As you know, my current work in progress has gone on quite a journey from short story to a novel about Leo dealing with his famous father to a novel about his sister, Etta, and NOW about two young High School juniors, Etta and Gina, dealing with their own ups and downs of family, school, and life.
Along this very long, multiple year journey, I’ve lost my way and lost my passion a few times, but I feel like I’ve gotten back into a really good place and actually am excited to start this next round of edits and fixing things. BUT I was also looking for a fun distraction between finishing up some new chapters and re-reading the novel so I turned to Pinterest.
Pinterest? Yup…I love creating mood boards for my novels and I realized that I had never changed the one for this book to reflect my new point of view character and her interests in the book. Head here to see the full board if you’d like to see some elements of my book: St. Louis, High School, the violin, the musical Grease, and baseball – student athletes and the Cardinals!
Basically, how I make a mood board is I start thinking about my novel as a whole and then think about each character and start putting in topics that relate to them and find images that I like.
So, for example, baseball girls in high school and then softball because it’s hard to find girls playing baseball (which is a huge part of my novel). For Gina – my new POV character, I started searching for theatre spaces, auditioning for theatre, and high school musicals but that didn’t yield too much so I went with the specific show she’s auditioning for in my book – Grease – and I found a ton of stuff!
I also like to describe my characters and find a few pictures for each of them. I still have a few characters to add to my board but I have Etta and her family and Gina and her twin brother Carl added but still need their cousin Libby and all the parents for that side. When I describe my characters I usually put in things like: short brown hair slightly nerdy teen boy and then scroll until I find one that I like, or that I think looks like what I have in my head when I write.
After creating my full mood board this past week, I decided to go one extra step and create an aesthetic over in Canva — what do you think?
I think it captures the new novel perfectly and I can’t wait for you guys to read it! I’m really hoping it will be ready by next Spring but we shall see what my editor thinks after I turn in the next round of edits in early September.
So…as a reader, do you like these sneak peeks into my author process? What else are you curious about? Do you want to see my outline? My editing notes or what I do digital vs by hand?
Let me know and I’ll make sure I incorporate some of that into my blog posts moving forward.
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