Reese Lavine’s Blog (whenever you’re ready)

Launching The Website And Blog

Reese — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I suppose the better title is "launching the website" as the blog is attached to it, but let's not be too pedantic.

After weeks of finagling with this very website, I think I can call it complete (mostly; I'm always fiddling with things), so I'm writing a little pre-launch blog post about it — just so there's some content on it when it's actually online.

In fact, because I'm greedy, I'll be writing at least two blog posts on it. Partially because I've delineated 4 categories (personal, devlog, articles, and updates) and this seems like the place to introduce the website itself, an update, whereas I'll make another about the process, ergo, a devlog.

Ahem, what was that about being pedantic...

Welcome, Reader

So there are a few things to cover. For the sake of accessibility, I'll act as if you have no idea who I am or what this website is for (how did you get here?). Also, I recognize that this will eventually be a time capsule, so it'll be a nice reminder for myself in the future.

This is my author website slash blog.
However, I do not have any books out as of writing this.
I am also not super experienced with blogging, but I'd like to give it a shot.

I do acknowledge that it's a bit funny -- I've heard that blogs are out of style, a relic of the older internet. But there'll always be an audience for something even if it's a smaller pool, and if there isn't... I enjoy the writing process!

Who Are You?

For the sake of this post, we'll pretend there isn't an about page on the website. To be fair, it's mostly author-oriented.

So hello! I'm Reese. I got access to the internet a good... almost 20 years ago, and have been on it way too much ever since. I've been an artist online for ages, a writer for a much shorter time, and a programmer for an even shorter amount of time.

I'm also a lesbian. While I don't care to speak on my identity too much, it is worth mentioning as something intrinsically tied to my work -- my books will be focused on sapphic/wlw couples, and I'm interested in sapphic media (who woulda thought?)

What Is This Site For?

Well, I suppose at the tail end of my twenties I've gone through a minor identity crisis, and now I'm an aspiring author.

<aside class="tangent">I suppose it's relevant to say self-published author. I think that's an important thing to denote, as it's quite different than traditional publishing. Why am I opting for self-publishing over tradpub? Maybe I'll yap about this another time.</aside>

Anyway, I wanted to create an author website in the hopes I'll start publishing books in 2026. I also wanted to try out blogging outside of Tumblr, so this site is killing two birds with one stone -- writing being the connecting thread between the two.

I would also be remiss not to mention the decay of social media sites in the past couple years. I find myself growing uncomfortable with the majority of them, and coincidentally I started learning to code in 2024, so it seemed a good time to create my own home base.

There's more I could talk about that is probably better covered in the devlog post I plan on making, like what I used to make the website and future things I'd like to implement. I'll link it here if I remember to.

In Summary

The website is for:

Serving as a hub for my author identity
Listing all (future) books under my pen name
Keeping people updated on new releases and projects

The blog is for:

Casual rambling, and also as a source of said news
Fun

<hr>

How much will I actually use this blog? Time will tell. I have ideas for some posts already, even personal ones like a retrospective on my solo trip to Europe back in 2024, but I get cagey at times. At the very least, it'll be a source for announcements and projects.

Cheers to new beginnings and ventures, and happy new year!

Creating the Site

Reese — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As promised in the previous post, I'm here to discuss the actual creation of this website, and get more into the weeds of it.

I will say that I'm relatively new to the world of programming, so behind the scenes it might resemble a child's drawing rather than a refined work of art. But that is okay (to me, the person who made the site); obviously I want it to be snappy and responsive and look nice for you, the user!

One of my favorite things about... well, just about anything is seeing something become optimized and improved over time. Hopefully, this site will see such upgrades!

The Site

Originally, and for a very brief time, I was going to try making this site in Python using Pelican.

That didn't last very long; I hadn't tinkered with Python at that point, and while I understand virtual environments now, I didn't a few months ago. I saw Astro mentioned on a tech post on Reddit, looked into it, and the docs had a very built-in blog tutorial.

So, easy enough! I'm familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and have dabbled in React. So Astro was similar enough to that, and I quite like it. There was still a learning curve, but not as bad as trying to mess around in a programming language I hadn't yet touched.

Anyway, the main site started out looking something like this:

Very, very basic as you can see -- but you can already see that I wanted to try out a layout that had a sidebar. I had some color scheme I ripped (basically blue and browns, with the pale lime background). I wanted something that looked 'soft' and neutral. I also like space/stars, so that was incorporated. All I can think of to call my theme is "cosmic latte".

At this point in time, it looks like this:

A few upgrades, but the general skeleton remains, even if the pale limey background color doesn't. The sidebar was shrunk, as it took a bit too much real estate for something that only holds a logo, a few socials, and short text.

The banner is perhaps a placeholder -- it depends if I'll make the time to create new art to replace it before this site is up -- but it has the function to go through a couple images, chosen at random per refresh.

It's still a bit simple, but I don't really need it to be much of anything else. This is my landing page for my author site, so it's just providing some brief information and then sharing the most recent blog entry that is categorized as news, and then a list of titles and dates of the latest five blog entries.

I also added a component for a featured book, which will likely just have the latest release.

Besides that, there are the following pages (which are pretty much self-explanatory):

About - just a short blurb about myself
Books - a place for my future book listings... alas, currently barren
Contact - contact info

And of course...

The Blog

Initially, the blog looked like this:

Yes, it's a mess. But it's funny because you can still see the remnants in its current iteration, just like with the homepage. If I were a better planner, I probably should have mocked this up but I went with my gut and just messed with the visuals as I plugged away at it.

Presently, the blog looks like this:

Not so bad, right? I replaced the stock space image into a pixel I made, fixed the color scheme (...it became very purple?), and of course, the text is placed where it should be.

I spent a lot of time on the blog, and while it's relatively simple*, I'm quite happy with it.

*Well, with a lot of pain from me in the backend on what might've been easier for a seasoned programmer. I spent a lot of time fighting the excerpts on the main page because I didn't want them to simply trail off mid-word with [...] based on an inflexible character length, but article text had to be converted from Markdown into HTML to display properly; Astro has something that does this conversion for you, but renders the full article, so I had to scrabble something together using someone else's tools and my own tweaks.

As it stands, they vary in length: the excerpt is for all text that appears before a line-break OR introduction of a heading, which is just as I wanted. What is programming if not fussing at one problem for hours, to reaching utter relief when it's (mostly) solved?

There are a few changes I still want to make -- the mobile view needs some fixing because of the nav bar -- and I'm still pondering about putting an image on the right side of the blog title.

There'll definitely be changes as time goes on. For the blog, I'll maybe look into adding a comment section in the future. I thought about adding dark mode, but that's also not a necessity, just a nice option to have.

But overall, I'm pleased! I made a functioning website! I used a framework as to not go crazy figuring out how to do blog stuff in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, but the site pages themselves were still handcoded by me (lovingly, and perhaps messily).

An Introduction, Perhaps

Reese — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As my debut novella edges close to the finish line, the duty now falls on me to be a little more active online — that is, get my author website up and running and start preparing my Substack for newsletter purposes. And, you know, make my presence known.

So, hi, hello, whoever has stumbled upon this post! I’m Reese Lavine, a fledgling author who specializes in sapphic romance fiction (and, within that, has a primary interest in fantasy/sci-fi in terms of genre, although a contemporary story from me isn’t an impossibility).

More broadly, I’m particularly interested in writing relationships between characters (both romantic and non-romantic) and exploring dynamics within them. I wouldn’t say my writing is all that cerebral, but I do hope there’s heart to be found within it, regardless of the subject matter.

But enough about my thoughts; I think that sort of opinion is probably best left to readers.

What’s this about a debut novella?

Of course, I’ll make a whole post about it when it’s closer to release. Currently, the final draft is in the hands of an editor, and once it’s finished I’ll open up a short ARC campaign. I’m hoping to release it sometime in July! It’s a shame I couldn’t quite make it in time for Pride Month, but surely the editing and ARC campaign will be worthwhile.

But in short: my debut is a roughly 50,000 word sci-fi romance novella titled ADORE. (Yes, yes, I know; it’s actually treading short novel territory, but I’ll continue to refer to it as such). It’s about an android mechanic that’s employed to fix an android who has bypassed her programming and gained full consciousness.

I’ve opted to self-publish this book myself. It’s a bit of a strange story (in my opinion), and I’m unsure it’d really work for tradpub. It means I’ve sunk costs into a book cover and editing, while being aware that it’s highly unlikely that an unknown indie author will break even.

Either way, I don’t mind. In the current era, I believe putting effort and time into something is well worth it — as is employing human artists and editors. This is a new foray for me, and I’m excited nonetheless! Even if it doesn’t go very far, I’ll be proud that I’ve worked so long on an original story and saw it to completion.

If you read this far, thank you! I hope to continue making blog posts and sharing my work as an author as time goes on.