all in one place, and if you don’t want to see the dolls, they’re sequestered to their own section of the site that’s easy to ignore. Mostly. They do make their way over here sometimes, when I have photos I’ve taken that I particularly love, or when I’m tackling a super-big project that I just can’t wait to share with the world. Mostly, though, they stay in their own space.

Three, a lot of the people who ask are those who want a better experience going through my archive of free sewing patterns for dolls. If that’s you, then here’s a good news/bad news for you: Improving the pattern archive is one of the things I want to do. But it’s also staying here, because if you get my patterns for free, you have to see the reason I started sewing in the first place. Which is the books. The books the dolls that need clothes are from. That’s it, that’s the deal. Not too bad, I promise.

But I’ll be completely changing how the pattern archive is managed, making it easier to navigate, easier to see what you’re getting, all that jazz. I’ll also finally be updating my collection list to share info about what characters the dolls represent, what series they’re from, and a little fun biography type stuff.

So why tell people I’m going to be updating instead of just updating?

Because this site has been online, without interruption, since 2007. I’ve been doing internet stuff long enough to know that I am going to break something, and it may take a while for me (or others) to discover what it is, so it’s best to let everyone know ahead of time that something will break and it will take a while to fix.

Through the month of October, I’ll be updating things a little at a time, trying to ensure as little as possible gets broken. But if you happen to come across something that is very clearly not what it’s supposed to be, or if you have suggestions for how site navigation can be further improved, please do let me know!