A Wrong Turn Backstage

It was early in the morning; I was half-asleep, doing that thing you're not supposed to do where you check your phone before you even get out of bed and slowly fry your brain awake. On Instagram, a DM: someone sent me a link to the Goodreads Choice Awards nominee list with zero context. I didn't click on it. They probably meant to send it to someone else, I thought. Possibly, their account had been hijacked and this was spam.

For context, because not everyone is as terminally plugged into the Internet Book World as I am (and they will probably live longer for it), the Goodreads Choice Awards goes like this: Goodreads puts out a longlist of the most popular books of the previous year, based on their data—15 categories (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc), 20 books in each category. There’s a round of voting, the list is shortened to 10 books in each category, there’s another round of voting, and a winner is chosen in each category. 

I never pay much attention to the GCAs. The list is generally made up of the year’s Big Books, the ones you see in People magazine and in every single bookstagram feed and at the front of Indigo in hardcover on their release day (I don’t know if I mentioned this, but my local Indigo did not have any copies, not a single one, of I Think We’ve Been Here Before in stock on its pub day and, here in Canada, neither did Amazon because three days prior they inexplicably cancelled every single preorder and pulled the listing!). The people who make up these lists are, like, Stephen King and Emily Henry and Richard Osman and Fredrik Backman. 

All of this to say: if it sounds like I’m being annoyingly self-deprecating when I say I didn’t click that link because I didn’t think it could possibly have anything to do with me, I’m not. I really, really didn’t think it possibly could. 

But then it occurred to me that, maybe, this person and I had a mutual friend who had been nominated. That was possible. So I navigated back to my inbox and clicked the link. It opened to the sci-fi page, and I paused. Most of my author friends write romance, lit fic, thrillers, poetry. Who do I know who put out a sci-fi book this year? I racked my brain as I scrolled down.

Oh. Me.

I saw my book there and had a moment of elation before the grounding realization: It’s a dream. My dreams are super vivid and I have ones like this all the time. I've won the Booker! I've gotten a six-figure book deal! All of Hollywood wants the movie rights to my novel and they're literally standing on my front lawn throwing money at my house! Oh no! They’re drowning in their own money! I heroically jump in and save the producers from drowning in the money and I’m a national hero! Jimmy Eat World writes a song about me—

Anyway.

The best evidence for it being a dream? I Think We've Been Here Before could not be on a list for best sci-fi of 2025: it was published in 2024.

I put my phone back on the night table and fell back asleep. That’s how fleeting my adrenaline spike was: I fell back asleep.

Later in the kitchen, making coffee, trying to drag myself out of my lingering sleepiness, I pulled the page up again. It was still there. Hm. I asked Barclay to see if his Goodreads account also had my book listed on there, because I'd gone from thinking it was a dream to thinking it was maybe a tech glitch. But no, it was on his screen too. 

I scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on Rules and Eligibility: 

Books published in the United States in English, including works in translation and other significant rereleases, between November 13, 2024, and November 11, 2025, are eligible for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards.

OH.

So then I believed it (barely, sort of). 

Voting for this round closes on Sunday, and the shortlist will be announced the following Tuesday. Let’s be real: I do not stand a chance. But! I’m going to ask you to vote for me anyway (HERE!). Because that’s what you do when this happens. And because my weird little book about a farm family from Saskatchewan is, for a moment, sitting on a list between two John Scalzi books, like a concert-goer who took a wrong turn after using the bathroom and accidentally ended up on the stage between Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Clap for her! She’s so confused about why she’s up there but she’s having a great time!