Tanya Lisle

  • There’s a lot of resources that I’ve been relying on to make all these books and aesthetic stuff over the years. I might as well share a could of them with everyone, eh? 

    Programs

    Some cheaper alternatives to some of the more expensive options ((And Adobe in specific, which I really want to get off of)) that are out there. I’ve used all of these and found them to be almost as good as the standard products, though some have a bit of a steeper learning curve than others. 

    Courses

    Because continuous learning is good. Especially continuous learning about marketing because, well, marketing is hard. 

    • Lynda (I get this one from the library)
    • Skillshare (This link gives 2 free months and helps me out)

    Covers and Aesthetic Resources

    Graphics! We love cover making and, if you’re as bad at drawing as I am, these are some pretty good graphic resources to get you started. 

    Let me know if there’s any that I missed! 

  • I’m going to be doing a short series about the backstories of characters that appear in The Looking Glass Saga that don’t get nearly enough attention and probably never will. To start with, Ms. Miller!

    Ms Rose Miller is an educational tutor that is currently working while going for her PhD in Child Psychology. Her specialization is with children with autism, though working with Alice has been a it of a special case. She took the job of caring and educating a child who was advertised to have a very tenuous grasp on reality because it presented a unique challenge and because it was very good money at a time when she desperately needed it. 

    She is not fond of the situation that she ended up with in terms of Alice. The issue was largely with the parents believing strange things about their child and giving her a very different complex. When mentioning it to colleagues, they warned her quickly that the Liddells had a reputation of making things difficult for anyone who tried to call CPS. Careers had been left ruined by what were deemed false accusations of those who pressed too hard. She doesn’t think that the children in the house are safe there, but ultimately doesn’t want to ruin her career before it gets started. 

    Given this, Rose’s focus remained entirely on the well being of the girls in the house. While Alice was a docile girl looking to stay out of trouble, her sister was much less willing to remain under her father’s rule. Eventually, she ran away and Rose helped her escape once she was sure of the situation that she was escaping into, promising to keep an eye on her sister. 

    Aside from Alice, Rose watches over three other students that are much less intensive, which gives her just enough time for her thesis and a relationship, especially now that she is only seeing Alice during the summers. She has been seeing Theodore Williams, a social worker she met through her program, for two years and they have been talking about marriage after Rose finishes her degree. 

  • Beauty Sleep is coming out in a couple days! Let’s do a roundup of some quotes!

  • I thought I’d take a break from what I usually read and went with something that felt much different. I knew vaguely that there was an ace character in here, but other than that I was intrigued by the idea of a series of murders happening on an island and it being up to a few girls to find out what happened to their friends, This was not quite what I was expecting, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless.

    The story mostly follows Marion, a young woman who is new to the island. Her, her sister Charlotte, and her mother are relocating to the island for her mother’s work and to try and move on from their father’s death. She doesn’t put much weight on the disappearances of the young girls on the island until her sister goes missing after falling in with the beautiful and popular Val. The outcast, Zoey, who is still mourning the disappearance of her friend from months before, joins her and a whole lot of paranormal stuff starts happening.

    So, as it turns out, this story is about a demon feeding on the girls of the island in an attempt to become strong enough to break free of his human hosts—Val’s family—and the island to go and murder whoever he wants. And Sawkill rock, ((An actual, sentient rock. It makes more sense and is less silly in context.)) finding young girls to give the abilities necessary to fight and eliminate the demon.

    The movement from creepy mystery to girls with powers fighting a demon is done pretty well and not as jarring as it could have been. The atmosphere is consistently dark throughout and there’s new elements to the world constantly being brought in and introduced, from the demon to the powers to the cult of monster hunters made up entirely of men, and any with lines are incredibly sexist. Who you knew were going to be evil and useless because this book goes a little heavy on the feminism themes.

    There was only one bit that really bothered me, and that was less the scene itself than its purpose in the narrative. Coming into the climax ((It’s a sex scene, there are so many puns, I’m about 20% sorry)) two of the characters hook up and the sole purpose of it appears to be so that they can make characters more angry at one another. The results of that conflict are resolved so easily during the main conflict in favour of focusing on longer and more established ones that it felt a little pointless and like it would have been better done earlier if they wanted the conflict to have a bit more punch.

    As for the representation, the queer ladies are done fairly well. I thought the relationship between he girls moved a little fast, but this book is structured very much like a horror movie, so that’s to be expected. Teenagers and their teenage hormones and the murders happening everywhere making them run amok. The asexuality is mostly displayed as an indifference-to-aversion to sex which is… fine? It’s not my experience, but it’s probably good for those who do experience it. The conversations around it sound about right, so it works.

    Overall, I really enjoyed the book! It’s spooky, it has some interesting concepts, and the characters are a lot of fun to follow as they try to figure out themselves and what to do with the demon.

    Get Sawkill Girls on Amazon!

  • After all this time, the end was finally in sight.

    Alice long ago learned that life wasn’t fair. She had tried everything to defeat the Bandersnatch, but he remained deep in the forest of Lucena Academy. With only one semester left, she thought she could just enjoy herself as much as possible and wait until he finally took her away forever.

    But when Adrianna suddenly falls into a coma, Alice knows there’s something strange happening. At the direction of the monster about to claim her, she must go back into Wonderland and through the depths of Neverland to find a way to wake her up. Alice knows time is running out for her, but she will stop at nothing to make sure Adrianna is okay.

    Get your copy of Beauty Sleep

  • This is a preview if Chapter 1 of Beauty Sleep!

    Divorce had become a forbidden word. It hadn’t even appeared in the emails telling Alice that she was going directly to the Case’s for Christmas break and that she would be remaining there until the school year started. Now that she was here, it was a topic that would not be brought up, though it seemed that there were more than a few close calls in the first couple days.

    Alice wondered if that was for her benefit or if she was going to have to tell them that not talking about it wasn’t going to stop it from happening.

    It was a little sad, but she could understand why they didn’t want her there right now. She hoped that she could see her parents one last time before she was taken away forever. They wouldn’t miss her, though. She wasn’t sure they would miss her even if they did remember that they had a daughter. She had caused them a lot of problems, had likely been the cause of their divorce despite what Lori tried to tell her. Maybe with her gone they could work out their problems and be happy. Just one more semester.

    She could send them an email or call them before the Bandersnatch took her away. Evan’s disappearance had taught her that the Bandersnatch didn’t seem to be as good at cleaning up electronic evidence. Not that either of them would know what her email was about after June.

    Again, she found herself wondering if there was really a point to trying to say goodbye to anyone before she was taken away. The point was to give them some closure about her disappearance and to let them know she was thinking of them and sorry, but it meant nothing once she wasn’t there anymore. When he took her, it would be like she never existed.

    Statistically, there was a chance she might be able to figure out a way to get around the Bandersnatch. There was likely some way to convince him to leave and to win the bet, but all of her looking through the books and trying to work out a method of trapping him or throwing him back into Wonderland had so far proven fruitless. She didn’t have any more ideas.

    There was nothing to do but try to finish as much as she could before she was gone once and for all. Hopefully Adam would come back without too much of a fight, and she could find Matt before it was all over. She should do something about the Queen of Hearts, but Wonderland could probably figure that out without her. She would need to teach someone else to return hearts, but that was it. If she could just finish that, maybe she could find some time to have a bit of fun before she faded away.

    For right now, though, she tried not to think about it, even though it continued to creep into her thoughts at every waking moment now that she was enjoying her very last Christmas. Adrianna was off with one of her brothers doing something else, leaving Alice and Lori to hang out with Ryan and Travis as they prepared cookies for tomorrow. Again.

    Cookies had become a thing Alice was making more or less constantly while she was here, seeing as they were eaten with fair regularity. While the people in the Case household were mostly their usual selves, kind and friendly, there were still flashes of hostility that came out of nowhere. Peter had shown her which flower would dispel that and so she had made it a point to be in the kitchen at least a little each day to sprinkle a some of the cure in the food so that she would not have to deal with that any longer. She wasn’t sure how much longer the flowers would last, but she had far too much on her mind to be worried about that as well.

    “My baby sister’s almost in high school!” Lori said, pleased as they put the cut cookies in the oven and set the timer. Alice was careful to be the one to make the dough, remembering all too well how Lori tended to forget ingredients like sugar when she was baking. “New classes, new dorms, new everything.”

    “Except Addie,” Travis told her. “You don’t get to lose her just yet.”

    Alice smiled, though she felt a pang of guilt at the reminder. She was going to be abandoning Adrianna to high school all on her own. She would be all right, going in with plenty of friends who could give her a hand and without Alice to distract her from her classes any longer, but perhaps she was someone she should say farewell to before she left. Or maybe not. If she was gone the next day, it would be easier for everyone and they wouldn’t have to be sad at all.

    “I have to get there, first,” Alice reminded her, a smile on her face. It was out of her hands now, and there was no reason to make anyone else worry about it. She would be gone no matter what happened. And it was Christmas in a house that really liked celebrating the holiday with family. Who had basically been adopting her the last few years. And with a sister that she thought she might never see again. She could let herself relax at least a little.

    “You’ll get there,” Lori said, ruffling her hair a little. “Ms. Miller taught you all this stuff years ago. You could probably have jumped right into high school with her help if you really wanted to.”

    “Does that mean she can tutor you in Chemistry?” Ryan asked, looking over at the pair of them. “Because I saw that last test.” He smiled gently, though Lori looked embarrassed about her grades and stumbled through an explanation.

    “Not my fault that teacher hates me,” she said. “I missed one question on the test and the whole multiple choice was off after that.” She looked and sounded irritated from the whole thing, but Alice still smiled and tried to gently calm her back down. She didn’t want Lori to be upset during their last Christmas together.

    “Can you retake it?” Alice offered.

    “Yeah, I’m doing a makeup exam with a different teacher in January,” Lori told her. “No scantron, so I shouldn’t screw it up this time around.” That seemed to calm her down, or at least she pushed the feelings back down before they could boil over. Alice could tell she had already been stressed about this enough, so she didn’t press any further. Ryan looked like he wasn’t sure if he’d said something wrong, but neither of the girls would say anything.

    “Is your girlfriend coming tomorrow?” Alice asked, trying to divert the subject to something a little happier. She did like seeing her sister happy, and knowing that she was in a relationship and watching her light up talking about it was one of the things Alice had come to enjoy. It was great spending so much time with Lori this year, but she did hope that she wasn’t taking her away from other people in her life. Well, maybe she was okay with it since it would only be one last time. “Her name is Jennifer, right?”

    “She’s coming by for lunch on Boxing Day,” Lori said, already looking excited. “But I’m going to be heading there for dinner tonight. You’re okay with putting up with all these guys without me for a night, right?” She smiled, looking up directly at Travis, who looked offended.

    “Hey!” he snapped back at her, but he was smiling as he said it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

    “I think you know exactly what it means,” she told him.

    “I think you need to elaborate.”

    “I think you need to learn how to peel a carrot again.”

    Travis jumped and realized that he wasn’t so much peeling the carrot anymore as he was whittling it into a very sharp point. Ryan laughed as Travis put it casually to the side, patting it like it could keep his secret, and moved onto the next one. “You know, if someone tried to attack us right now, I could protect us all with Frosty’s nose. You should be thanking me.”

    “Thank you for turning a nose into a murder weapon,” Ryan told him, giving him a light whack on the back. “Now, if you could continue cooking like there were still two extra ravenous mouths to feed, that would be great.” Even as he said it, confusion flickered across Ryan’s face like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of it. He shook the thoughts away. Alice looked back at the timer for the cookies.

    Beauty Sleep is out on June 19th! Order it now on Amazon!

  • It’s a strange day when Cole starts teleporting between doors. He could never do it before, and now that he is he doesn’t know how to deal with it. More than that, the cutest boy in school has decided that Cole is the one who he wants to talk to now that he’s questioning his sexuality.

    The second half of that would normally make me put the book down, but there’s ace rep in this book and I wanted to give it a chance, even if it’s only in a side character. And the first half was interesting enough that I wanted to see what was going on and how they dealt with it.

    The story is interesting. It is structured a little like a paranormal romance, with the bulk of the supernatural stuff happening in the last third of the book ((No houses eating people or the ocean murdering anyone this time)) but it is interspersed decently throughout. I thought there were a few times when it could have come back into play a little sooner to make the personal drama and the supernatural stuff work a little more together and it felt less like everything happened all at once at the end. At least, introduce the concept of who the bad guys were a little earlier so they weren’t just looming mystery figures until the end, then reveal the secret society in the last couple chapters.

    With the background of the Rainbow Club, the sheer amount of representation that is in the book feels like it makes sense for the narrative. I really liked how they dealt with the different sexualities, the race stuff, the gender stuff, the disabilities in the book. Namely, they didn’t. The story was not about any of them, so they existed in the book without it stopping everything to explain what asexuality was, or enby or how you should be treating deaf people. They just existed in the story and when it was brought up, it was brought up in a way that makes sense.

    For instance, the love interest, Malik, has the exact same reaction to being ambiguously brown as I did as a kid. And I greatly appreciate it.

    The only time there’s any explaining is done in the context of the narrative. A character thinks they might like boys and girls, but is confused about the distinction about bi and pan. Which Cole doesn’t have an answer to, so he looks it up and asks about it. It makes sense in the context of the story.

    And, because I came here to see the ace character, I liked him a lot. Particularly in how it’s dealt with, namely that someone in the queer community had a problem with it which made him veer away from the community, and the bridges being repaired were done without much fanfare. The situation is more accurate to my experience, and the lack of focus on that resolution works well in the narrative because it isn’t his story. Alec’s story getting more attention than it did would have felt like a distraction to the main plot.

    I really enjoyed this book. The story of the teleporting through doors and how Cole dealt with it was interesting and Cole as a character is different than a lot of other ones I’ve been exposed to in the past. Namely, he’s not spontaneous ((He bullet journals, which is another really interesting detail to the narrative)) and has multiple hobbies, which makes him feel much more rounded as a character. It’s a bit more romance-y than I typically like, but I didn’t feel like the romance was a distraction from the main plot, and I had fun with it overall.

    Get Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks on Amazon!

  • And once again, I pick up the second book in a series without reading the first! I am very good at this. This time, however, Tash McAdams themselves recommended starting here because I am obnoxious and asked for where they wanted me to start. So any problems I might have had was all their fault.

    However, there were no problems! This is the least second book-is of any second book I’ve read. And I meant hat in a good-yet-confused sort of way. There is a lot of rich world building done in this, inclusding a storyline that absolutely feels like it’s a sweeping epic, but the story is framed very much like the first in the series. The alternating perspectives include one character that is new to the world and we see through his eyes how the universe works, which is very much a first book pattern, and a more wizened character who is more familiar with the universe and explains her parts of the universe with familiarity.

    What I’m saying is that it’s written in such a way that I have no idea what came before it. And I’m intrigued.

    As for the book itself, it was a lot of fun! In that way I describe fun. On the one side, we follow Toby, who leaves his comfy life as a rich kid in the city only to be immediately mugged as soon as he leaves, have his finger cut off, and develop incredible super powers. On the other we follow Epsilon 17, who is a child soldier with incredible powers that has to track him down while at the same time really not wanting to find him at all.

    The story follows the two of them as they both struggle with the Institute, who want to catch Toby and do… something with him. The question mark is less interesting than the chase and how the story comes together. It’s well paced, not forgetting about the human element of the post-apocalyptic world, and it ends in a wonderful showdown between just who it should be between. In my opinion, anyway.

    I have a couple small issues with the book, but nothing that detracts from the experience of reading it. The prose is very dense, and there were a couple reveals at the end that felt like they wasn’t led up to enough, but overall it was a lot of fun and I would highly recommend checking it out.

  • Short stories are a weird spot for me. On the one hand, I’ve written a lot of them and I appreciate them as a form of narrative that’s a lot harder to write than most people give them credit for. On the other hand, my memories of short stories growing up are the ones I had to analyze for school and angsty fanfic one shots. I’ve always had a lot of trouble finding good genre shorts that I like and that don’t leave me severely wanting in the world building department.

    Enter Pulp Literature. It’s a local short story publication, a magazine that comes out with a regularity that I’ve yet to ask about. ((I’ve met JM Landels several times and I have yet to remember to ask how often.)) This is a science fiction, fantasy, and all those genres in between magazine that accepts and publishes short fiction, poetry and comics. ((And they have a decent pay rate. If I could write short things that actually stand alone…)) Despite the diversity, or because of it, there’s a lot of high quality content in the issues. Maybe not everything for everyone, but certainly something you can latch onto in each issue that makes it well worth it.

    There’s a very distinct feel and aesthetic to the works, despite them being all very different. They all work surprisingly well together in each issue and, between the few that I’ve read so far, I’ve managed to find more than my fair share of books that I enjoyed among the collections.

    Rather than an Amazon link this time, I’ll send you right to their site and their Patreon. Go check them out!

  • Earlier this month at LitFest, there were quite a few people who wanted to know if there was any advice I could give to new authors. It came up during an interview I did with CSFJ as well. And while there’s always a lot of advice, I tend to go right back to what my old standby is.

    Try everything. Keep trying things until you find what works for you.

    There’s reams of writing advice out there, and that advice will run from writing a thousand words a day to finish the novel in a month to revise as you go. You should plot everything, plot nothing, plot only a couple things and leave the rest up in the air. You should know everything about your characters before you start or you should get to know them as you write. The advice is wildly contradictory between sources, and not even every author can agree on what the best way is to do things.

    That’s because the best way doesn’t exist. There’s only the best way for you. And figuring out what that best way for you is to try out a bunch of methods and not getting too upset if something isn’t right. Write every day and see if that’s working for you. Try powering through a first draft and see if the need to go back and revise while you write is too great. Try NaNoWriMo once to see if your brain likes it.

    It’s important to understand that there is no one right way to get your story out in the world. That’s going to mean trying a bunch of things until you get your weird routine for writing down and figure out what works for you, your life, your brain. It doesn’t matter how other people do it. You have to figure out how you do it and know that your way is the right way for you.

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