Tanya Lisle

Life is rough

August 2, 2026

This is post 18 of 18 in the series “The 2026 Done List”

Things in my personal life are not doing so great. I won’t be getting into it until I feel like I am ready to share, but know that I will be prioritizing other things. As much as I do love being creative, it’s not the essential thing for me to focus on right now. Some people use stress to become more creative, but it’s really just stunting my inspiration and drive.

Scions

I thought this book held up a lot more than it did, but this draft really needs a lot of work. On the bright side, it’s shorter just because a lot of the set up and world building happened in book 2. Now I just need to do what I do at the 2/3 mark of any story and dismantle some of the established facts of the universe and twist the story.

Beyond the Din

I have a title for the White Noise game! I had a burst of inspiration for it, so there’s a lot more structure in place for this one. I am running into the issue of the art. Namely, my ability to draw the same person with different expressions is questionable at best, which isn’t great when I’m building essentially a visual novel with mini-games. Not sure what to do about this yet, but there’s a lot of writing that needs to be done before I really have to worry about this.

Oops, new hobbies

July 19, 2026

This is post 17 of 18 in the series “The 2026 Done List”

I have been influenced. I already had a pretty bad fountain pen habit, but somehow the algorithms didn’t know about it until very recently. Seeing all of the pretty pens and inks, not to mention the notebooks ¹ have got me back into journalling. I already had my brain dump one and one for when I actually finished a project, but pulled out one of my notebooks that have been collecting dust to start a journal just daily creativity journalling.

Will I spend all my time journalling instead of doing actual projects? MAYBE! But my health is better during the summer and the books is small, so this might just be a thing I do for a short amount of time and drop when the weather gets bad.

The Trilogy

I really should rename this to Scions, since that is the name of the trilogy. I’ve been using the name for a while now and it was the name I used for it when I thought about making it a single long volume, but I just never got around to it. I’ll add it to the list of to dos for the next block of time, I guess, but heads up that the title will probably change and some links might break as a result.

Audiobooks

No actual progress has been made on the current project. Whoops. I managed to record a new chapter on the next book instead and got the files into the program I use for the first pass of editing. It only gives me an hour worth of audio a month and I had files from last month I hadn’t loaded in, so unfortunately the next book is also going to take a damn long time because my ability to read is pretty bad. Still, at least I’m not going to be procrastinating by trying to record more this month? That’s probably a good thing.

Fantasy RPG

I really need to just accept that I can’t work on actually building this right now. Which should be fine! I don’t have anywhere near enough of the story together to even think about building this, but I saw that the Steam sale had RPG Maker available and I was very tempted to purchase a version that would actually work on my OS. I did not give in, but I did spend far too much time staring at it.

White Noise Game

It’s been a while since I have looked at these books. I have my notes for what happened in this prequel story, but I did need to go back into the books eventually to see what actually made it into the final books about what happened. Luckily most of it is in just the first book and contained mostly in one chapter, so I needed to pull this information eventually. I should really check Dead Air again before I start putting together a final story line, but maybe next block.

I also need a better title for this. Something like Tinnitus but better.

I found my old card game

July 10, 2026

I designed a card game a few years ago. The idea was based on a story idea that I never figured out a good way to implement. The original iteration was an that an MMO studio glitched and all of the games that studio produced blended together. Your fantasy character would end up in a GTA-style world with their original stats and get comfortable in it before ending up in something like Starcraft randomly in the middle of a race. I don’t play enough ¹ MMOs to really understand how to get this to really work well.

The idea morphed into a card game where you played with decks made up of cards from different stories. For now it’s just cards from books that I’ve written, but if it got popular it could expand into having decks from any author or story that the audience wanted ² and I’d have a guide so that people could make their own custom decks that could be added in.

It has never been play tested and, unfortunately, I am no longer in good enough health to conduct my own play test sessions. I did write instructions back in the day, though, so I’ve decided to throw it all up on itch for anyone who wants to try it out for themselves. It’s free and all you need is a printer, so if you’re looking for something to try out with some friends one afternoon, have fun!

Get on itch.io

Progress, at last!

July 5, 2026

This is post 16 of 18 in the series “The 2026 Done List”

One of the better things about summer is that the nice weather tends to help ease symptoms. I’ve been doing my best to have my one adventure a week ¹ and catch up on the chores that I’ve been taking a lot of short cuts with.

Which means I finally swept the floors and vacuumed one rug. Still, progress!

The Trilogy

Speaking of progress, the second pass of book 2 is done! I think the structure is finally solid, but it’s definitely going to need another pass to make sure all the information is in the right place and the prose is good.

While I am really happy about it, I can’t help but remember how this used to take me a matter of weeks to do. It’s weird taking so long, but I try to remember that this is not actually as slow a pace as it feels like. It’s just slow compared to what I used to be able to do.

Audiobooks

You know, if I just kept up doing just one audio file every 2 weeks, I could have been done one book by now. At this rate, maybe I’ll get the first book done by the end of the year. But hey, another chapter edited and finished is another chapter edited and finished!

Fantasy RPG

So, I haven’t actually done any work on this. RPG Maker still doesn’t work on my computer, so nothing’s really getting built until I can be upright long enough to use the desktop.

What I have been doing is I’m slowly creating some templates in Notion so I can make notes and keep track of asset creation. Luckily, I’ve already more or less made my standard templates for this kind of stuff, so it’s just digitizing it and adding a little extra for video game specific elements like attacks. With any luck, I will be able to use this for that other game.

The tangents are back!

June 21, 2026

This is post 15 of 18 in the series “The 2026 Done List”

Just when I thought the sun meant going out and enjoying myself, the heat got a bit too harsh for me to be going out quite as much as I want. It means I don’t have to deal with those feelings just yet, but I’m hoping that the blazing heat either dies down or I get used to it so it isn’t stopping me quite so much. If nothing else, I am still getting my once a week outing to check out the world and being much less housebound, one way or another.

I also recently got scouted for a medical thing. Yay for being medically interesting! It resulted in my furthest adventure out from my house in years ¹ and I survived! Crashed very hard as a result, but I was downtown for the first time in years, so I’m hopeful that the weather isn’t going to stop me for too long.

The Trilogy

I am so close to getting back into the bit of the book that exists. As much fun as writing new stuff has been, it’s also slow and I am excited to get back to some of the fun bits of the plot that I wrote the first time around. It’s also a lot faster to work with story that I just have to make sound better rather than write from scratch, so my productivity will feel a lot greater, even if I’m pretty sure I’ll be working on it at about the same pace.

As a side note, I do miss when I could write fast. This is the longest it’s ever taken to write a trilogy. I feel like it’s going to take me longer to finish this than it did to finish all of The Looking Glass Saga.

Worksheet Tangents

I had a thing happen with one of my medications. Yay for being medically interesting, right? It gave me an idea for something that people can use to keep track of how their new medications are improving their symptoms or causing side effects. And then I remembered I can’t get Affinity working on Linux, so it’s currently trapped in back of an envelope limbo for now.

Photo of a mockup for a worksheet that tracks medications and symptoms over a month.

Fantasy RPG

It’s been ages, but I finally opened Notion up again so that I can start making notes on this project as I come up with ideas for it. Mostly because the day I had an idea for the game, I didn’t have a notebook and ended up starting a slide deck of all things to make these notes. I had a notebook for this project, but I cannot find it so naturally I have to complicate matters.

I also had a sprint of trying to get the program working on my computer again but, again, Linux. I like this OS, but dammit. I’m going to have to run a virtual machine, aren’t I?

Other ventures

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