Tanya Lisle

  • So. There’s a hot chocolate festival happening in Vancouver right now. This would be fine, but I have a bit of a problem and I have been trying to hit as many of the places as I can. Some of them have been fantastic and some have been nearly impossible to get to, so I haven’t tried them yet. And, since no one asked for it, here’s my thoughts of the ones I’ve been to.

    49th Parallel – Dark Chocolate Love

    I do love a dark chocolate, and this one is delightfully dark. 49th Parallel was my favourite of last year’s very few hot chocolate festival drinks I’d tried, so I was looking forward to this years offering. ((It’s also not far from the office, which is helpful)) It is made with cocoa powder, though, so there is a little bit of that grainy-ness to it that comes with not having someone carefully stir it as the milk is being heated up, but it’s not that bad.

    The first time they were out of the doughnut, but it wasn’t that much of a detriment. They have these doughnuts year round, so they aren’t that incredibly special of a treat to go along with it.

    Bel Cafe – Prettier in Pink

    I am a sucker for anything floral, so this one with the rose and fruity tastes was right up my alley. It’s quite sweet, which is a given since it’s white chocolate, but there’s still a good amount of flavour there to latch onto. It isn’t very chocolatey, though, which is unfortunate. It might have been nicer as a milk or dark chocolate instead of the white, but then it wouldn’t have the same aesthetic, so…

    This one came with a macaron that I was not a huge fan of, mostly because I don’t like the non-cream fillings that they chose. The jammy stuff just doesn’t do it for me. Your milage may vary, though.

    Soirette – Mining for Vibranium

    Do you like black things? I am suspicious of any food that is black. ((Activated charcoal, the thing that makes things black, tends to also interact very badly with medications)) Still, I am more suspicious of pea white chocolate, so I went with the black drink and truffle instead.

    The drink is more sweet than anything else. Some of that is likely due to the rim, which is covered in ganache and sprinkles, but also possibly due to the mixing. I found that the drink tasted different the further down I got, with a lot of the sweetness pooling at the bottom and a lot of the chocolate being near the top, which is a strange shift that I wasn’t expecting.

    The truffle was fine. It comes with a chocolate truffle, which isn’t really anything special, although it is pretty. Overall, it’s kind of an average experience.

    East Van Roasters – The Umami Experience

    So first off, don’t go down Hastings to get here. I know better, but my ability to pay attention to where I’m going and not get lost are both awful.

    To start, this is a drinking chocolate as opposed to a hot chocolate. An important distinction to anyone who has had drinking chocolate before. It’s warm, significantly heavier and thicker, and impossible to drink quickly. This one was a little salty and strangely meaty in a way I can’t quite describe, but still really nice. It felt homey eating it, even though it was wrecking my insides the whole time. ((Have I mentioned I’m lactose intolerant?)) It’s one I think I would have enjoyed more with a friend, since it is intended as a much slower experience than the rest of them.

    This is paired with chocolate wasabi almonds, which mercifully aren’t too spicy. There’s a nice flavour to them and they go really well with the drinking chocolate. It even comes with cute chopsticks that you definitely aren’t going to use at all. They are only for the aesthetic. And I’m okay with that.

    Cadeaux Bakery – Cocoanut

    I don’t normally choose the vegan option voluntarily, but at this point I was in pain from the amount of dairy I’d consumed. And this one had a few strikes against it already because I do not like coconut and avoid it normally.

    However. However. It was actually pretty nice. The dark chocolate is a nice counter to how sweet the coconut milk was, and it didn’t have a coconut-y aftertaste until I was a good way through the drink. Of all three drinks Id had that day, this one was my favourite. Possibly because it didn’t hurt me like the others had.

    They also gave me a vegan cookie which was less nice because it was also coconut and this time I could taste it. Also, it was all in togo stuff instead of the cute for here dishes I saw around me.

    Mink – Who you calling a conehead?

    Aside from the presentation, it’s honestly nothing special. It’s a standard hot chocolate served in an ice cream cone that has a very thick layer of chocolate inside of it so that it doesn’t melt through it to the wafer. It was nice, but it’s less than a full cup of hot chocolate and not really worth the price.

    Dishonorable Mention: Perverted – Young, Dumb, and full of Kumquat

    I have had so much trouble with Perverted to the point where it wasn’t open when we went to get it. A coworker ended up getting one of these and, well, she wasn’t impressed. I’ll skip the tale of their service, which is always a bit of a crapshoot, and right to the drink. It was white, weirdly thick and lumpy in appearance, and apparently tasted of steamed milk that had read about white chocolate on Wikipedia once. The merge that came with it tasted like sugar and nothing more. So… skip.

    Anyone try  the other ones? How is it?

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHiJPogpRi4

    Back in October, I did a reading of a chapter of City Without Heroes while I was at VCon. And now I’ve finally gotten around to cleaning up the audio and uploading it with all the stammering glory that comes from a first reading!

  • In my quest to do some personal and professional development this year, I’ve started looking into things like how to do more to treat writing and publishing like a business, and one of those things I need to work on is getting my newsletter ((Which you should definitely subscribe to! You’ll get a free book out of it right now!)) in order. Enter Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque.

    So I struggle a lot with my newsletter, as do a lot of other author folks I know. I don’t always know how to handle it, how I should think about it, and what exactly you do with it in general. This book was great to answer some of those questions that I’ve had.

    The book focuses a lot more on the philosophy of the mailing list. How to think of your list and your subscribers, and then taking that mindset and using it as a means of communication. It also gives a lot of interesting ideas for how to implement the ideas as well.

    Interestingly, it also uses some of the concepts in UX design ((I work as a programmer and UX dev, by the way)) like creating a specific user that you can then talk to, which I found particularly helpful to understand and, while it still hasn’t told me what I should be putting in the newsletter directly, it does help to guide what sort of content will go in there in the future.

    And, you know. Other super secret things. That you should subscribe to see.

    If you want to pick it up, Newsletter Ninja is on Amazon!

  • Dead Air is out now! Be sure to get your copy at your preferred ebook retailer or Amazon if you want paperback !

    Somehow, Harrison wasn’t dead. He wasn’t so sure about Max.

    Despite surviving his encounter with the newly reborn Luke, Harrison doesn’t have time to even process the loss of his boyfriend. The Harrish and Barrister Corporation, now under the control of the mysterious Doctor Gethen, has decided they must be brought back for further testing — permanently.  

    At least locked inside the walls of H&B, Harrison is safe from a resurrected Luke now hijacking Max’s body. Since coming back, Luke’s developed a desire to see Harrison dead, but there’s something  holding Luke back from finishing the job. It might be in his head, but Harrison swears he can still see just a glimmer of Max behind those eyes.

  • So apparently infographics are a thing! I’m currently working out how I can use them, and one of the first things I made was an infographic for White Noise. Enjoy!

  • Since folks seemed to like the past bunch, here’s a few more trading cards I made! These are for the Keepers, all the ones who were from the first round of testing and have now been brought back to work for H&B.

  • I picked up School of Sight back when I was at VCon directly from the author! Always exciting, and it was a reward for me once NaNoWriMo was over to finally dig into it. And it was definitely worth the wait!

    The book is about someone who has discovered that they have the sight and is being brought into the world of vampires, fairies, and werewolves just as a strange new force has entered the fray and is picking off the supernatural community one by one. The way the world is revealed is really well done, with a lot of things being presented as matter of fact and the perspective character just trying to keep on top of it while being fully aware of how lost they are. And they aren’t the only one, given that they live with two roommates who, honestly, take the news that the world is magic a lot better than they do. 

    Also, for folks like me, there’s a romance in it but it’s incidental to the narrative. The story is not and never becomes about the romance, which makes me so very happy. 

    You may have noticed I’m using they pronouns. There’s a reason for this. I never noticed it while I was reading it, but the main character’s name and gender is never actually mentioned. From other cues in the text, I think they are a male named Jose, but that’s largely based on very small hints and I can’t be sure. ((I may have to ask the author if this was an intentional choice or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention.)) The book does generally have a good dose of queer content, which I like. 

    On the negative end, I did find that the pacing was great until the end when all of the things happened and there were some conveniences that could have been brought up earlier. ((Like everyone’s birthdays? You could have mentioned that earlier so it didn’t seem so out of left field. On the other hand, it was mostly used for raising stakes that were never going to happen, so…)) There were a few concepts that I feel could have been brought up earlier so that it wasn’t all piled in at the very end to help smooth out that transition a little. 

    Overall, though, the ending wasn’t enough to deter me. It was more that it could have been done better than it was a detriment to the story as a whole. And the rest of the story made up for it, along with the world building. It was a lot of fun and I’d suggest reading it, though be aware that you might run into some issues talking about it. 

    Get School of Sight now!

  • https://youtu.be/hi7X6iDCN7s

    I tried making another trailer for White Noise! This is more for things like Facebook and whatnot, but let me know what you think and if there’s any other things you’d like to see video-wise from me.

    Coming up as soon as I have some time to fix the audio, I have a recording of the reading I did at VCon! Be sure to bother me until I get that up! 

  • Dead Air is now available for preorder!

    Somehow, Harrison wasn’t dead. He wasn’t so sure about Max.

    Despite surviving his encounter with the newly reborn Luke, Harrison doesn’t have time to even process the loss of his boyfriend. The Harrish and Barrister Corporation, now under the control of the mysterious Doctor Gethen, has decided they must be brought back for further testing — permanently.  

    At least locked inside the walls of H&B, Harrison is safe from a resurrected Luke now hijacking Max’s body. Since coming back, Luke’s developed a desire to see Harrison dead, but there’s something  holding Luke back from finishing the job. It might be in his head, but Harrison swears he can still see just a glimmer of Max behind those eyes.

  • I recently got it in my head to do some trading cards for various characters in White Noise, mostly because I thought it would be fun. And so I spent more time than I should have designing a card, looking for stock photos, and creating one for every character that is in the series. Well, the ones who do plot things, anyway.

    Here’s the main five! Let me know what you think. I’m thinking about what sort of things I can do with them.

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