I’ve always been really bad at figuring out what other books my books are like. I tend to want things to match too closely in order to keep people from being disappointed that the story isn’t enough like the one that they originally read. But I finally have a comp title!
Children who are not over the other worlds that they went to
Parents who are not happy that their children are not over the other worlds they went to and want them to go back to normal dammit
A character with personal space and boundaries issues that talks in riddles
Oh hey look, there’s horror in this!
I’m just happy that I finally have at least one answer to that question. If you liked these elements of Every Heart a Doorway, check out Return to Wonderland! I suppose I should probably also mention Alice in Wonderland as another title that goes well too, but somehow that
Honestly, though, this whole post is an excuse to show that picture of my cat.
Check it out, it’s the first traditionally published fiction book of the year and one with some asexual representation! Not only that, but it’s about a school full of kids who went to another world and had to come back to their own world and didn’t adjust well to it, which I may have some thoughts on. So going into it, I was pretty excited.
The story follows Nancy as she’s brought to a boarding school where she and several other girls who have traveled to other worlds are given a place to remember where they were and acknowledge that it did happen while their parents get to think that they’re getting counselling to understand that it was all an elaborate delusion.
As a premise, I love it. A lot of the characters were interesting and I found myself interested in the worlds that they came from and how they were coping with the fact that they probably couldn’t go back. Going into the world and understanding where the characters were coming from was interesting. I did enjoy the dynamic between most of the cast and how their experiences interacted with one another.
The ending, though. That ending. It’s one of those things where it just kind of happens more than it’s built up towards. None of the characters really change or grow as a result of it and everything is wrapped up a little too neatly.
Spoiler
Jack was just always able to go back? Really? And who didn’t see that someone was building a perfect key as soon as Sumi’s hands disappeared? You only needed hands, eyes, a brain, and a pretty person to build the perfect key? Plus, Nancy learns something by way of reading a note that Sumi left for her? That whole ending is just so unsatisfying.
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Now. The ace rep. It’s interesting to see how other people do it. This makes this book the second one I’ve seen and this one treats it very differently than the last one I read. Nancy knows going in and the first conversation where it’s brought up feels very unnatural. It’s smoother in the rest of the book, but that first conversation with Sumi feels really awkward, kind of like it was put in there purely so that they could get the word in there, and some of the other mentions feel a bit off. For a book with almost no mentions of people being in relationships, Nancy brings up sex in her internal monologue more often than feels natural in order to reinforce that she’s ace.1
I feel like the trans rep might have been done better with Kade, but I can’t really say definitively on that front.
Overall, though, I did enjoy it. Apparently it’s a series, but the first book stands well enough alone that I probably won’t go back to it this year.
I’ve been having far too much fun making some quote graphics. They get posted to the social media accounts, but for anyone who is only following the blog, here’s the ones from White Noise!
Keeping on brand, I went to a high tea place that is very inspired by Alice in Wonderland with just that bit of Lovecraft. This place is actually right by the day job and I’ve been staring at it for ages, but I finally managed to get a bunch of other people to come with me to go check it out.
This is an experience. I feel like that’s something to know going in. You’re going in so that you can have something cool to take photos and post to various social media afterwards. There’s an aesthetic to the place and the food that means you’re in part paying for the ability to take photos of cool looking stuff.
But the food isn’t bad! At least, I didn’t find it that bad. It’s a strange mix of flavours and a lot of them are a lot stronger than I was expecting. I remember mostly the egg cracker, which was a black rice cracker, quail egg, caviar, and roe, mostly because roe has an aftertaste that I’m not a fan of. The other strange one of note was the chocolate tart with a smokey cream on top that tastes almost like bacon, which was very strange and a little unsettling for the vegetarian in the group.
They can, on that note, change things to be vegetarian if you give them a little warning in advance! We did not, but they did try to accomodate us anyway as best they could.
Overall, I really did enjoy the experience.1 It was fun to go to and there was a lot of really cool things to check out. Even the bathrooms are decorated in the aesthetic and it was a lot of fun.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I finally decided to redo a couple of the covers for The Looking Glass Saga. I thought the Cheshire Cat should look a little more like how I imagine him on the first one and that there should be something more of a dragon on the second one given how prominent a role he plays in that book.
Let me know what you think! And I’d advise checking out the newsletter for some upcoming polls about the cover art in the future.
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.1 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.2 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.3 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?
It’s also not far from the office, which is helpful [↩]
Activated charcoal, the thing that makes things black, tends to also interact very badly with medications [↩]
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 design1 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.
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!
