A Family Newsletter

The sky is the color of a used eraser and the roads are sludgy and Sullivan has mysterious red spots all over the palms of his hands so I kept him home from school today. It's nap time; Scarlett's sleeping and Sully's curled up in my bed watching Paw Patrol. I'm in the living room at my desk with a cup of coffee and massive blanket and leftover Halloween candy. I've lit a candle for maximum Hygge. People swear by lighting a candle.
I've now lit a second candle because the first one wasn't doing anything for me.
I'm giving the candles a moment to kick in.
Okay, well, I'm feeling no effect from the candles, but the blanket is nice.
It's been a long time since I've blogged about something other than publishing (I guess the last time would've been in June when that guy tried to break into our house in the middle of the night), and I enjoy stream-of-consciousness writing, like in the good old days of blogging, so here's that. In fact, maybe I'll reach even further back in time and do, like, an old-school family newsletter-type blog post. The kind your family got in the mail in the 90s from your mom's friend whose kids are around the same age as you—who she says you were besties with when you were two and she's shocked you can't remember them because you loved each other so much it was adorable—but, really, you were two.
Here goes:

Life is quiet lately. Barclay's first full landscaping season (which went swimmingly, I thought) is finally starting to wind down; he's got a few projects to finish up and then we're into snow clearing days—which means that we get to see him more, but also that I get a bit of time to leave the house and work during the day, which I'm excited for. I like being a stay-at-home mom, but I also really like working and letting Barclay be at home with the kids. Plus, the winter schedule means I get my evenings off (*trumpets*). In the summer, because I don't really get to work during the day, I generally work from 7 pm until...whenever I can afford to go to sleep. In the winter, I get to watch Netflix and read books in the evenings and hang out with people. It feels amazing. Balance, you guys. Totally underrated. I'm working on book three, but it's not under contract so I have a bit of room to breathe and not run myself into the ground over it (again).
Sullivan's in kindergarten now. That's weird. He loves it, which is great. Generally, he's really nervous about new people and new situations, so I was fully prepared for the kindergarten experience to be...hard. To put it lightly. But on his first day, Sully just hugged me goodbye and disappeared into the school with all these kids and teachers he'd never even seen before. I could tell he was nervous but he just did it. I, obviously, burst into tears and another mom came over and said stuff to me like, "It's hard, isn't it? When they don't need you anymore?" and "He'll be okay; this school is so great." And I was crying so hard I couldn't talk so I just fanned my face like I'd just won a beauty pageant and nodded like I was sad that he didn't need me anymore or like I was worried about him. But the truth was, I was so proud of him, and that was it. He's still into drumming and pretending to be an adult man for hours at a time.
Scarlett and I are spending a lot of one-on-one time together, and that's good too. I mean, she's pretty cranky about not being allowed to go to kindergarten and even more cranky about not having Sully around, but I can tell she also likes having the house (and me) to herself. She's talking so much now and her most frequently used phrase is, "Oh! I love that!" or, when she's eating, "This is a happy meal!" (Even if it's not actually a Happy Meal™.)
That's...basically it. I know my newsletter skills hardly rival that of a legit 90s mom, but maybe that's okay? It's really not a fair fight anyway, since you can't use your fancy Stampin' Up scissors on the edges of a blog page.

Goodbye, Proofreads!

Well, that's that: I've sent off my final proofreads for Sorry I Missed You. This is the part where my editor politely pries my fingers off my manuscript and gives it to lots of other people and I try my best to distract myself from all of the untapped possibilities still in there. You know when you read a book and you think, "I wish the author would've explored that concept more" or "I needed more closure on this one storyline" or "I loved the whole book except this part..."?

Welcome to my entire life.

If they would've let me, I would've edited Valencia and Valentine for fifty more years. Same with Sorry I Missed You. I think you kind of need to be a chronic over-thinker in order to write a novel, but dang. It makes it almost impossible to let go of the thing. Especially since you write a book over the course of many months (or years, in my case) and you change as a person as you're writing. You meet new people and experience new things and life happens to you and around you, to your friends and on the news. And every time you return to these fictitious people, you can't help but want to teach them what you're learning, or introduce them to people you've met, or put them through something you're going through just so you can write it out. You gain empathy and perspective, and you want to put that in there, too.

I suppose it's good that I have people who pull this stuff out of my hands at some point—people I trust, who care a lot (my editor, for example, just emailed me about a missing comma; I love her) and who won't put it out there before it's ready.

So anyway. Those are off. ARCs are in production and the book wheels are in motion. I'm starting to work on marketing and publicity stuff. They tell me I need to make a street team (do you want to be on my street team? Apply within). The book comes out in a little over seven months.

Now, my most immediate job is housework.

You know how authors' houses in movies are just indoor junkyards? That's so accurate. If my kids are sleeping, I am working. My office is in the living room. I'm not sure when anyone expects me to do, like, housewifing. So I step over the piles of stuff, I move the piles of stuff, I sit on and amongst the piles of stuff. The piles of stuff grow and multiply and become cognizant and develop charming personalities and we give them names and they become part of the family. It's quite something.

So now that I have a little break from deadlines and contracts, I am going to take care of that. Goodbye, piles of stuff! Goodbye, Gretched and Larrin and Marvit! (My three favorite piles of stuff.)

Goodbye, blogworld! (Until next time.)

A COVER REVEAL! And So Many Other Words

At last, I get to share the cover for my second book. But first! Preamble!

Obviously.

This book is nothing—at all—like Valencia and Valentine. I just feel like I need to say that. People have asked if it's a sequel, or if it has similar themes, characters, anything—nope. But I did write both books, so it will bear a certain family resemblance, I'm sure. Personally, I think this one's funnier. Lighter. Fewer people die in it.

I got the idea for this one when I was out for a walk with Sullivan a few years ago. I'd recently finished writing Valencia and Valentine but I was not finished writing, period, if you know what I mean. I still wanted to sit at my desk and make stuff up, but I had no story. I had no characters, no hooks, no settings. So I put Sullivan in a wagon and I literally went out to find a story to write.

Sullivan loved that wagon; I could've walked for days with him happily reclining in there, watching the houses roll past—which was good, because I walked for probably two hours before I found this story. It was on a street full of old houses and mature trees that stretched their branches over the road like they were holding hands with each other, completely blocking the sky. I stopped in front of this massive white house with a creaky porch and three mailboxes. And I thought, this house looks like it's haunted, and also, I wonder if the people who live here get along with each other.

And then I thought about how fun it might be to write about a haunted house, and about tenants who are very different from each other and have nothing in common except this one thing: they all live in a haunted house. And then I thought about a friend of mine who'd recently suddenly stopped talking to me for no reason, and about a conversation I'd had with a different friend about that experience, about being "ghosted." And I thought that maybe the people who lived in the house could have that in common too—because it's kind of a universal experience, being ghosted, isn't it? And I thought I'd call it Ghosting Stories because of the ghosts in the house and the ghosts in the people's pasts (the title was the only part that didn't stick). And then I went home and started writing it.

I sold it to Lake Union at the same time as I sold V&V, its name has been changed to Sorry I Missed You, and it's coming out on June 2, 2020.

Okay. The cover.

The cover process is easily one of my favorite parts of having a book published. Maybe the main reason I love it so much is that, unlike every single other thing about publishing a book, it's not hard—I just wake up to an email one day that's like, "Here are some possible designs. Which ones do you like and why?"

I've never had a hard time having and giving opinions.

I weigh in and my lovely editor, Alicia, adds her thoughts and my wonderful agent, Victoria, agrees with us (we all seem to be on the same page about basically everything and WHAT A BLESSING THAT IS) and then the marketing team gives their opinion (their opinion, obviously, holds the most weight). We pick a design and go back and forth with the designer, who swiftly chisels and whittles and doodles away at it until it's something that a whole bunch of people can agree on, which is like a magic trick.

The aforementioned magician is Liz Casal. I wish I could show you all of the designs, because even the "rough sketches" she sent were incredible. As it is, I'm only going to show you this one:

Isn't it great? I'm going to paste the promo text below so you don't have to squint to read the back:

A poignant and heartwarming novel about friendship, ghosting, and searching for answers to life’s mysteries.

When Mackenzie, Sunna, and Maude move into a converted rental house, they are strangers with only one thing in common—important people in their lives have “ghosted” them. Mackenzie’s sister, Sunna’s best friend, and Maude’s fiancé—all gone with no explanation.

So when a mangled, near-indecipherable letter arrives in their shared mailbox—hinting at long-awaited answers—each tenant assumes it’s for her. The mismatched trio decides to stake out the coffee shop named in the letter—the only clue they have—and in the process, a bizarre kinship forms. But the more they learn about each other, the more questions (and suspicions) they begin to have. All the while, creepy sounds and strange happenings around the property suggest that the ghosts from their pasts might not be all that’s haunting them…

Will any of the housemates find the closure they are looking for? Or are some doors meant to remain closed?

Quirky, humorous, and utterly original, Sorry I Missed You is the perfect read for anyone who has ever felt haunted by their past (or by anything else).

So that's what's coming down the chute next.
You can preorder it here.

Feelings (and the Lack Thereof)

I sent in my copyedits for book two a couple of weeks ago, and then I shut my laptop and cleaned the bathroom.

Copyedits aren't my favorite part of the whole publishing process. You're not really supposed to change stuff at that stage (that's what the developmental edits are for), but I'm picky and I overthink things, so I end up changing quite a bit and feeling bad for the proofreader and wishing I had many more rounds of edits to go. To shuffle punctuation and change people's clothing and think of different ways to describe their facial expressions. Rewrite whole chapters. Rewrite the book. Etcetera. Do you know how hard it is to commit? To say, yes, you can print it and let it be like this forever. I don't want to change a thing...?

So, upon finally hitting send, I thought I might feel relieved or excited or something. But I didn't feel anything. I couldn't figure out why. It was like when you go to the dentist and they freeze your gums and you go out afterward and you don't realize you're drooling down your shirt because they also kind of froze your lips and chin.

You're so numb you don't even know you're numb.

Writing and publishing my first book was like being in a new relationship. It was full of neon feelings—sitting down to write every day was exhilarating (I was writing a book!), an email asking me to fill out US tax forms was thrilling (I was gonna get paid!), the cover concepts came in (a cover!). Every decision, every email, every meeting felt magical. And every time I sent off a round of edits, I celebrated like I'd climbed a new mountain. I loved all of it, even the hard stuff, because it was all going to culminate in that big day, the day every little girl dreams of and plans for her whole life, that ultimate party—Publication Day.

May 1, 2019 couldn't come soon enough.

And then May 1, 2019 came, and it was...a humbling experience.

(I've always kind of hated when people use that word on social media—it's usually in the context of receiving an award or a lot of recognition for something they did, or a new job or position or promotion. "I'm so humbled to announce..." As if they feel they shouldn't say "proud" so they replace it with...its exact opposite. But when I say now that this has been a humbling experience, I mean it the way I think it should be meant.)

The ironic thing is that my journey to being published began with a good humbling. It was humility boot camp. Publishing is intrinsically deflating. It's hard to get into, it's exclusive. You send off query letters and you're rejected, often, with silence, or with robotic-sounding form letters (which is worse? No one can say!). You move on to being rejected in personal-sounding emails, having your hopes raised by the odd interested agent who wants to read your book (but then doesn't want to sign you). And after you finally accept an offer of representation, you go onto the next Horrible Thing: Submissions, where once again you're rejected over and over, this time by editors and, if you're lucky, whole acquisitions teams! Your book is discussed in meetings, passed around offices, deliberated upon, and you receive emails explaining why your work won't be published by that house.

By the time I finally arrived at my publisher, I was, I thought, firmly 'in my place.' I knew I wasn't the best or the brightest, that I had so much to learn and so much growing to do, that I was very lucky to have gotten this far at all. I was ready for the negative reviews, ready for the awkward IRL conversations, ready for my book to make it onto zero lists and to be read by exactly three people. Ready for anything. I had already had my hopes and dreams crushed many times over and I was now resilient and lowly, with alligator skin and a meek, heavily-armored heart.

I guess I still had further to fall. You should never assume you've been all the way humbled.

Where was I? Oh yeah: May 1, 2019.

The big day came and my book went out into the world. Reviews began to trickle in within 12 hours. People began to send emails and tag me in social media posts. And, it turned out, I wasn't as ready as I thought. Maybe I'd forgotten some of the lessons I'd learned in the prior years? Or maybe I just wasn't ready for Goodreads culture, where the Golden Rule is: if you get your feelings hurt, it's your own fault for reading what we've said about you. I know I wasn't ready for people to make personal judgments about my character or my mental health based on a fictitious person who is, you know, not me. I wasn't ready to be called names. I'd never been in the public eye before, had never received unfiltered feedback about myself in front of other people.

I also didn't come equipped with the ability to not read my reviews. There are at least twenty people reading this who think that's stupid, that everyone has the ability to not read their reviews, and at least ten who actually believe it's wrong for authors to read their reviews—they would say, "If you can't hack it, you shouldn't have become an author." (But how do you know you can't hack it until you've experienced it? Please don't overestimate my self-awareness. It's almost non-existent. Besides, if you were in a coffee shop and you realized the people at the next table were full-on discussing you...wouldn't you be curious about what they were saying? No? Well your self-confidence and self-control are astounding and I applaud you and I wish I was more like you but I'm just not.)

On one of my worst days, I read ten reviews right in a row from people who not only didn't like V&V, but who were downright angry about having read it, as though I'd done something wrong or spiteful or mean in having written it. They used words like 'aggravated' and 'mad' and 'disappointed' and 'furious' and, once, 'waaaaahhhhhh.' They wanted their time back and I actually felt bad that I couldn't give it to them.

I'm trying to think of a way to say this that won't make me sound whiny or unprofessional, but I can't think of that way, so I'm going to say it this way: it killllllled me. It was torture tailor-made for me, and I hated every second of it. It sucked every drop of magic out of the perfect daydream that was becoming an author. I was supposed to be promoting my book and I found that I couldn't because I didn't want more people reading it and saying horrible things about it. I started to feel anxious about writing anything—an instagram caption, an email, a blog post. Let alone, you know, another book.

But also, I was under contract for another book, and that book was due in July. At the time, this felt like the worst thing. I didn't want to write another book, and I didn't want to publish another book, and I began to understand why authors in movies are depicted as grumpy and frumpy and reclusive. I felt stupid and I couldn't think of anything for my characters to do other than sit at tables and frown at each other.

It felt like the worst thing, but maybe it was actually good? I mean, I channeled all of my big stormy feelings into that book and finished it. Maybe it was something akin to getting back on the horse right after you fall off it.

(I don't ride horses but I fell off a bike twelve years ago and have not been on a bike since so that should give you a picture of how self-motivated I am to adhere to this philosophy. I needed that contract.)

People use the phrase 'thick skin' when talking about negative feedback in the publishing realm. Like, "Yes, this sucks, but soon you will have thick skin and this will just roll off your back." I took that to heart, and spent most of this summer waiting for my skin to thicken. When I sent off those copyedits the other day and suddenly didn't feel anything, I thought, maybe this is it? Maybe this state of numbness—no excitement, no anxiety—is thick skin. Maybe I'm a real writer now and I can just do this like it's work and it won't bother me that "BookClubGal53" in some unknown corner of the USA thinks my "prose" is "ham-fisted" or whatever.

I popped over to my Amazon page that night and read some reviews to test the theory out. The good reviews didn't make me smile, but the bad reviews didn't make me sad. So that was it, then. Too bad, I thought passively, my heart is now a frozen, drool-covered chin. The magic is gone. 

But the thing about those needles they give you at the dentist is that they wear off. Nobody's chin stays frozen forever, thank goodness, and you wouldn't want it to. A blocked-off nerve ending keeps you from feeling pain for a few hours, but it doesn't keep you from getting hurt. It's not a long-term solution; it doesn't make you invincible, and it actually inhibits you in a lot of ways. And I bet 'thick skin,' if it even exists, is similar. It's armor you put on, maybe subconsciously, to keep yourself from feeling the root-canal-like sensations that come when someone says something really, really bad about something you've lovingly worked on for four years.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about this a lot. This new numbness makes for easy review-reading, but it also makes it impossible to write, to enjoy music, to smile at people. The sad feelings made writing cathartic but they pulled a wet blanket over the fun parts of publishing a book—the book clubs, the parties, the promotional stuff, the interviews. I just want to be excited about all this again. I want to figure out a way to read a negative review and hear it and not dismiss it (some of the negative reviews have actually been very enlightening) but also not read it like it's a review of me. And I want to read the positive reviews and trust them and let them make me happy. Because honestly, I think they'd be my favorite part of sending a book out into the world if I wasn't so distracted by the negative ones.

My conclusion? Oh, I have all kinds of conclusions here:

1. Numbness is okay. Self-protection is fine, for a time, and local anesthetics are essential (see also: epidurals). But

2. feelings are good and if I had to choose between thick skin and the vibrant, firework feelings of my pre-published life, I'd choose the FEEEEELINGS. Maybe being a thin-skinned person is actually an advantage for a writer? Like, yes, it sucks when you're getting feedback, but it really helps when you're trying to create a multi-dimensional character with their own emotions and stuff.

Also,

4. humility is not a thing that you can achieve once and for all because pride is a living, breathing monster that basically wants to take over your whole entire being. You think it's harmless, but being humbled after going on a pride trip, even if you didn't notice you were on one, is like falling from a skyscraper. Except

5. humiliation is not actually fatal. It's healthy. But you should never presume to have reached the basement because the basement has basements.

You know when you're on your way home from the dentist, and your mouth is frozen, and you wiggle your jaw around to try and get the numbness to wear off faster? I'm not sure if there's a way to do that with your brain, but this was my attempt at it, writing all this out. Fingers crossed it works.

An Email from Valencia

I got an email the other day from Valencia Valentine*. A friend of hers had sent her a copy of Valencia and Valentine and she was writing to ask if we'd ever met (there were a few other things in the book, apart from the name, that were eerily close to her reality and she was understandably a little freaked out).

It was weird, seeing that name in my inbox. Even weirder to write an email that began, "Dear Valencia..."

I asked her if she'd ever seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction, because the whole thing reminded me of the scene where Will Farrell's character calls Emma Thompson's character on the phone and is like, "You're writing my life! If you kill me in the book you're going to actually kill me!" (Valencia had, in fact, seen Stranger Than Fiction and agreed that it felt the same.) The funny thing about that is that Stranger Than Fiction was one of the movies I drew a little inspiration from for Valencia and Valentine. So. I don't know. It's all happening.

I don't know if there's anything I like quite so much as when something comes full circle.

The Real Valencia lives in the States and I assured her that we've never met, that I got the name from a baby naming website and chose it because I liked how it sounded with 'Valentine.' (Also, for all that it matters, I'd originally named the main character Violet.) As for the other coincidences...I don't know. Magic? Or logic. There are a lot of people in this world, so I suppose it stands to reason that at least a few of them would be named Valencia Valentine and that, of those, one might have some peculiar similarities to my fictitious protagonist.

Magic or logic. As with everything.

*She's married now, and her married last name is something else. BUT STILL.

LET ME IN

It's such a strange feeling when you wake up to a sound that has woven itself seamlessly into a dream. There's a split second, where you're hanging out right between sleep and wakefulness, where the sound makes sense in your dream and in real life, but you can't figure out where it belongs, even if it's a normal sound that you hear all the time.

Am I rambling? Yes! Yes I am. I'm actually a nervous wreck right now and I didn't get a lot of sleep last night so I am definitely rambling.

A story:

At 4:22 last night, I woke up to the sound of a fist on a door. In my dream, the fist was a drumstick and the door was a drum. It made sense both ways, but when I woke up the sound stopped immediately and I looked at the clock and decided that this sound was only in the dream, not in real life. But, just to make sure, I woke Barclay. "Is someone knocking on our door?"

He sat up. "I thought I heard something but then I thought I was just dreaming it."

"Well we probably weren't both dreaming it."

We listened. Nothing. Maybe we were both dreaming it. Maybe we were both dreaming about drums. Maybe it was someone knocking on the neighbor's door.

Barclay fell back asleep immediately. I didn't. Having someone break into my house in the middle of the night is one of my greatest fears, and I'm constantly asking Barclay to check out a noise, or telling him I'm certain this time that I heard the back gate clang or the sound of someone jiggling the doorknob.

Twenty minutes passed, and I finally started to relax. It was all in my head again.

But just as I started to nod off—

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

I jumped out of bed and ran into the kitchen, almost without thinking. I peered around the corner at the back door. The handle was moving—someone was trying to get in. I crept to the window and peeked out—by streetlights, I could just see the top of a head, wrapped in a bandana, as someone gave up on the back door and headed around to the front of our house. I stood there frozen, listening to the sound of footsteps on the front porch, the opening of the screen door, someone fumbling with that doorknob. Barclay came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

"Call 911," I hissed. "Someone's trying to get in."

He was skeptical, and rightfully so. I have cried wolf a million times. But it didn't take long for him to come around, because soon the front door started heaving at us as the stranger began to kick it. Barclay and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.

Then there was an angry scream:

"LET ME IN."

His intentions were, I'd say, fairly clear.

There's a scene a lot like this in the book I'm writing right now, so there was a moment where I considered that this might a dream, inspired by my book. I actually also have dreams like this all the time, which is maybe where that scene in the book came from. It's like a nightmare cycle. Brains are wonderful, aren't they?

But whether this whole thing was happening in my head or in real life, it felt like a nightmare. The sun was just starting to rise, so the living room was dark but not pitch black, and it had that shadowy, surreal quality to it. There were LEGO blocks everywhere, so even though I was trying to step quietly, I kept giving myself away to whoever was out there.

The guy left the front door right as Barclay called 911 and we waited to see if he'd move on to another house. It was quiet for a few minutes. I went back into my bedroom to grab my phone—I don't know why. Barclay had a phone. He was on his phone. What good was having two phones? Whatever.

But I entered my room just in time to see a hand reach up through the partially opened window and try to wrench it away from the house. (If I don't have nightmares about that image for the rest of the week I'll be pretty darn surprised.) The guy must have heard me gasp because he yelled again:

"LET ME IN."

I ran back into the kitchen. It's pretty amazing how fast your lungs can take air in and put it back out, isn't it?  I might have been hyperventilating. "He's trying to get into our bedroom," I whispered to Barclay. But then the guy was at the back door again, trying to kick it in. I pointed at the phone. "Where are they? Are they coming?"

Barclay nodded. He was describing the guy to the 911 operator. He was so calm, like it was three in the afternoon and the person at our door was a Jehovah's Witness.

At this point, I should mention that our kids were not with us. It was my birthday yesterday, so their grandparents invited them for a sleepover (bless them). I kept thinking about that every time I thought the door was going to break, every time he tromped around our house trying to find another way in. How great was it that our kids weren't here for this? It wasn't just the thought of them being terrified with us, but the thought of trying to keep them safe if whoever was out there got in, you know? I was so, so thankful.

Anyway, this went on for about half an hour, and finally—finally—I looked out the window and saw a policewoman walking across the lawn instead of the guy. A few minutes later, I saw two officers helping the guy into the back of their car. Then the woman came to our door and told us that we were okay and could go back to bed and that was basically it. The guy was drunk and thought he was somewhere else. The end.

(Anti-climactic, right? I'm okay with that.)

I Tried!

I wrote the first draft of Valencia and Valentine in three months, back in 2015. There's a blog post I wrote that summer that I went back to this week. In it, I wrote about how the whole book thing got started and what I was going to do with it next. I finished with these words:

...I have very low expectations, and am naturally very pessimistic about the whole thing. But I just want to try. Because sometimes trying is the fun part, and having tried is such a great feeling. Much better than having wished but not tried. I said to Sarah, or Mystery Friend, or both of them, that my goal was, ultimately, to write a book I liked. If someone else liked it, even cooler. And if it got published, that's just beyond anything I'd expect or hope for.

So, already, I'm 'there'. I'm where I wanted to be in the first place and I've still got some energy to expend. I figure now I'll just go as far as I can from here, and then when I feel like I've given it all the time and energy it deserves, I'll step back and see what I've got and hold my hands out in front of me and say, "That's that!"

And then I'll go do something else, or maybe this again! Isn't life nice?

A question authors like to ask each other is, "When will you feel like you have succeeded?" But we all know the answer is a carrot on a string, always moving farther away, making you look like an idiot for chasing it. The answer changes from "When I'm agented" to "When I get published" to "When I become a bestseller" to "When Reece Witherspoon turns this thing into a movie." It's easy, once you enter the Publishing Machine, to get caught up in the cogs. The lists, the politics of which books get promoted and put on the shelves, the reviews, the sales numbers.

But back when I wrote this book, I only wanted to try. I didn't have an idea of what success looked like because my goal wasn't to succeed. It was just to try. I acknowledged the daydreams that hung around in my periphery, but my only real aim was taking the shot in the first place.

Tomorrow is the official publication day for Valencia and Valentine. Lots is happening. I'm frazzled and nervous and excited and, really, kind of a mess, but mostly, I'm just happy that I tried. Now to step back and see what I've got.

That's that.

This is Kind of a Gross Blog Post

Two nights ago, while we were eating supper, Scarlett became irate. Just out of the blue. Irate gave way to angry, and angry bloomed into furious. She started pushing on her nose and rubbing her eyes and yelling at me.

"Maaaam! MAAAAM! DOZE!"

"Hmm?" I said, puzzled as to what could've caused the outburst. "Your...nose?" 

"YEAH!" she yelled, eyes bulging, trying to impart to me some very specific information without words. She strained her neck toward me. "DOZE!"

I looked at Barclay. He shrugged. "Maybe she wants you to blow her nose?"

I shrugged back and went to get a Kleenex. No harm trying.

Scarlett continued to yell. "DOZE! DOOOOZZZZZE!!"

I held the Kleenex in front of her impossibly tiny nostrils. "Okay, love, calm down. Blow."

She did. And from one of those ridiculously little nose holes emerged something like the head of a worm. Small. Yellow. I jumped back. 

Barclay frowned. "What?"

"There's...something...in there," I said. Suddenly, I was thinking about that Neil Gaiman book wherein the weird creature from another world turns into a worm and hitches a ride into our world in the heel of a little boy. (I have told you already; it's been a strange and dream-like week. I would almost not have been surprised if a weird creature turned itself into a worm and hitched a ride into our world through Scarlett's nose.)

Scarlett liked my reaction a lot. Scarlett loves making people react. "DOZE!" she shrieked, more happily this time. She blew again. Five more millimeters of worm.

"SPAGHETTI!" I yelled. "THERE'S A SPAGHETTI NOODLE IN HER NOSE!"

Sullivan, who had to this point been watching the whole thing with nervous curiosity, burst out laughing. I gagged, and Scarlett and Sully both thought that was funny too. These kids absolutely love it when they can make me gag.

Barclay was calm. Barclay is always calm. He didn't understand why I was gagging. "Just pull it out," he said calmly. Like always.

I tried, but I couldn't get hold of it. Scarlett, poor Scarlett, Scarlett with a whole spaghetti noodle dangling down the back of her throat, gagged then, and up came...well, other spaghetti noodles.

Now Barclay was gagging.

So much gagging in our kitchen that night!

Sully, though, Sully was not gagging. Sully thought the whole thing was amazing. But his favorite part was when I finally caught hold of the end of that seven-inch spaghetti noodle, helped forward by the gagging, and pullllllllllled it outta there.

So, is this a thing I have to worry about now? That food is just going to wander into Scarlett's nose while she's eating it? That I'm going to have to retrieve stuff from up there on the regular? That she's going to stick things up there just to make Sully laugh?

I don't have anything more to say about this. 

DAY FOUR

Hello and good morning from day four of being an author with a book Out There. It is, of course, not OUT THERE out there—pub date is still a month away—but enough people have it in their possession and are currently reading it that it feels as good as published.

The state of my head these past few days is very difficult to describe. I'd say it's somewhere between About to Cry and About to Barf, but in a good way, for the most part. Sometimes exceptionally good. Sometimes very bad. It's a whole trip. My shoulders are all bunched up by my ears and and I've been doing stupid things, like putting muffins into a heated oven and then...just...not taking them out again (oops).

I barely slept at all on Tuesday night. I stared at the ceiling until about 1 AM. Scarlett was up thinking it was morning around 2 AM and I had to convince her, through that wonderful adult-toddler language barrier with an additional middle-of-the-night sleep fog filter, that it wasn't. She eventually conceded and I went back to bed to stare at the ceiling for another long time. When I did sleep, I had nightmares about waking up to people basically voting me off the planet for writing drivel.

In reality, I only woke up to a headache. No reviews at all—obviously, I guess, because the book had only been up for a few hours. I thought, Well, I guess I should post something about this on Instagram, and I did. Then I trudged off to have a shower like a condemned prisoner, thinking all the same thoughts I had the night I went to the hospital to deliver Sully. There is no turning back now. This is going to hurt. This feels very surreal. 

I should give some context here: First Reads is kind of an internet visibility rocket ship. It places your book, along with only seven others, in front of every single Amazon Prime member in all of the US, the UK, and Australia. I can't remember the exact number she quoted to me when my editor told me we'd been selected for this thing, but it was a really, really high number. I was excited for, like, a day, and then I was just terrified. After all, if you invite thousands of people to your house party, it's a guarantee that at least some of them are going to be stupid and belligerent and break things and the whole thing's just going to get absolutely out of hand. And if you set your delicate newborn—firstborn!—baby book in front of thousands of people...right? Absolutely out of hand. Zero control. I was imagining my metaphorical book's house party, complete with flying opinions, hurled insults, misunderstandings, assumptions, hate mail...!

Also, though, I had (have) stage fright. I, personally, would never purposely choose to stand in front of an audience of thousands of people and read something that is not my diary but which kind of feels like my diary, and allow them to then dissect and analyze my performance back to me—and on Wednesday morning, I realized that I had chosen exactly that. TERRIFYING.

But when I picked up my phone again it was flooded with so many encouraging messages and excitement from friends and family and fellow Lake Union authors (who have also quickly become friends) and all of the lovely, wonderful people I've met through my blogging years (also actual friends) and all of a sudden my brain was like, OH. Oh right, okay, these people are all here too. For me!

It helped a lot.

That night, Barclay took me on a date so I'd stop obsessively looking at the Internet. Being an author in 2019 is strange because they supply you with all these analytical tools. You can see, for example, your book sales in real time. You can see your author rank, your book's rank in the Kindle store, your reviews. You can even see what sentences and passages your readers are highlighting in their Kindles as they read...!!

So. There's that. Here's something I've always known but now know double: I have zero self-control.

But now, like I said, day four. I've made it to day four.

A few reviews have begun to trickle in and—wonder of wonders—they're really, really nice. Actually, my favorite part of this whole experience so far was Wednesday afternoon when I sat down in the quiet of my living room during nap time to take a peek at the first couple of reviews, even though I'd been warned extensively not to (I had to!). I'm well aware that negative reviews will be here any moment, because that's the nature of the beast. I've been preparing for those ones by standing in front of the bathroom mirror every morning and telling myself I suck and don't have any brains.

(Just kidding. I don't do that.)

Right now I'm just planning ahead for the rest of this pre-sale rush and onto publication day and the weeks after that. I'm trying to figure out a way to stay busy enough outside of my house that I don't just sit here and refresh my analytics pages but, also, I do need to sit down at my computer and get stuff done there. THERE IS SO MUCH TO DO. I'M KIND OF A MESS!

Also, I'm going to leave these here for posterity, because this is kind of a once in a lifetime thing.

I'm Going to Live Forever

It's been a whirlwind month around here. My book comes out in a month (although, psst, if you're in Australia it's available for you on May 1 which, if you're there, is today—click here), and I've been a little busy. I remember when I first signed my contract and opened my day planner to pencil in my pub date which, at that point, was seventeen months away. I remember thinking, why so far away? We could publish this tomorrow.

Shh, listen. Do you hear that? It's the faraway sound of publishing people scoffing at my inexperience.

I had no idea how much there was to do in the meantime. Seventeen months is nothing. Developmental edits, copyedits, proofreads. Cover concepts, rounds and rounds of designs and redesigns. Reaching out to other authors for advance reads and blurbs, having galleys printed and sent away for trade reviews. A million (like, actually) other conversations and meetings and decisions that I wasn't privy to (thank goodness). 

And now, here we (almost) are. My author copies—softcover, hardback, audio—came in last week, and I'm trying to calm my nerves and plan a launch party. But also, life is just humming along like it always does. Sully and I have been playing a lot of Candyland. I tweaked my back today, picking Scarlett up.  Our furnace quit yesterday. Barclay and I hang out and talk about stuff that's not business or publishing-related. It's a very calm, ordinary time, with undertones of TERROR AND FEAR AND EARTHQUAKE LEVEL TREMORS IN MY HEAD AND HEART. 

It doesn't help that this is how my brain is: I think to myself, This might be okay. People might like my book and say nice things about it. 

And then I'm like, Maybe they'll say very nice things.

And then I'm like, MAYBE JIMMY FALLON WILL CHOOSE IT FOR HIS BOOK CLUB IF THAT'S STILL A THING JIMMY FALLON IS DOING THESE DAYS.

And then I'm like, But not everyone likes even a good book. Even a very good book has people saying bad things about it. And if people say bad things about a very good book, man alive, what will they say about my book?

And then I'm like, I'M GOING TO DIE BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO SAY AWFUL THINGS ABOUT MY BOOK AND IT'S GOING TO FEEL LIKE THEY ARE SAYING THOSE THINGS ABOUT ME AND THEN MAYBE THEY WILL JUST START MAKING FUN OF MY PICTURE IN THE BACK OF THE BOOK ALL OVER THE INTERNET. 

It's this drastic shift from a true thing to a possible thing to a ridiculous thing.

Yesterday, as Sully and I were leaving Canadian Tire, a car drove past and Sully said, "Phew. I'm glad that car didn't run me over. I'M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER!" 

And it was one of those moments where I was like, yes, this is my child. And I need to remember not to go from, That car didn't run me over to I'm going to live forever in one second flat. And if any of you want to hold me accountable to that in the coming months, I'd appreciate it.

First Spider on the Ceiling Day

You'd think the spiders would move in when it got cold outside. Maybe they do, maybe they're just really sneaky about it, but I don't really see them around in the winter. I don't see them until First Spider on the Ceiling Day.

It's exactly what it sounds like: it's the day, every year, usually sometime in March or April, after the temperatures have crawled above zero and held for about a week, that I see the first spring spider in my house. It is always, always on the ceiling of either my kitchen or my living room.

(But of course, First Spider on the Ceiling of Either My Kitchen or My Living Room Day is kind of a mouthful.)

Guess what yesterday was?

I always spend the days immediately after First Spider on the Ceiling Day with my head tipped back, anxiously scanning the room for the Second Spider on the Ceiling. There's never only a First Spider.

(Otherwise the day would be called, just, Spider on the Ceiling Day.)

This is kind of an appropriate week for the First Spider. It fits.

A few days ago, I was home alone with Sully and Scarlett. I was in the bathroom giving Scarlett a shower, Sully was playing LEGO in his bedroom, and I heard the back door open. It's a loud door; our house shifts in the winter so the door hangs a little crooked and you have to throw your hip into it to get it open. It scrapes on the floor. You can't quietly open that door.

I heard rustling and footsteps and thought, huh, Barclay's home a little earlier than I thought he'd be.

I wrapped Scarlett in her towel and carried her into her bedroom. I called to Sully, "Is Dad home?"

"Yep."

I nodded to myself, talking quietly to Scarlett about what we were going to do that day as I dried her off and picked out her pants and shirt.

Barclay wasn't there when I came into the kitchen a few minutes later. "Barclay?" The living room was empty too. I peeked around the corner. The back door was wide open. "Barclay?" Down the stairs. Out the door. "Barclay? Where are you?"

That was when I noticed the car wasn't parked outside. Which meant that either Barclay wasn't home yet, or that he'd come home, opened the back door, and left again—which, why?

Another thought crossed my mind then: maybe Barclay hadn't opened the back door at all.

"Sully!"

Sully came out of his room, still holding the LEGO car he'd been building. "Yeah?"

"Did you open the door?"

He shook his head. "Dad did."

"Did you see Dad?"

"No. I was in my room." He held up his car. "I just heared him open the door."

So there I was, standing in the kitchen, staring at the wide open back door and thinking, Someone opened the door. Someone has been here. Or, worse, Someone is still here. In the basement.

Reading this back to myself, I think of every scary movie I've ever seen, where a woman is just standing there, waiting, while her soon-to-be murderer advances toward her and the audience thinks at her, Run. Why don't you run away? I think some people think that the filmmaker does it to build tension, but I think they actually do it because it's realistic.

I was frozen, staring at the open door directly at the top of the basement steps. Straining to listen.

Scarlett chose that moment to start crying. Wailing. She was sick, poor kid, and she wanted her blanket. She wanted her blanket more than anything else in the world, and the more I stood there not getting her blanket, the harder she cried. But the blanket was in her bedroom and, honestly, I wasn't going further into the house to get a blanket. I picked her up and tried to comfort her, grabbing my phone off the table. I called Barclay. He didn't answer. I called him again. He picked up on the fourth ring.

"WHERE ARE YOU?" I hissed.

"Is something wrong?"

"I THINK SOMEONE'S IN THE HOUSE BARCLAY THE BACK DOOR IS WIDE OPEN AND SOMEONE CAME IN AND I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU—"

"Wait, what?"

"COME HOME."

Scarlett was crying into my shoulder and Sullivan was staring at me with dinner plate eyes and I was suddenly thinking that I should maybe, you know, get out of the house. But my feet stayed planted in the kitchen floor like I was a big old tree.

Then Sully said, matter-of-factly, "Mom, no one's in the house."

"What?"

"I opened the back door."

"You said Dad opened the back door."

"No," he was shaking his head, still clutching the LEGO car with both hands. "I heared Dad open the car door. Outside. So I opened the back door to let him into the house. But then he didn't come into the house so I went back to my bedroom."

So that was what had happened, and everything was fine, and Barclay arrived a few minutes later to no emergency at all and I felt dumb for overreacting and freaking everybody out and also dumb for not getting the kids out of the house when I legitimately thought someone was in the basement and ever since, even though I know there was no one in the basement, no one in the house at all, I can't help but jump a little when I'm home alone and hear a creak.

And now I'm checking the ceiling for spiders.

People at the Library

I'm at the George Bothwell library in south Regina, surrounded by high school students. An angsty guy is sitting directly behind me listening to rap music sans headphones (yikes, these lyrics are decidedly inappropriate for the afternoon library crowd) and staring at the back of my head. I know, because I can feel it, and because I peeked a few minutes ago and saw that he was. Still as a statue. What's the science behind being able to feel a look?

A kid came up to me a bit ago and asked what grade I'm in. I said, "No grade; I don't get to go to school anymore. You?"

She grinned. "No grade either! Kindergarten!"

We chatted about kindergarten and about being nervous to go to school for the first time and stuff like that and then, while I was telling her that my son will go to kindergarten in the fall, she stood abruptly and walked away, as though she'd gotten really bored with me really fast. Maybe I should've been offended, but I just felt jealous of her ability to suddenly and unapologetically exit a conversation that didn't, you know, "spark joy" or whatever.

I'm at the back, by the big windows. There are comfortable chairs with wooden TV trays in front of them; it's too comfortable a situation to be productive, but today I've decided to think in circles instead of move forward (both are important). I'm people-watching, too, which is also important—you have to watch people if you want to know how to write about them.

So far:

A tiny woman in a luxurious velvet dress with a large bow on the back of it, and a shiny gold purse. She is hunched over a table, highlighting things in a migonstrous textbook and has a little girl with her who is content to sit at the table beside her and read book after book. They have matching hair, mother and daughter, shiny and black and shoulder-length.

A teenaged girl with a toque and scarf, seemingly walking the perimeter of the library without stopping to look at anything in particular, who scowls at me every time she goes past. She has short, fluffy, curly hair and thick, fuzzy eyebrows that sit low over her eyes.

An older lady and a boy, probably in his teens. She's a guidance counselor, I think. She's asking him about his "plans" and he's talking so low that I can't hear what he's saying. Maybe they're an unexpected bank robber duo. Maybe they're planning a heist.

A troubled-looking man who looks like he probably always looks troubled even when he isn't. He's sitting at a table staring at the magazines like they're what's troubling him, but a minute ago it was the carpet, and before that it was something out the window. Trouble everywhere.

Three girls at one of the big tables. They look like they're straight out of a movie; very fashionable and put together—and the product placement! A Manchu Wok bag, Booster Juice cups, Coke and Pepsi bottles, an Orange Julius... Everything's labels are fully visible and facing me, like I'm the camera.

I always wish, when I write posts like this, that someone across the room was writing a similar one, and that we could compare notes, and that I could read what they wrote about me.

Probably:

A blonde woman by the big windows in a comfy chair. Too comfortable-looking to be productive. Watching everyone; thinks she's being inconspicuous but really isn't. Probably cuts her own hair.

The Yogurt Fridge

Okay, so we're in front of the yogurt fridge. Scarlett's in the shopping cart with the milk and eggs and Sullivan's beside me, hanging onto the cart loosely with a couple of fingers. When I reach out to open the fridge, this middle-aged man appears out of nowhere, steps in front of me, opens the fridge himself and sticks his head inside. He wants yogurt too, apparently.

That's fine. People don't see people sometimes. I step back to wait my turn.

While we wait, Sully begins to loudly plan his impending purchase. He's been anticipating this, you know? We don't buy yogurt every time. It's a treat. "What kind should we get, Mom?" he asks. "Blueberry? Or, no, STRAWBERRY...?"

"Sure," I say. "Is that what you want?"

"YES," he says. "YES I DO." He hops up and down on the balls of his feet a couple of times; his hands are in little fists. He's so excited. "STRAWWWBERRYYY."

The man in front of us is moving so slowly, surveying the options before him like he's choosing a living thing instead of a dairy product. Like all the ones he doesn't choose will be hurt that he didn't choose them. I think I see him look at me over his shoulder once but I'm not sure; mostly he doesn't seem to be too concerned with us.

"Okay," I say to Sully, smiling. "We'll get strawberry."

"IS STRAWBERRY ON SALE, MOM?"

I nod, even though it's not. Sully loves when things are on sale. "Yup."

I mean, it's on sale in the sense that it is being sold. It's for sale. Same thing.

"OH GOOD," he says in his just-barely-not-yelling voice.

But then something incredible happens.

The man looks over his shoulder at me again—this time I'm sure he's looking at me—and takes one of the strawberry yogurts. Sets it in his basket.

Okay, no, I know, that's not incredible.

But then he reaches back in—moving quickly all of a sudden, like he's got a whole new lease on life—and takes another.

Still not incredible? He's not done: he takes another.

And another.

And another.

And another. He keeps going. He's moving like a bank robber cleaning out a safe.

Dear reader: he has taken every last strawberry yogurt in the yogurt fridge.

And when he's done, he hefts the basket handle into the crook of his arm and staggers off, shooting me one last look. The look says, Ha.

My mouth hangs open for a second and then, because my mouth is open anyway, I laugh. Right out loud. And I don't care if the man hears me laughing at him. Whatever.

Okay. That's the whole story. People are great.

A Little Visit with Sullivan Barclay Krause

I was reading on the couch this afternoon when Sullivan Barclay Krause (who you'll remember from this post) came in and sat beside me. I could tell it was him and not just normal Sully because he opened by mentioning that he'd purchased a new apartment in Austin, Texas (I asked what he bought it with and he said money and I said yes but where did you get the money and he said Sarcan—they give you money there).

Then he was quiet for a minute, thinking—or waiting—studying me very seriously. He said, "Okay." Like he'd called a meeting and I'd finally shown up and now we could talk about whatever we needed to talk about.

"What's up?" I said.

"We're going to have a little visit," he said.

I laughed, but he didn't. He just smiled politely. "Okay," I said, also smiling politely. "What are we going to visit about?"

He spread his tiny fingers out and set them on his tiny knees, studying them. "I'm going to count down," he said, "and then I'll tell you what we're going to visit about and how we're going to visit about it. Okay? Ready? Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, carwashes. First we'll visit about what our favorite carwashes are and then we'll visit about how carwashes work. I'll go first. My favorite carwash is SUDS. What's yours?"

This might seem like a strange line of questioning, both in execution and subject matter, but it didn't surprise me much. Sully adores SUDS—so much so that we took him to SUDS on his birthday. So much so that the last time we took him to the dentist, we used a trip to SUDS as a bribe to get him to open his mouth. (The time before, we tried using Menchies and that didn't work at all.)

I thought carefully. I knew that if I said my favorite carwash was also SUDS he'd call me on it because—silly mom—how could two people possibly have the same carwash?

"The one on South Albert," I said. "Petro...Can? Is that what it's called?"

He nodded gravely. "And do you know how carwashes work?"

I shook my head.

He sighed. "They spray your car with soap and then there are brushes and water and it just," he sighed again, so much work to explain such complex things, "it just washes your car and then it sprays your car with water and then it blows your car dry. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, vacuum cleaners. First we'll visit about how you build vacuum cleaners and then we'll visit about how they work. Your turn: how did you build your green vacuum cleaner?"

This question was also unsurprising. Barclay recently purchased a shop vac and Sully helped him put it together and it was the highlight of Sully's whole month.

"I didn't really build it," I said. "It just kind of came...built."

"Mm." He nodded again, his tiny lips pursed. "Well I built my vacuum cleaner. Had to attach the hose, put the wheels on, put the lid on, all that stuff. Lots of work."

The conversation continued on like that. Lots of brow furrowing and throat clearing and head nodding. I'm really glad that Barclay and I have obviously given him such a good example of normal, healthy adult communication, and am also thankful for the reminder that if I'm ever stuck in an awkward, aimless visit with someone, I can take charge of things by counting down backwards from ten and naming a new topic.

#hashtagging

The hashtag.

Invented by Chris Messina in 2007, immediately dubbed "a thing for nerds." Maybe it still is a thing for nerds, but what even is a nerd in 2019?

Wikipedia describes a nerd as "a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, introverted or lacking social skills." Ask any given thirty-something-year-old and they'd identify strongly with most or all of that definition. It should not surprise anybody, then, that hashtags are pretty widely used now.

There are those who use them "ironically" but in a way that serves no actual purpose (#icouldhavemadethisjokeinthecaptionbutforsomereasoniammakingitahashtaginstead).

There are those who use it for networking purposes, to connect with people who have common interests (#amwriting #amediting #writingcommunity #peoplewholikebutter).

There are those who don't understand how hashtags work at all (#you're going to wreck your hashtag if you use punctuation, symbols, & spaces and this hashtag will actually show up as just 'you').

There are those who use hashtags because they've seen other people do it but they don't really know why so they just go to town with relevant and irrelevant words (#why? #blog #hashtag #likeittoknowit #peanutbutter #blue #thatsdarling).

And then there are those who use hashtags to group their own content together so they can find it easier—for weddings, say, or pictures of their kids or pets or whatever. That's how I mostly use them, and I'm writing this blog post because someone asked me the other day why I hashtag all of my live music pictures on Instagram #suzyslivemusicdiary.

This is why:

How cool is it to be able to click one link and be able to see pictures from every single live music event I've been to for the past decade? The scrapbookers of the 90s are collectively dying of jealousy right now. 

Would you like to see the other hashtags I've been adding to? Of course you wouldn't! But I will show you anyway, for I am a blogger and it is what we do.

This one, I started fairly recently. I call it #bookmusiccombo and I add to it every time I read a book. Before I begin, I stand in front of my CD collection (yes, I still have a physical CD collection and I will never not have one) and decide which album matches the atmosphere of the book I am about to read—weirdly enough, the album art usually matches the book cover, like they were made for each other. If Barclay is in the room, I pull him into the decision and we both think it's very fun. You should try it sometime. (But get your own hashtag.)

This one is just for fun, because it's social media, and social media is all, really, just for fun. Plus, I love pictures of coffee in my Instagram feed. I don't know why; it just makes me happy. So if you follow me and you're like, Suzy, you post too many pictures of coffee; why do you do that? It's because I love seeing it, so I figure some other people love seeing it, and I want to contribute to the online caffeine zeitgeist (I don't fully understand how to use that word correctly, I'm sorry). 

Then there's this one, which is the modern equivalent of carrying your kids' pictures in your wallet. "Oh, yes, I have a video of him playing the drums RIGHT HERE, one sec—"

Okay one more. This one is fun for me, because I started it when I started writing Valencia and Valentine. The first few pictures are of my view from the Naked Bean when I was writing the first draft, then there's a shot of the mess on my coffee table the first time I pulled an all-night getting together a manuscript to send to an agent, and then there's the agency announcement, the book deal announcement, the cover reveal, and the physical copies arriving. That last picture, up in the left hand corner, was actually taken by my editor, with New York in the background (that's where a bit of the book takes place). And as people read the book and post pictures of it on Instagram (hopefully) they'll use the hashtag and I'll be able to see what they're saying about it. Fun, right? 

So. That's that.

A List of Distractions

I turned in the manuscript for my second novel a week or so ago. It's nowhere near finished—in fact, I'm eagerly awaiting what will surely be a many-pages-long edits letter—but for now, it's off my plate. Across the table. My brain keeps trying to reach over and pull it back, but I'm dutifully distracting it.

Distractions:

1. Sully, Scarlett, and Barclay (feeding them, hanging out with them, letting them know I like them and stuff).

2. Friends (being around them, talking to them, letting them know I like them and stuff).

3. Listening to and making endless Spotify playlists. (You can tell what kind of thing I'm working on if you follow me on Spotify because what I'm listening to is usually pretty inextricably linked to what I'm writing. One influences the other, for sure, but I never know what direction the energy is moving in. It's a chicken and egg thing.)

4. Researching book marketing. I'm supposed to have a call with my marketing team sometime soon, and I don't want to sound dumb. I mean, I'm going to sound dumb, but it makes me feel less nervous if I fool myself into thinking I might not. It's all a pointless charade. I'm so bad at talking on the phone. Help.

5. Working on book three. After much deliberation, I've decided that my jumping off point is going to be that time I discovered a homemade flyer on the ground in Saskatoon promising me "the best time of my life" and, being the naive farm kid I was, found myself in a back alley, after dark, with a whole bunch of strangers. And that's just the jumping off point. I've also decided that there will be at least two—or maybe twenty—magicians! Because I've always wanted to write a book with magicians in it. Little known fact.

6. Reading so many books all at the same time. I have (counts) five on the go at the moment: a magician's memoir, an apocalyptic thriller, a lighthearted book about the last remaining descendant of the Bronte family, a lit fic, and a YA fantasy.

7. Blogging! (Obviously.) Because (refer to item 4) all the articles about book marketing say you should be more noisy online, and this is about as loud as I'm comfortable with. 

Better Oblivion Part II

I watched Begin Again last night from atop an exercise bike (I don't have the time or patience for exercise or Netflix unless I combine them). I'd never heard of this movie before, but it had Mark Ruffalo in it and the premise sounded right up my alley (lost souls, chance meeting, music-making, New York).

The whole time I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of how it felt like a poppier, Americanized version of Once. This wasn't a bad thing; Once is one of my favorite movies, and whenever I watch it I think about how I either wish I lived in it or had written it or starred in it or something. My heart just wants to be part of that magic. There are very few movies that make me feel that way, but Begin Again struck the same inexplicable chord. 

Well GUESS WHAT? John Carney wrote and directed both movies. Mystery solved, and dear John Carney, please turn my books into movies. 

Anyway. On to the point:

There's a scene in Begin Again in which Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo's characters wander through New York City at night listening to the music of Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder through a headphone splitter. At one point, Ruffalo muses that when you put music to real life, it turns what's banal into pearls. The music is still playing in their ears only as they watch pedestrians pass, skateboarding kids, a man being arrested—and you see how he's right, how the soundtrack gives the scattered things coherence and a sense of meaning and beauty. 

As I was watching this scene unfold, I was struck by the memory of something I'd forgotten: a few years ago (three? four?), Barclay, Sully, and I went to Montreal together for a week. I'd just finished writing Valencia and Valentine and life felt very exciting and full of potential. I'd just sent out my first query letters and didn't yet know or understand how hard it was to land an agent. So I was naive, is what I'm saying, and naive excitement is so lovely; it gets into your head, like you're taking big breaths of helium, like you're newly in love. I was floating. 

We were downtown, and it was rush hour. We were standing on some street corner trying to decide what to do next, and I pulled out my headphones, plugged them in, and put on Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableau in G-minor—my favorite piano song of all time and one I wrote into my book with maybe a little too much fervor. I gave one of the ear buds to Barclay and put one in my own ear and we just started walking, Sully asleep on my back in the carrier. Just like in the movie, we wandered Montreal, holding hands, watching the people crossing the streets and the traffic lights changing colors and the music made it all just a little surreal, like it had been orchestrated for us.

And I thought of the post I wrote yesterday about how you don't get to choose which memories you get to keep and which ones disappear without your permission. And then I thought, well, maybe this is better. Sure, you don't get to choose which memories disappear, but then sometimes they're given back to you when you least expect them. Like a present.

Better Oblivion

I'm on my trillionth listen through the Better Oblivion Community Center album. It's Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers's collab, and it's amazing—but I can't honestly tell you how much of the magic is the music itself and how much is nostalgic residue from the Bright Eyes days. I can't tell you; I don't know.

Oberst is one of those artists whose voice, all by itself, makes a song good for me. It's jagged and quavery and though he doesn't do anything fancy—what do you want from him? He's not Adele—it matches the lyrical content of his songs perfectly. But also, those songs, that voice, make up a large percentage of the soundtrack for my life circa 2005-2007.

Isn't it weird how you don't know what songs, friends, smells, whatever, are going to become capital "I" Important to you later on until it's later on? The summer I lived in Saskatoon, I borrowed so many CDs from the public library—stacks at a time, as many as I could fit into my backpack. And it wasn't like I didn't listen to all of them; I did. Sitting cross-legged on my air mattress in the closet-sized bedroom I shared with a girl named Patricia. Following along in the liner notes like it was one of those read-along children's book-and-tape situations. Taking it seriously, like I was studying for a test.

And now, though I listened to probably hundreds of albums, it's like I only listened to three: Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Brand New's Deja Entendu, and Bright Eyes's LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.

(I wonder if I would've named a few more albums if I'd written this blog post even five years ago? Is my memory narrowing this list down without my knowledge?)

Okay, so now I'm thinking about how you don't get to choose which memories you keep.

I'm thinking about a memory from a few days ago: I was sitting in the living room reading a book and Sully ran in and gave me a hug and I gave it back and, a little surprised, asked, "What's this for?" and he replied, "It's just because I love you and I want you to know."

Melting, for a mom, right?

But here's another memory: This morning at Shoppers Drug Mart, I was squatting in front of a row of face lotions and Sully was standing on one side of me and Scarlett on the other. An older woman with a black nose stud the size of a marble and these huge, black, plastic glasses—eccentric vibes, definitely—looooooomed over the three of us and said hello, repeatedly, to both kids but not to me. She looked angry. I don't think she was, but she looked it, is what I'm saying. Sully and Scarlett stared at her, awestruck or maybe fearful, and didn't reply, despite her earnest attempts and my also earnest but much more quiet prompting. Finally she gave up and huffed, to me, "Not in a good mood today, I GUESS," and stalked away.

Which memory will I keep? Both? Neither? Just the weird one with the eccentric lady I'll probably never see again? Who knows! Either way I don't get to pick, and that's really too bad. It makes me feel desperate and cranky, like someone is routinely stealing my phone and deleting whatever photos and emails and text messages they feel like.

It's not fair.

But the point is, listen to the Better Oblivion Community Center Album, because it's really good, probably even better if you were already a Bright Eyes fan, and write down every single memory you want to keep because if they disappear before you do, you won't even know they're gone. 

Galleys!

I got my galleys (the almost-complete version of the book that is given to reviewers a few months early so their reviews can coincide with the publication date—basically the book's dress rehearsal) last week.

I was walking through the living room on Wednesday afternoon when I glanced out the window and saw the UPS truck parked across the street. I hadn't ordered anything. I did not consider that maybe one of the neighbors had ordered something. 

I said, "Barclay..." and drifted to the door just as the bell rang. I couldn't feel my fingers. The hair on my head was standing straight up in the air. I have very long hair. Just picture it.

By the time I opened the door, the UPS guy was already walking away, having done his job. I imagined yelling all kinds of bizarre things after him and worried that, in that moment, when I had so little control over my fingers and hair and feet, that I might.

"HEY! THIS BOX CONTAINS AND SIGNIFIES THE CULMINATION OF ALL OF MY DREAMS SINCE AGE SIX I HOPE YOU WERE GENTLE WITH IT."

Instead, I silently picked up the box and brought it into the house. And then I was very calm. Like everything inside me that was crashing waves was now a still pond with not one living thing in it. Like I was sleepwalking.

Sullivan wanted to know what was in the box. Of course he did.

"My books," I said calmly. I've seen many videos on Instagram of authors receiving their first book shipment. There's usually lots of squealing. Tears, often. I wondered vaguely if I should shriek a little. I thought that I should ask Barclay to take a picture of my face when I opened the box, but then I immediately forgot the thought. It just floated out of my head.

"You ordered books?!" Sullivan yelled. He loves when I order books because they usually come in bubble wrap (what's up with that, anyway? Books aren't breakable).

"No," I said, smiling. So calm. "These are my books. I wrote them. It."

I set the box on the floor and waited, as though I thought it might open itself. It failed to do so.

Sully ran to get scissors. (He did not run once he had the scissors. Don't worry.) He helped me open the box and dig through the paper, so it went faster than I wanted it to. I felt surprised, realizing that I wanted it to go slower, that even though I'd been eagerly anticipating this moment for months, I now didn't want it to happen yet.

That was unexpected.

But, I mean, props to my subconscious. After all, the anticipation of something good is almost always better than the actual good thing. The moment right before the fulfillment of a dream or longing is so rare and fleeting and beautiful. I knew, without knowing, that I should savor it.

So I peeled back the layers of paper slowly, taking little breaths, and then Sully pulled the first book up, like pulling a carrot out of the ground. He was so excited, and that was the next surprise: that seeing him holding the book and being so excited about it was better than me holding the book and being excited about it.

To both my amazement and his, he pulled another out, and then another, and another, handing them to me one by one. 

I stared at them in wonderment. "Well, isn't that something," I said. It was a dorky thing to say, but I said it.

Sullivan, still unearthing the last few books one by one, paused. "No, it's not. It's not anything," he said. Then, "Well. It is a book. Can I have this one?"

I told him that, no, I couldn't keep these; these were for giving away.

"You can give this one away to me, then," he said, unconcerned, and he ran off to his bedroom to add it to his bookshelf. (I snuck into his room later and stole it back. He came to me within fifteen minutes, looking very disappointed, and said, "Mo-om. Did you take my book? It's not on my shelf."
We've gone back and forth on this a few times; he is very observant. I am not winning.)

Physical ARCs are exciting for a lot of reasons, but the main ones for me have nothing to do with marketing or exposure or trade reviews: if your book gets ARCs, you get to hold it in your hands a few months earlier than you would've otherwise. You get to put it on your bookcase, see how it gets along with your other books. You get to carry it around in your purse for a few days—not to show people, just to have it there with you. You get to keep it by your computer while you write your next book, to remind you where you're going and how great it feels to get there. 

And then, you get to see how it looks in other people's hands.