Tanya Lisle

Author: Tanya

  • Things I have learned from the romance author community

    Things I have learned from the romance author community

    It’s Valentines season and I am not a romance person whatsoever. Still, I thought I should do something in the spirit of the season and to capitalize on the keywords, so I offer you this. I have been saying for years to anyone who asks that if you want to be a successful author, you should follow the romance author community because they have the business down. So here’s some takeaways I’ve gotten from following the community from afar.

    Networking with other authors

    Watching the majority of the community come together to lift up one another has been amazing over the years. This community was the one to introduce me to the idea of newsletter swaps, book boxes, and also inviting other people to Facebook launch parties in order to network and share audiences rather than compete over them. There’s a lot of this understanding that audiences are vast and there is no real competition—If someone gets one book, they are likely to get many books and you are not going to lose that reader if you showcase someone else once in a while.

    The power of branding

    Many of the authors in the community have such a solid, clear brand that it’s almost like they are able to step into being this completely different persona. I’ve seen successful authors exist on mostly a name and tagline without much social media presence, but their audience is still able to recognize their works at a glance. There’s a consistency that exists in some of these authors to be able to be their brand, whatever that brand is, and make that accessible to their audience in a way that still allows them to not have to share as much of their personal lives in order to promote themselves.

    It’s totally okay to be repetitive if that’s what the audience wants

    This is obviously not something that I am good at, but romance authors as a community understand that their audience wants to read those same, feel good stories over and over again. The way some of these authors have niched down so specifically and have made their whole career on what from the outside as someone who is not reading these books looks like the exact same story over and over again is fantastic. I have heard from other authors outside of the genre that they are worried about boring their audience, but romance authors know how to give their audience exactly what they are looking for.

    Just a lot of legal and PR stuff

    There is something about a community this large and public that brings to light some very interesting conflict, and I have learned a lot about things like what can and cannot be copywritten, how lawsuits around copyright work, and probably more than I needed to know about some of the darker sides of the community.

    There’s also how to handle various PR issues, such as unclear marketing, or how to handle taking a leave from social media and the community.

    Also, don’t write a character murdering their husband and then murder your husband.

  • How to be Everything review

    How to be Everything review

    I’ve gotten a bunch of book recommendations lately, and they all seem to be in a very familiar theme. Apparently I give off the vibe of someone who likes to do a lot and might have a career of doing a lot of things. Which, well, in the past decade I have been a community manager, retail employee, author, full stack developer, UX analyst, jewelry maker, zinester, product designer, and… no, I think Youtube was more than a decade back at this point. But they may have a point, so let’s check out some of these career books!

    How to be Everything is a book for something called multipotentialites, or people who have a lot of interests and are still trying to decide what they want to be in a world where the expectation is that there is only one answer to that. The argument here is that it’s okay to have a lot of different interests and there are different ways to make that work for you.

    What I found really interesting is that there is much acceptance that some people just don’t need their main source of income to be that thing that is fulfilling and you can use that as your source of income while you pursue your interests on the side without the money stress that might cause, which has been the thing that has ultimately made many of these kinds of books fall flat for me. It is only one of the four directions that is talked about, alongside a few other things I don’t often see such as building a career by pursuing several interests separately at the same time as a collection of part time jobs that add up to a full time income, or just letting yourself completely change careers as your interest wanes. It’s just not something that I see that often.

    I really enjoyed this book and I always appreciate a book that will acknowledge that it is not the one answer. The addition of nuance to the conversation and that different people are different was refreshing and, given I’m at a strange point of my career where I want to make some bad choices, I am going to actually try out some of the exercises in here to see if I can figure out what works well for me.

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  • 3 fantasy subgenres to try writing this year

    3 fantasy subgenres to try writing this year

    Magic is so much fun to write, but so often the conversation about fantasy ends up in one of two places: The traditional high fantasy space of elves and dragons and drama between rival nations, or that modern day urban fantasy where there are magical beings living alongside everyone else in secret.

    There are so many other types of fantasy subgenres that you can explore! Here are a few ideas to get you started if you’re looking to try something a little different.

    Folklore or Fairytale Fantasy

    These are stories based on traditional folktales, legends, and myths. They often include some reimagining or adaptation to bring it more to a modern audience. I tend to also think of stories that are based on non-western cultures that are brought to a western audience in this category as well.

    Examples: Gods of Jade and Shadow, Hoodoo

    Portal Fantasy

    These are stories in which the characters travel between different worlds or dimensions. Sometimes they can go back and forth between the worlds and sometimes they can’t.

    Examples: Return to Wonderland, Labyrinth Lost, Ten Thousand Doors of January

    Steampunk Fantasy

    These stories are set in a world that is powered by steam and clockwork technology. These don’t necessarily have a magic system, and sometimes the steampunk-inspired technology serves the purpose of magic in the story.

    Examples: City of Ember, Northern Lights

  • Shadow Stitcher review

    Shadow Stitcher review

    Have I had this book on my TBR forever? Yes. My bad! I got it with the intent to reward myself for finishing the trilogy with reading it and then, well, last year was not the best year for me in general. But I picked this up from a Pulp Lit event directly from the author and we had a great chat that had me excited for it.

    We follow Basil Stark, Captain Hook’s first mate and only surviving pirate who has now settled into the land of Everland, a place very different than Neverland was, and has been working as a private detective in a world of corruption and dark history. When the woman he’s been asked to track down turns up dead, he falls into a mystery involving magical research that they all thought had no merit and uncover some mysteries of the island.

    This was so much fun. With my brain, I can’t follow a lot of mystery stories well and I found that I was perfectly okay with just coming along for the ride without trying to keep track of the clues that had been laid throughout the story. Between the characters and the way the world came together around the central story, I was fully engrossed and wanting to keep going right until the end.

    I really loved it. It was so much fun, and I love a reimagining of a story. The choice to use an evolved Neverland as a backdrop to the story and taking inspiration from the original made for a lot of new ideas and it was a fantastic ride. Absolutely check it out.

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  • January stuff roundup

    I’m going to try to do this once a month now! Here’s all of the things I’ve released across all of the things this month!

    Handmade

    These items have been released on both of these shops:

    Scrap paper shop
    Etsy shop

    Redbubble

    The last of the patterns went up this month, and I’m out of art to put up for a little while as I start to try to write more!

    Medium

    Not really a release, necessarily, but I’ve been experimenting with Medium! I’ll be cross posting my old articles, but also doing a little experiment with trying to figure out what direction I want my career to go in!

    Check out Medium
  • Deep Work review

    Deep Work review

    I have an ongoing complaint with my day job that I have far too many meetings, many of which absolutely could be an email or done in a different manner that is not a meeting. This has prompted a friend of mine to introduce me to the concept of deep work and she has also now loaned me several Cal Newport books, so expect to see a few more thoughts about these reads to show up over the next little bit.

    Deep Work is the oldest of his books and it talks about how the best kind of work is deep work, which is done by taking long stretches of time being spent in deep concentration and working on something. He argues that shallow work—which requires less cognitive effort and focus—is… bad? He says there’s a place for it, but it does feel very much as if this kind of work is beneath him, as is social media and several other things.

    Like most books in this genre, it’s someone who has found the one thing that has worked for him and he insists that his way is the only way. There are some good ideas in here, but there’s an element of lecturing people for habits that he doesn’t approve of and making concessions if you must but you are not going to be as successful if you aren’t following this method.

    Overall, though, despite the voice of the author I did ultimately find some interesting ideas in this book. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t emphasize just completing tasks and looks more at how to cultivate your time to get a deeper understanding of something you’re interested in, this might be worth a read!

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  • 3 ways to use the real world to help your worldbuilding

    3 ways to use the real world to help your worldbuilding

    Creating fantasy worlds can be hard! There’s a lot to consider in universe building and trying to make your fictional world feel fantastical, but also ensure that the world itself does not become a distraction from the story you are trying to tell.

    Sometimes it’s a lot easier to make a believable fantasy world if you have some foundation in the world we know so that there’s something familiar to use as a benchmark. Doing this can help make sure that people can get pulled into the narrative rather than wonder about things that might not make sense about the worldbuilding.

    Here are a few ideas that you can use to help you figure out how to create that magical world that makes just enough sense by using the real world as a basis.

    Magic as a skill

    This one is a pretty common strategy. In the same way as you get better at art or education or physical activity with practice, magic can be like that. Some people start out naturally more gifted, but with work it can be built on and grow into specializations. Sometimes there are ways to artificially enhance those skills with outside forces, such as a drug or better tools.

    Royalty structure

    You do not need to make your own complicated way that power is passed from one person to another unless that is the point of your story. There are lots of different existing hierarchical structures that already exist in history that you can draw from, from the Thai monarchy to the British parliament. If you use something that already exists to form the structure of your royal family or how the government in your universe works, it has the added benefit of already having most of the rules in place in case you want someone to abdicate the throne or marry in!

    Foliage

    If you want to create some unique foliage for your world that still makes sense, there are some really weird plants out there. If you look up unique plants that currently exist in climates similar to the universe that you are making, then you can use those to pepper your world with your own versions of them that make more sense for how the universe works. Or you can just use them directly and give them some mystical properties, like I am definitely going to do with the Phantom Orchid in a future story.

  • Gods of Jade and Shadow review

    Gods of Jade and Shadow review

    I don’t remember when I put this on my holds list, but it has been on there for ages. Completely forgot about it when it finally showed up as available and I was anxious to find out what this story with the title that sounded like all the YA fantasy romance stories was about and why I would have put a hold on it.

    The story is set in the early 1900s and follows Cassiopeia, a young woman who is living out a Cinderella-like life in servitude to a family that doesn’t like her much. One day in defiance, she reaches into a forbidden chest in her grandfather’s room and awakens a god who takes her with him to retake his place as ruler of the Xibalba and overthrow the brother who imprisoned him in the first place. But his brother takes his own unwilling champion in Cassiopeia’s abusive cousin, Martin.

    This felt very much like a book I might be asked to read for class: One where I liked the read through of it on my own but I had this sense that there were deeper and very intentional themes littered throughout it that were meant to make me learn something. I couldn’t help but feel that my attempts to read it for fun were me reading it somehow incorrectly, but it’s not something that I think anyone else would experience when they read it.

    But I did like the world quite a bit. It was a fun look at what the Americas looked like early in the century, and how the mythology of the story could more easily mingle into the culture of the time and the place. The way the worlds were intertwined, despite them existing separately, creating a more ethereal feel to the story as a whole that I appreciated.

    Overall it was fun! I enjoyed the experience of reading it and I did think that it was an interesting look at other mythologies that I am not familiar with. I do like the stories about pantheons that mingle with humanity, however that happens, and this was a different take than what I’ve read before. If it sounds interesting, do check it out yourself!

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  • Guided character development workbook – Sneak peek

    Guided character development workbook – Sneak peek

    I am slowly working on a not so secret project. My newsletter has been aware of it for a while, but I’m ready to start showing off a little of it here! In addition to the existing workbooks, I’m starting to create some more guided ones as well. The first one will be around character development, and it will include a bunch of my process and how I tend to work with them.

    And so, have a sneak peek of what’s inside!

    So what exactly is a character?

    The Merriam Webster definition is: One of the persons of a drama or novel

    I find this definition to be limiting, given that not all characters are people and and not all stories are dramas or novels. Personally, I define a character as:

    A personality in a story that can hold a perspective. This is the core of who this character is as a person or woodland creature or supernatural entity. With that as a framework, I’ve found that you can create a more robust character.

    A character in a story typically though not always will also have a beginning state and and ending state, or where they are at the beginning of the story and where they end up at the end as a person. Or whatever kind of being you’ve decided to create. And that also goes for if they are dead in the end. These changes happen as a result of the events that you put them through.

  • Witch Haven review

    Witch Haven review

    Fiction, how I have missed you! And something about murder and magic, which is right up my alley in terms of stories that I am in the mood for of late! Like so many others, I do not remember adding this to my holds, but I was happy to have it to read as the weather took a very snowy turn.

    The book follows Frances, a young seamstress whose magic is awoken when she was assaulted by her boss late one night. She is quickly brought to Haxhaven, a school for witches disguised as an asylum for tuberculosis patients, where she is to learn to control her magic and use her powers only very quietly for housework because sexism. Frances grows frustrated by this and as soon as she has the opportunity, she starts to venture outside of the strict bounds of the school to start investigating the murder of her brother and gets wrapped up in a war between Haxhaven and the Sons, who want to use their power more brazenly for control.

    It’s a book that essentially is about finding yourself and being true to yourself, and that is generally the kind of thing I like. The pacing is pretty quick, and I do like that it winds and is not terribly straightforward with what the story is. New discoveries brought changes in what characters did next. I did think the romance elements ended up undermining Frances as a character to a degree, but I also just generally think most books would be better without the romantic subplot so I am aware I am alone in this.

    As for the social issues, I’m split on whether or not I like the handling of them. While the sexism felt appropriately woven in, some of the other issues like the racism felt more like it was nodded at without ever really being addressed. There were some characters that felt that their issues were added in as supplementary that didn’t feel like they added to the character or their story because those elements were never really explored and they continued to feel like characters that only really existed for the purposes of enabling Frances’ story.

    But overall, I did enjoy the read! It’s a fun look at a not too distant past and what the world had once been like through the fictional lens of how magic might have been treated and dealt with at the time. There’s a lot of loose ends, but I believe this is the first book and it may be explored more in the future.

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