Tanya Lisle

  • First and foremost, Will Novak is out of the picture! YAY! You didn’t have a personality, so I’m not going to miss you now that you’re gone! Also, apparently the quickest way to make a guy dump you is to reach into a zombie and rip it apart with your bare hands in front of him. Good information for you all.

    It’s about bodies that show up in the Underground, which is where Seattle’s homeless live, and those bodies belong largely to Seattle’s homeless population. As it turns out, there’s also a monster that is eating people that is not a vampire.

    This story strikes me as interesting in that it’s about the homeless population of Seattle and it seems a lot less judgmental or preachy about the situation. Quinton is among the population, though has converted a forgotten room under some stairs into a bachelor ((That may or may not have a washroom, I legitimately don’t remember)) and is there willingly because he wanted to drop off the grid. Others are there for a variety of reasons and there’s never this push for them to get a job or that they’re a scourge on society, nor is there a message that they are all these poor unfortunates that should be pitied for their situation. Everyone is a person in a rough situation and it’s nice.

    Speaking of Quinton, guess who’s ship just became canon! ((Mine. It’s my ship.)) I am a little iffy on the timing, but I’m a lot happier with this relationship because he’s much more on her level with the magic stuff. he can’t do any of it, but he can come up with logic about it based on his own experiences and he’s not going to absolutely refuse it. They can talk and communicate about the important things going on in their lives, which makes this a far more healthy relationship.

    The eventual monster is not vampires, though the vampires are still very much a presence in the book. Instead it’s something a little more local. There’s a nice use of Native American mythology in the story as well as Native characters. I have no idea how accurate any of it is, but I do wonder if Harper will continue to use feathers in her arsenal in the future. That one seemed incredibly useful.

    And then the story gave me a year. Don’t say 2005. Harper just got a flip phone. ((I assume it’s a flip phone.)) She doesn’t appear to know what the internet is, despite it being her job to be an information broker of sorts. It just can’t be 2005. If it were, I’d be seriously questioning why she doesn’t at the very least google ((Or Yahoo!)) the name “JJ Purlis” before asking her boyfriend about his top secret past and taking it completely at face value. Is it because you want to [insert cheesy sex euphemism here] with him?

    Come to think of it, Harper hasn’t done a single background check on a boyfriend yet. The woman, who works as a PI and apparently has a history of rough boyfriends, not at least looking up something to make sure her potential mates don’t have a violent crime history or personal attachment to a previous case she worked on at the very least strikes me as weird. Then again, I have googled my friends’ dates to make sure they aren’t crazy before they go out with them. If I continue to assume this takes place in a world before Google, ((And assume that 2005 was a typo)) I can kind of forgive it.

    Guess who isn’t there for the climax this time! That’s right, no calling in Carlos! Instead she nearly gets a Dazinger killed, but you knew he wouldn’t die. ((If he did, she couldn’t call up Mara to constantly ask about magical stuff!)) She handles this one pretty much on her own, which was exactly what I wanted to see.

    [AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”0451462831″]

  • This one was so much better than the last one. There was a focus to the whole thing and not nearly as much of this things happening because they needed to happen. There was a much better balance struck between the case and everything else happening in Harper’s personal life. It’s also nice to know that she does have friends, though at this point, I wondered if those were one off characters.

    This time around, Harper is trying dealing with an experiment at a local university where they have accidentally made a poltergeist that is now killing people in the group that created it. It’s an interesting concept and there is an actual mystery in it because she is trying to figure out who did it without using a lot of physical evidence because the murder weapon is a ghost made by the group that leaves no trace.

    You know what helps this book a lot? There is only one case. The jumping back and forth was what made the last book such a mess, and there’s none of that now. It read more like a mystery than the last one and I was actually trying to figure out who did it by the end of the book. ((I was also right, which was awesome.))

    What doesn’t help is the thing I don’t like about mystery novels. There are always sections of it where the protagonist steps back and thinks through the facts, putting together the clues in a way that makes sense. These monologues need to happen, but they always throw me in a story and I find myself tuning out despite these arguably being the most important parts. They always feel like recaps and I’ve just read that in full detail several pages ago. Why didn’t you tell me this then, even though you had absolutely no reason to put it together until right now? ((This is probably the reason I’ve never really gotten into murder mysteries or cop shows for very long.))

    The magic of the series is getting explained to a bit of a strange degree, though. There’s always something that makes me nervous about doing that because there’s too much opportunity to write yourself into a corner and have to completely break your own rules about your universe in order to make the story continue to work. ((Being on the sixth book now, this does not happen. The whole thing works out really nicely.))

    I also wonder if calling Carlos is going to be a thing. She calls the Dazingers as soon as she needs a magical problem solved, but is she going to need Carlos for every climax? I get that she deals in ghosts, but is the necromancer going to be necessary all of the time? I might be more okay with it if the description didn’t always talk about how intimidating he felt, ((Admittedly necessary)) but I kind of want to see Harper actually take a climax n her own.

    Lastly, let’s talk about Will Novak. He is bland. He is female love interest bland. They seem to be together entirely for the [insert cheesy sex euphemism here] and nothing else. He doesn’t know about her world and doesn’t want to. This is not a good foundation for a relationship. At this point, I’m kind of shipping Harper/Quinton just because they seem to be a better match.

    [AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”0451461754″]

  • So I have started to binge-read all of the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson based on a friend’s recommendation of the series. I am now on book 5 of it, so I figured I’d go back and go through my thoughts of the previous books as I keep going.

    Fair warning, there’s not going to be a lot of recap in these so much as my thoughts about books and elements of the book. If you wanted to know more about what actually happens in them, I do suggest reading them. Or, you know, finding someone who reviews in a much more standard fashion.

    The first book in the series has Harper Blaine, our heroine, dying and coming back changed. Now she can see into the Grey and not only can she spot a ghost, they can see her. Also there’s vampires, which is much more important to one of the cases at hand.

    This was messy. It’s the first book in the series and there’s a lot to set up, but it’s really messy. Harper is working on two cases that I knew would eventually tie into one another because I have read a novel before, but that connection doesn’t happen until the last 10% of the novel. Up until then, it feels like there’s two separate cases, one of which ends up with its very own romantic subplot spin off that isn’t even related to the case.

    The three plots running through this were: Trying to find an old antique for a mysterious client, finding a runaway college student that turns out to be a vampire, and a romance with Will Novak. Besides Will Novak being the least important, ((Because I don’t care)) I’m not sure which takes precedent in this book. The vampire plot line has more to do with the long term arc, but the antique is also given a lot of weight. Like, much more weight than necessary, despite its involvement in the conclusion.

    Most of the events are presented as things that happened as opposed to things that lead into one another as well. Because there are two completely separate cases tied together by individual characters, there’s a lot of jumping back and forth between all the plots and there’s never any real parallel between them. One doesn’t present a lead for the other, and there are some scenes that seem to just come out of nowhere, happen, then never get touched on again. ((Until much later. Like, other books later.))

    Harper’s newfound abilities with the Grey are all right. She is pointed to a witch who can help her understand what’s happening to her by a medical doctor, because you know medical doctors are totally into explaining things away with witchcraft, and she doesn’t go through a long process of denying it, which is good. She is frustrated by it frequently, but that doesn’t stop her from believing it’s happening, which is a nice change from some other stories where the protagonist will deny it until they are forced to accept it.

    It is nice that the story takes place in a real time and place, though. Seattle feels vivid and like it probably really is. ((For some reason I’ve never been. It’s not even that far away, so I don’t know why.)) I do wonder if that’s hammered in a little too much because she drinks coffee as her only beverage ever, ((A thing I have never encountered before, but I do know the stereotype about Seattle and their coffee)) but after a while I figured it was a character trait. Harper also uses a pager and has no cell phone, so you know this story probably happens in the early to mid-nineties, which I can still kind of remember.

    Overall, it was on the low end of okay. The biggest problem was that it was messy and the twist at the end seemed like it was pulled out of nowhere despite the fact that I know there was build up to it throughout the novel. Everything just felt so disjointed that I couldn’t really put the pieces of the story together until I thought of them as entirely separate stories.

    [AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”B002361LF2″]

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6BObXvdnYE

    So over the weekend, I decided that instead of working on the rewrite, I would make a Vine-length book trailer, despite not having Vine. Apparently they’re like advertising or something. Enjoy!

  • I got White Noise fanart. This is Jaime, drawn by Lozchic.

    ^5B48301BB585BAB6426697384487B5AAAB7F3BB452AD7E5306^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr

    She wants none of it. And I am ecstatic! ((LOOK AT IT! This is the best thing!)) 

    That is all.

  • The first proof arrived almost a week early. It was a great start, or so I thought. I was working form home that day because I caught a flu ((Which is still going, might I add. I will be sick forever.)) and was able to get it without going to pick it up. I waited until 5 to open it and it was more exciting than Christmas. Which is only relevant because it was the start of December at the time.

    It looked amazing. At first. The front was great and the matte felt great in my hands. It smelled like a book. And then I turned it around. The spine was a little off, but that’s okay. I knew about the 1/8″ slip and I measured. It was exactly that much of a slip, so it was fine. And the back cover looked good too, so I was generally pretty happy.

    Well, until I started reading it through.

    Those notes? Every one a thing I had to change. Missed orphans. Places where the spacing looked weird. Typos. Grammar. All the things I thought I had gotten the first few times going through it, and there were still little things that needed fixing.

    But it was all little stuff. I fixed them all in both the InDesign document and in the eBook at the same time and uploaded the new versions. I also changed the finish to glossy because, as much as I loved the feel of the matte, it smudged and got dirty like crazy with a white cover. The pages, as well, were very white and didn’t feel like a book in the way I was used to. I went back through my stack of reference novels and noticed they all had more cream pages, so I changed that as well.

    Time for the second proof.

    They were a little lighter in the cover than I thought they would be. I darkened it with filters in the photo, but the grey was just a bit too light for my liking. The problems in the book, though, those were mostly fixed. The glossy worked better, as did the cream pages, but I didn’t check the spine alignment on the digital proofer this time, thinking everything would be the same as before. I was… very wrong. But, since I was changing the colours on the cover anyway, I went back through and made more adjustments to the spine.

    Proof copy three. Here’s hoping this time?

    One thing I will say is that throughout this whole thing, shipping has not only been good, it’s been amazingly fast. The slow option took maybe a week all of these times so far. On top of that, this version of the books looked great. No orphans left and after reading it through hundreds of times to the point where I was unable to see anything wrong with it anymore, I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it. And on top of that…

    … the spine finally lined up!

    In chronological order. You can see how off the spine has been so far. It was pretty awful. You can also see that 6×9 as a size is much larger than most of the books on my shelf. At this point, I’d put so much work into it that I couldn’t go back. The ISBN was assigned to the size. I’d make a smaller one later when I was more comfortable with everything. When I could pay for moor proof copies with the income from this book! ((Such wishful thinking on my part…)) It’s the size of Name of the Wind on the next shelf down, as well a few other scattered books I have, so it didn’t bother me.

    I looked through it yet again. A few times. I showed it to the girls at work, both designers, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. That night when I got home, I decided to publish it. I have a coupon for two free books from finishing NaNoWriMo, so I go ahead and order those as well.

    2 hours after deciding to do that, I got a message pointing out something…

    Screenshot_2015-01-07-15-10-02

    Dammit.

    So of course, I immediately get it all changed and get the new version. I’ve learned at this point that Createspace usually gets back on approvals in 12 hours on changes to interior files and less on cover changes. I get it changed and breathe a sigh of relief.

    Which brings us to now. I have received my free books ((It took UPS a week and a half while I called over and over to find out what was happening)), and they have the right back cover! White Noise the physical copy is now for sale at Createspace and on Amazon.

    I think I’m going to wait a little while before I do this again. It’s been an interesting journey so far, but I think that’s enough for a little while. Time to start looking at what I’m going to write next.

  • It was late November. I had just finished writing two books for NaNoWriMo ((Escaping Reality and a Looking Glass book)) and I had promised that I was going to take the rest of the month and all of December off of writing to keep myself from completely burning out. I was already really close to burning out as it was, so it was a good idea to take a bit of time off.

    But this is me. I don’t do time off very well.

    I don’t know why, but I got it in my head that I wanted to turn White Noise into a print book. I have wanted to make a print version of my books just for that aesthetic. I like holding books and I love the smell of a book, so I wanted that for my own works as well. Since I promised that I wouldn’t be doing any more writing, I figured that now was the perfect time to start working on creating something that I always wanted. I’d just finished White Noise and I already designed the spine and back cover back in October, after all, so why not this one?

    Luckily, I’d already been playing around in InDesign for a while, so I had a general sense of my way around. I pulled out novels from my shelves and made a pile of them by my desk as I started looking for fonts and tried to remember every gripe my designer friends and classmates had about text on a page. I tried to get rid of any orphans and widows ((Single words on a line and single lines on a page)) that I could find. I adjusted my spacing and rewrote little things so that the lines looked better.

    And then I chose my fonts ((Chaparral Pro and Bebas Neue)) and I had to lay everything out all over again. Choose your fonts first.

    I went with a 6×9 layout because that was the recommended size by Createspace and, now that I had all of my documents ready, I was able to start uploading all of my documents. It was exciting. I had checked everything and rechecked it. Everything was going to be great. I’d get one proof copy and it would be perfect and that would be all. I uploaded the cover and the interiors and I waited for them to approve it and get to the stage where I could order my first proof. I obsessed over the description for a while, I selected a matte cover finish, ((Because matte is awesome)) but there was something wrong.

    Here’s a tip about Createspace. For those who are using Createspace for the first time and you’re wondering why your interior file still needs approval, open up the Digital Proofer. There’s a big blue button at the bottom that says Save and Continue. You have to press that before it will approve your interiors.

    Once that was sorted, I looked through their digital proofer. From here, you get to see how the spine is aligned and the spine was a little off. Cue making little adjustments to it, uploading it and waiting until Amazon approved the new version before I could actually check it for myself. The biggest downside of this whole process really is this part right here. You have to upload a cover and get it approved by someone on Amazon’s end before you can check the alignment yourself. But a few tries later, I finally get it ready. It’s approved. The spine looks good.

    Time to get my first proof copy.

Join 900+ subscribers

Stay in the loop with everything you need to know.

Sign up