Mood Boards for Brainstorming and Plotting

I’ve seen a few of these around, usually as a brainstorming technique. Some authors collect images and put together a board that embodies the mood they want to convey in their work: a mood board. I’ve been intrigued by them because they’re very pretty, but never used them as part of the planning process. Instead, I did it all ass backwards and created some just for funsies for my existing drafts.

I used Canva to create these, and I swear this isn’t an ad, but that site is pretty damn good with a lot of free options. I used it long ago to create a mock cover for Vacancy, and it was good then, but has improved. There are great mood board templates already existing, and if you go there you’ll quickly see where I grabbed these from (one of the images I didn’t even change because it was already weirdly perfect), but you can alter just about everything–layout, colors, images, filters–so you have total creative control if you have a perfect vision, or you can let the tools guide you to create something pretty dang rad.

I know She’s All Thaumaturgy isn’t even out yet, and I only mentioned The Association by name, but I thought this would be a fun way to tease the upcoming books. Plus I’m pretty proud of myself for the primary color scheme for my first three novels, so, ya know, I’m showing off.

I’ve also never written taglines before and didn’t think too hard about these, but I think they’re fun. I probably wouldn’t use them on covers (though I do like taglines, so maybe I should), but they’re useful on promo material like this. Of course, I don’t know how good these are at being promotional when the covers aren’t on them or, like, the fact these are about novels is nowhere to be seen. Still, it was a fun project to keep creative but not have to think in a whole lot of words.