Beth Alvarez's Blog, page 21

Tea Review: Adagio Caramel

Ahhhhh, caramel. This was the kind of experience I was hoping for when I tried the tiger eye blend that ended up being a little underwhelming.

From the moment I opened the pouch the caramel blend came in, I knew I was going to love it. I had some reservations about my tea time, since I was switching to using stevia and erythritol instead of straight sugar, because I like my drinks real sweet and that adds up to a lot of empty calories after a while… but I digress.

My mouth was watering the whole time this tea was brewing. The fragrance was magnificent and I couldn’t wait to get a taste. Even straight from the teapot, this was an absolute treat. Strong and smooth with warm and savory-sweet tones of caramel. I added very little sweetener, just enough to elevate the caramel flavor, and then added a teaspoon or so of milk to add a little creaminess. Bliss in a cup. Really.

This absolutely hit the spot for the caramel sweetness and delivered in every way I could have hoped, and I’ll be happy to add this one to my shelf of permanent additions.

Refreshing the old

Pretty soon after I started working on Her Midnight Hunter, I ran into the problem that I haven’t touched the series in several years, and my memory of events in the books were a little bit hazy. When I wrote Her Midnight Cowboy, I kept comprehensive notes in one of my personal sized planners. Then after the book was done, what brilliant thing did I do?

Threw them away.

Writing Her Midnight Wedding was no challenge, because I’d just done three books in the series back to back. When I picked up HMH again, I assumed the outline I’d written right after completing HMW would be enough to carry me through. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t, but I admit this is probably because of my very bad habit of having large chunks of outline that read simply “Things happen” or sometimes, less articulately, “???”

So, the project got delayed a little, because I had to go back and reread everything I’d done–and I do mean everything, because characters from Keeper’s Finder are present in HMH, too.

How could I possibly make this situation worse for myself?

Well… it’s hard for me to read without mentally editing (which is why it’s hard for me to find books I like!) and you can probably guess what that led to. Mental editing turned into real editing, which means the earlier books will end up getting a little extra polish along the way. Granted, that’s not a bad thing; the prose in those books is pretty different from the way I write now, as I’m older and more experienced, and I have worried the transition from old writing to new in HMH would be jarring. They won’t be substantial differences, but hopefully the places I’ve smoothed out the grammar and corrected a few lingering typos will help. There’s also formatting to consider–re-editing the books now means I can switch to using Vellum for formatting, which will make my life a lot easier in the long run.

All this just means that finishing HMH will take a bit longer than I expected, since I took myself off down a tangential side road. I think I’ll feel better for having done this, but it does mean I probably won’t hit my initial goal of getting HMH out by the end of September. Good thing I’m not doing a preorder for this one! As long as I get it out by Halloween, I’ll be happy…

Serpent’s Bane is now available

Today’s the day! Serpent’s Bane, the third book in the Snakesblood Saga, is out now.

You can get your copy on Kindle or in Kindle Unlimited–the print edition is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, and most other booksellers worldwide, and pretty soon, they’ll be available directly from me, too!

A woman forced to claim the throne. A man forced to flee it in exile.

Driven from his home by the war he couldn’t tame, Rune finds himself faced with two choices: serve the foreign land he’s imprisoned in, or die in arena combat. Desperate to return to the island’s aid, he’s willing to fight his fate until an unexpected ally promises the one thing Rune desires most—the chance to finally lift his curse.

As the fractures in Kirban Temple begin to heal, the promise of unity brings a new threat and draws simmering tensions to a new eruption. Without the Underling king at her side to quell it, Firal is forced to act alone—and fight the countless hands that pull the strings in effort to steal control of the island.

The adventure continues in Serpent’s Bane, the third book in the Snakesblood Saga.

Happy reading!

Free Silhouette divider tabs cut file

Short and simple: I bought a bin for small art prints and needed some tabs for the cardboard dividers between them.  I found lots of printable options, but none made it easy for me to change colors, and none made it easy to pop the thing into Silhouette Studio and make nice cuts. Print bleed wasn’t cooperating. So I opened Illustrator and drew my own tabs, then fixed it up in Silhouette Studio so it’s all set for my Cameo 3.

Pretty simple here: Print and cut on your cardstock or sticker paper of choice. If you want to change colors, just select the big box of color and change as you please. Or, delete the colors and use patterned cardstock to make things more interesting.

Click here to download the .studio3 file.

That’s all this time. It’s free. Hope someone finds it useful.

Tea review: Adagio Tiger Eye

When I opened up my Sweet Tooth Teas sampler, I showed my husband the options and asked him which I should try first. We both agreed that the Tiger Eye tea sounded delicious, so that was the first one to make it into my cup.

The Tiger Eye blend boasts chocolate and caramel, and the first thing I thought of was those little individually wrapped Godiva caramels I loved so much–and have missed terribly since the Godiva chocolatier near me closed. I was pretty eager to dive in and see the taste, which was…

…okay.

Honestly, I didn’t know what I felt about this tea. I thought it would be a lot sweeter, a lot more chocolatey, a lot more… more? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not a bad tea, but it didn’t blow me away like I expected. When tasted straight, it’s relatively bland, with the black tea overpowering everything else. With some sugar and milk added, it’s a lot more enjoyable, as that helps bring out some caramel notes. But it tastes less like the creamy caramel I was envisioning and more like burnt sugar caramel–which isn’t bad by any means, but it wasn’t what I expected or anticipated at all.

I’ve tried the tea twice more and while I do enjoy it, I always end up looking into my cup and wondering if I’m preparing it wrong, because while it’s pleasant, it’s not exactly remarkable. Good, pleasant, definitely something I’d put out on my table for friends to sample at a tea party, but it didn’t wow me, either. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for this one? Hard to say.

Either way, there aren’t a lot of teas that fall into the “eh, it’s okay” category for me, but this one did. Hopefully the rest of the box will be a bit more impressive.

Tea break

I knew when I got back to writing new stories, I’d want some tea to go with them. I perused my tea cabinet and found a few things I liked, but nothing that quite satisfied what I wanted. I’d been wanting to order some more Second Breakfast fandom blend from Adagio, so I figured it was time to go ahead and order that–and a few extras.

It’s also been a while since I had anything new. I love sweet teas, so I decided to grab the Sweet Tooth Teas sampler. I was delighted to see the order came with lots of extras, too.

I’d been looking to try an oolong for a while, and I was excited to see a vanilla oolong sample available. There’s also a birthday tea, a white peach sample, and a box of special community blends specifically for this week. Those probably won’t get an individual taste test review, since they’re unique to each day of the week and unlikely to be available, but the experience is certainly interesting.

Regardless of freebies, though, I’m staying focused on what I requested first, and there’s something about chocolate and caramel that seems to go perfectly with vampire stories, which makes it a perfect beverage of choice while I’m working on Her Midnight Hunter. The book has been slow going so far, but it’ll be out soon, one way or another.

On that note, it’s probably a good time for me to go ahead and mention that after HMH comes out, the Keeper’s Kin series will be finishing its stint in Kindle Unlimited and will be made available with other retailers, such as Nook, Kobo, and Apple. So if you’re a KU reader, better give it a go now–by the end of the year, the books won’t be available that way anymore!

New covers for the Keeper’s Kin

Now that the final Keeper’s Kin installment is officially underway, it meant it was time to put together a cover… and why not freshen up the series while I’m at it? So I went back to the drawing board and started over fresh with the trilogy, putting together updated covers for Her Midnight Cowboy and Her Midnight Wedding, as well. Last week, they began quietly rolling out, as it takes time for new covers to appear.

Covers for these have always been a challenge, because they’re cross-cross-genre. Paranormal romance is easy, cowboy romance is easy, vampires are easy, but how do you put them all together? Western paranormal romance trends heavily toward werewolves. Western vampire paranormal romance unfortunately… doesn’t really exist. In the years since I started this series, I only ever found three other books that sort of touched on the same subjects.

That’s a very small niche.

Regardless, it’s good for a designer to stretch their ability to fit book covers into unusual genres, and I’m content with the way these new covers look. Maybe you’ve seen a couple of them already. But the last one, the cover for Her Midnight Hunter, has nowhere to be shown but here.

Ready? Here’s all three:

And yes, this means this is serving as the official cover reveal for Her Midnight Hunter!

These new covers should show up everywhere soon, if they haven’t already… and the preorder for HMH will be up in early September.

More soon!

Revisiting the world of Keeper’s Kin

Over the past couple months, I’ve mentioned in passing that I’d be working my way back to completing the last book in my Keeper’s Kin core trilogy. Actually getting back to it and making the choice to follow through has been something else entirely.

I’m a big believer in finishing what you start, but let me be honest up front–if not for the book already being halfway done and me just needing to finish what’s already most of the way there, I probably wouldn’t come back to it. There are a lot of reasons it would be smarter to put the book aside, really. For one, it became evident pretty early on from the overall negative reception of the series that the things I like in the vampire/PNR genre as a reader aren’t what other readers enjoyed. Those were the things I focused on in my work and it didn’t go well. But I don’t see a lot of point in writing something that suits someone else’s taste and doesn’t bring me enjoyment, so I wasn’t going to change the way I was doing things.

It’s also not a book that’s going to do anything for my author platform, because I don’t have plans to write any more paranormal novels after this one. Fantasy has always been what I enjoyed most, it’s what I’m best at, and it’s what seems to finally be working for me as an author. Readers seem to be enjoying my fantasy stories, and I’m definitely enjoying writing them a lot more.

It’s also not really wise to invest much time or effort into a series that doesn’t sell. I won’t get a return on investment with this one. Not the money it’ll cost to produce, and not the time it will take to write it. On top of all those reasons, I’m a better writer now than I was when the previous Keeper’s Kin books were written. I’ve learned a lot about story structure and even just grammar since 2016, when I decided to start that story world.To make the series into something presentable, I’d need to go back and start with Keeper’s Finder, then work my way through the two existing Midnight books to improve sentence structure and correct grammatical issues and just… overall bring the books up to my current level of writing. However, that would be an enormous investment of time, and once again, there’s not going to be a return on that effort.

But, like I said, I’m a big believer in finishing what you start.

The plot threads I started with this story adventure have been hanging in my head for years and it would be nice to get them out. I’ll feel better if I wrap up all the things I left hanging, so I’ll be skimming through the first half of Her Midnight Hunter, fixing what I can, and resume writing the story on August 1. I’ll be giving the Midnight books new covers, too, so that they’ll hopefully more clearly portray what readers can expect from the story. Then I’ll release the last book into the wild this fall, letting it slowly and peacefully fade away into the background as I move on to the stories that excite me most now.

I’d previously split my email newsletter in two, dividing content between paranormal and fantasy, but I’m going to do away with that divide too. I haven’t had anything new to send to paranormal readers for a few years, so when HMH is finished and on its way, I’ll send a notice to the paranormal side letting them know they can switch to receiving updates about my fantasy stories… then I’ll erase that list.

I’m excited to get it wrapped up and be done, to fulfill the obligations I gave myself when I began the series and then let go. It feels like freedom, you know?

Cover reveal: Serpent’s Bane, book 3 of the Snakesblood Saga

After the release date for this one was pushed back, I worried a lot about whether or not that was the right decision. After having plenty of extra time to prepare for the release, I’m confident it was. The extra month gave me the opportunity to polish the book even more, and now we’re almost there.

So here we go: The cover for the third book in the Snakesblood Saga, Serpent’s Bane!

A warning, though–the book description below it may contain small spoilers for the previous books. Read at your own risk.

Learning to set goals with limited time

Q3 of 2020 started a week ago, and while it’s hard to believe it’s here, it also feels like this year has been an eternity long. I know I’m not alone when I say this year has been weird. Since it became clear early on that I wasn’t going to get a whole lot done this summer. I’d planned for it, but a lot of my plans got upended, and… yeah. You know the rest.

I managed to stick to my plan for the first half of the year, and that was honestly a big surprise to me, too. I previously wrote about how Q3 would see things slowing down a lot: right now, I’ve got edits for Serpent’s Bane (Snakesblood book 3) underway and will be sending the files for book 4 off before the week is out. Book 3 has a tentative release date of August 29 at this point in time. But before I get the book out there, I have to get final edits done.

How do you plan and set goals when you have such limited time? That’s been the biggest challenge for me. Being used to having a certain number of hours in the day where I can work, and then suddenly having a fraction of that. About a quarter of that. On good days, anyway–on bad days, I might not have much time to work at all.

So how do you get things done?

You let them go.

Counter-intuitive, I know, but my to-do list has continued to shrink in hopes of getting it to fit into my limited work time. It still doesn’t fit, which means more has to be dismissed, but we’ll get it sorted out.

I don’t have as much time as I want, I don’t have as much time as I need, but I still have time to make things happen–the important part is finding which things can be done in what limited time I have. My kanban board has helped with that, as has my planner, because I keep big lists of the things I need to do. Any time I have ten, fifteen minutes to spare, I save myself time by already having a list of small tasks that I can address, and those little tasks will add up to big results eventually.

Have fifteen minutes before everyone else gets up? That could be half a page of editing, or a handful of invoices sent. Five minutes during lunch? That’s enough time to do some needed research or reply to messages.

Through it all, my phone has been my most useful tool (but RIP my battery!) because it lets me multitask, to an extend. Got studying to do? Turn on a Bluetooth speaker and listen to a podcast in the shower. Need to write a book blurb? We can tap that out in the Notes app while pushing a little one on a swing.

Of course, that’s less useful for editing books or filming videos, which is why July is sort of a catch-up/take-a-break month.

I’m still setting goals, but they’re small ones.

Finish editing that book.

Try to balance the checkbook this month instead of vaguely knowing that I’m putting in more than I’m taking out.

Ship all those signed books.

Catch up on work I owe other people.

This unfortunately means my doll projects (and as a result, YouTube videos) are taking a back seat. I’m still filming stuff, but I’m working a bit slower as I knock out some big jobs, and I’ll resume doing videos some time in August.

If school doesn’t go back to normal,  my work schedule won’t, either, and I can’t see that happening. So for August and September, I’ll need a whole new system to deal with things, and I’m open to suggestions for making that happen.

Right now, though… my 15 stolen minutes are up, and there’s laundry that has to be folded.