Episode 46: More Bonus Stories, Alternate POVs, and Website Storefronts

Hi there! I'm Lindsey Sparks, author of books featuring hidden worlds and twisted myths. Welcome to my weekly author's notes podcast! This episode was recorded on Sunday, June 26, 2022, and I would love to share some of my reflections from this past week with you.

CURRENT FREEBIES:
Starter Library for newsletter subscribers (FREE ebooks and audiobooks of my series starters, and more!)
https://www.authorlindseysparks.com/join-newsletter

CURRENT WIP:
With my editor: Blood of the Broken (Atlantis Legacy, book 5)CURRENT FREEBIES:
Writing: Patreon stories (spicy!), including a Dom POV story and a Nik POV story
https://www.patreon.com/lindseysparks

READING:
A Kingdom of Ruin by K.F. Breene
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

WATCHING:
The Boys (season 3)
For All Mankind
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

PLAYING:
Elder Scrolls Online

HIGH:
Finished writing all the Blood of the Broken bonus content and almost finished one of the July Patreon stories

LAST WEEK'S OBSESSION:
Figuring out what to do with my website/bookshop

GOOGLE SEARCH HISTORY:
- French words for a [CENSORED]
- Glock 26, slide holster, IWB holster, shoulder knife sheath, John Wick holster setup
- Rosario Resort

BIG GOAL(s):
Finish July Patreon stories

LOOKING FORWARD TO:
Brainstorming The Ending Legacy book 1 with Lindsey Pogue on Friday!!!
-
JOIN MY READER GROUP: Lindsey's Lovely Readers
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lovelyreaders

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON:
https://www.patreon.com/lindseysparks

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER:
https://www.authorlindseysparks.com/join-newsletter

JOIN MY DISCORD SERVER:
https://discord.gg/EH4XPY6djP

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Transcript

0:00

Hi there I'm Lindsey Sparks author of books that include hidden worlds and twisted myths. Welcome to my weekly author's notes podcast. Today is Sunday, June 26th, and I would love to share some of my reflections from this past week with you. First off, as always, the best place to find free books of mine is in my starter library, which is for only for my newsletter subscribers. And there, you can find some free eBooks and audiobooks of my series starters- so the first books in several of my series. So, you're welcome to go check that out by subscribing to my newsletter. And I hope you do. The link is in the show notes. My current works in progress, because there are multiple, or I guess not multiple multiples. There are multiple.

Same as last week: 0:44

Blood of the Broken, the fifth Atlantis Legacy, book is with my editor, so no changes there. And then I am writing now, I am writing the Patreon stories for July. So I am working on- there are three stories that I'm working on. Well sort of. There's two stories and an episode. So I finished all of the bonus content for Blood of the Broken, which is going to be releasing in August on Patreon. So I did finish all of that. That was great. And I almost finished the Dom- one of the stories for July, which is the my choice story. So I'm each month I'm doing three basically guaranteed releases. So the next episode of The Last Vampire Queen, so you'll get an episode of The Last Vampire Queen each month, and then a Patron's choice story. The Patrons get to throw up their ideas and then I'll- I set up a poll and then the Patrons get to vote on it. And whichever story idea gets the most votes is the one that I write. And then a author's choice story. So for July, the author's choice was... I had a Dom- a story idea, featuring Dom, who is a fan favorite character from the Echo Trilogy. He is not a main character, but he is an important supporting character. And he is going to end up getting his own series. He's probably... it's looking like the next series after Tarset's series, which is the Fateless Trilogy, is going to be, and the fless trilogy is the one that starts with Song of Scarabs and Fallen Stars, which I released in March. So it's looking like Dom's series is going to be the series after the Fateless Trilogy, which will probably start in 2023. Nope, this is 2022, isn't it? I'll probably start it in 2024. And then the Patron's choice story was a Nik point of view story, which is Nik's point of view right before the beginning of Ink Witch, which I'm really excited about. And as I fall asleep tonight, I'm gonna be brainstorming exactly what I wanna do with him. I've always kind of known what he's doing then. But I need to think about what exactly I wanna do for his- what's scene or series of short scenes I want to have in this story, which I'm really excited about. And then, of course, I'm excited about writing The Last Vampire Queen, episode three, because that is just the most delicious, like, I don't know, uh, indulgent, I guess, serial it's- it's a spicy reverse harem paranormal roman- paranormal romance, vampire, shifters, and witches serial. And it is just so much fun. So I'm very excited to dive back. And my dog is staring at me through my window. Really excited to dive back into that one, to write episode three of that. So that is what I'm working on right now. And the Dom story. Whew. The Dom story. Wow. So the Dom story is actually Dom's perspective in Echo in Time, in chapter 22, which is, um... I'm not gonna tell you what it is, but if you have the book or if you've read it, it's right after Marcus gets back and that big thing happens after he gets back. So it's Dom's perspective right after that. And I realized some things about Dom a week or two ago... My dog is now jumping up and down outside of the window. I realized some things about Dom a few weeks ago that gave me this really great story idea. It features Dom and Neffe. Dom is going to get his own series and he's going to find his happily ever after, his soulmate partner, like everybody does in their Echo World series. But even though he's paired up with Neffe in this specific story, we already knew that he and Neffe had a history. And I can say definitively that Neffe is not his happily ever after person, but that is who he is with in the scene. Just so, so we're all clear. And it is- I really, really love this story. I think it's a great story. I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited to share it, to share the side of Dom, because he's always been so quiet and reserved, and we know that he has this extreme darkness because he was the bad guy for a long time. And the- being the bad guy was too much for him. So he is no longer the bad guy. He's the reformed bad guy. And now we're getting to see what he does now that he doesn't do all the bad stuff that he used to do. I mean, we know that he still does torturing for- for Marcus/Heru, but now that he's not doing all the- ALL THE, all the bad stuff, all the assassinating and just all the extreme torturing. That he is- has to find another outlet for his darkness. And that, that is what we get to see a little bit of, because he can't just get rid of it. It's a part of him. It's been a part of him for centuries. So that's what we get to see a little bit in this story. So I'm excited to share that. Right now I am still reading A Kingdom of Ruin by KF Breene, which is a third book in the Deliciously Dark Fairy Tales. And then I am also about to start reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, which is one of my all time favorite books. I've read at gazillion times. I'm probably gonna listen to the audio book. I'm either gonna listen to the audio book or I'm just gonna skim the book, because LP and I are reading it and comparing it to season one of A Discovery of Witches, the show, for the next No Shelf Control Podcast, which is gonna be really fun. I love talking about that book so much, and actually, A Discovery of Witches is one of the books that LP and I first bonded over when we worked at a bookstore before we ever wrote any books together. So that's just a fun little fact, if you're an Ending Series fan and you like the Team Lindsey, Lindsey Pogue and I bonded over A Discovery of Witches and True Blood. That's kind of how we- how we first got together as a team of authors. Or baby authors, I guess. We weren't authors then. I am currently watching The Boys, season three, which is amazing. Every episode- oh my God. This last episode was crazy. I'm going, I mean, it was totally nuts. But that's like this show's thing. It's just nuts. It's so good. And Jensen Ackles. Oh my God. Could I love him anymore? Apparently, apparently. I really like him being like a kind of bad guy. I don't know what that says about me. I also just watched for funzies yesterday morning, when I woke up super early because I can't sleep in anymore, I watched Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness, which I loved, of course. I love all Marvel stuff. And then, my husband and I are watching For All Mankind on, I wanna say it's on Apple TV, and it- I think it's super interesting. He thought the last episode was kind- kind of boring. I think we're on episode six of season one. But it is basically an alternate history of what if the Russians were the first ones to land on the moon, and what would that mean for our space program? And so basically if the United States space program continued to push for more and more. because the space race never really ended. So, I've been really enjoying that show. I am also still playing Elder Scrolls Online, of course, because it's so fun. My high this week was finishing writing all of the Blood of the Broken bonus content, and it was so fun, and I am so much, like- this makes me, I'm already ridiculously excited to release this book because it is insane. It's insane, in a good way. It- just so much stuff happens and, oh, I really like it. It's like, very emotionally damaging, but in a good way. In a satisfying way. I wanna say it rips out your heart, but then it like kind of sews it back into your chest a little bit. But, uh, I just finished writing all of the bonus content last week. So all the stuff that's gonna go up on Patreon, and then there's gonna be the- one of the stories is gonna be for everybody, free for everybody, because I think that there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna wanna see that. But I finished writing all of the bonus content and I loved it so much. And, I got to write- So this is what there is: there is a- there's uh, two extended scenes from Cora's perspective that are steamy. Steamy to spicy. They're just spicy. There is an alternate point of view scene from Hades' perspective, which is really fun. We get to see some of his, well, this is our first time being inside of his head, and we get to see his emotional- just his emotional reasoning reasoning. So we've gotten a little bit of- We, we understand a little bit of his perspective because Cora has been inside of his head, not inside of his head, but she has seen inside his head. So she understands his emotions pretty well. But we get to see just a little bit more some stuff about what he went through when he was on his own for all those millennia. And then my very favorite thing that I wrote for the- for the bonus content for Blood of the Broken is a bonus epilogue, which is still weird for me to say that it's a bonus epilogue because there's not an actual epilogue, so it's not like there, this is an extra epilogue, but it is a bonus. It's not in the book. So, it's an epilogue, and it's a bonus. So it's a bonus epilogue. But it is basically launching, I didn't know this was gonna happen, but it's launching kind of a mini serial that I'm gonna be writing for Patreon, probably just for Patreon. I haven't a hundred percent decided that yet, but... I also, haven't a hundred percent decided whether that is gonna be exclusive to Patreon or not. I kind of feel like I should not have it be exclusive to Patreon. I don't know. I might change up. We'll see. There's four different things, so I can have two things be exclusive and two things not be exclusive. We'll see what I decide to do, who knows? It's basically bridges the gap between at Atlantis Legacy and Allworld Online in a way that I had been trying to figure out how I was gonna do it, and that just naturally developed in the perfect way. And I'm really excited about getting to share it. And, it doesn't fit in the story proper for a very specific reason that I can't say without spoiling everything. It's really fun, really exciting. And I'm so happy with how perfectly it connects the two series. It just makes it really clear what is going on. So that's cool. I couldn't figure out a low, so I didn't put anything for that. My obsession last week didn't actually have anything to do with writing. I know in last week's episode, I talked about how I was gonna switch my website over to Shopify. I now, after exploring more of Shopify- So, my obsession last week was figuring out what to do with my website and my bookshop. I was going to switch my entire website over to Shopify. Now that I've explored Shopify quite a bit, it doesn't feel like it has all the functionality that I need it to have for what I want my website to do. At least not in a way that doesn't include using a bunch of different apps that I would have to upload to it. And I don't know, it just seemed really complicated. I've already got the website set up. I like the way it functions on Wix. I just don't really like the way my shop functions on Wix. So, I'm gonna go back to the original plan, which is to keep my current website. But my bookshop is now down and offline, and I will be putting up the new booksh- bookshop in the next week or two, and that'll- and that'll be the new Shopify bookshop. I just have to finish up a couple things, but I'm hoping that I can get that all wrapped up and finished this week. So it should be up hopefully, hopefully by next episode it will be up. Whew. It's getting hot. It's getting hot again. All day. I did a Facebook live earlier, and it was hot because I can't have my AC on while I'm recording, because it's too loud. And it's just a hot day, and I'm just sweaty. You didn't need to know that, but I am. In case you're watching. If you- if- and so if you're watching the video and you're watching me like fan myself, that's- that's, what's going on. It's hot in here. I did have some fun Google search history items, mostly because of this Dom scene that I wrote. But one thing was also relating to some, um, some of the Blood of the Broken stuff. So the Google search history item that I am not going to explain very much, but that relates to the Blood of the Broken bonus material, is Rosario Resort. So I looked up Rosario Resort, which is a real resort on Orcas Island, which is where Cora lived, where Blackthorn Manor is. And Rosario resort is actually the hotel, the resort that Blackthorn Manor is based on. So, I had to look that up. So take from that what you will, I'm not gonna say anymore about that. The other two kind of sections of search history items have to do with Dom's story, and there was another one that I didn't include because it was just, like, too much. It was too explicit. So these two are, um... I already said it was a spicy story, so that's why the search his- or the search phrase is here, which is: French words for vagina. Because Dom is French, if you will recall. And then the other set of words- I'm just gonna read them. It's a whole series series of- of search terms, have to do with Dom's- the fact that he is, like, really heavily armed, but he's also basically looks like a male model. I realized after having created him almost 10 years ago, and before I had ever heard of John Wick, that Dom is very much like John Wick. And so I decided that his style- like, stylistically everything about him is very John Wick-ish. I had some fun looking up pictures of John Wick, because I love John Wick. And Keanu, I just absolutely adore. It was really fun for me to realize that connection, and especially because I created Dom before I had ever seen John Wick. And so it was it's f- I've, I've never had an after the fact inspiration pop up. I guess it's not an inspiration if you discover them after the fact, but it helped to solidify how I see Dom. So that was kind of cool. Anyway, here's the series of things that I looked up that have to do with

Dom and his- what he wears basically: 15:30

Glock 26, slide holster, IWB holster, which is an inside waistband, I think is what it stands for, holster, shoulder knife sheath, John Wick holster setup. So that's that series. And you will get to see all of that if you are a Patron and you get to read that story. So that's gonna be super fun to share. It's like this super long, drawn out scene of Dom taking- like, disarming himself. It's, like, very- just a lot of anticipation that happens while he is unloading all of his weapons. My big goal this week is to finish the July Patreon stories, which, uh, the Dom story is pretty much done. I just have to add a couple paragraphs and wrap it up. And then, I need to write the Nik story and the last vampire queen episode three. So that's gonna be really fun. And then I am also gonna try to get the Shopify shop finished up and up. So, I probably am not gonna get all of the digital- so, the reason I'm going to Shopify, which I think I talked about last week, is because it integrates really well with BookFunnel, which is the service that I use to deliver my eBooks and audiobooks to people when they get them directly from me. The Wix store that I have doesn't integrate well with that. However, Shopify integrates perfectly. It has like a web hook, whatever that is. But, basically, it pings BookFunnel to send somebody the book when they buy it on Shopify, which is what I need to happen. I probably will not have all of the digital items set up, but there will be some, by the time I launch the new bookshop. But the physical items will all be there, including pre-orders for at least the next upcoming book, which right now would be Blood of the Broken. And that would be pre-orders for paperbacks. So those are my goals. And then I am looking forward to, really, really a lot, looking forward to brainstorming The Ending Legacy, book one, with LP on Friday. Uh, Friday night, we are brainstorming, and we're probably gonna be brainstorming Saturday morning and possibly Saturday night, too. That is what I have going on at the very end of the week and the weekend. I'm trying really hard not to work on weekends, but I am making an exception for this one. We need to get the titles for the series, or at least for this first book. We need to just brainstorm what we're doing basically, and figure out what we're doing. We don't even know how long the series is gonna be, but we definitely need to get the title for the- for book one. And we need to get the outline done for book one, because we're writing it in July. So that is what I have going on this week. Thank you so much for listening, and I will be back next week to ramble some more. Until then, happy reading!