Everything is Like Something Else!

I have some book news! 

I'm very, very happy to announce that my fourth book, Everything is Like Something Else, will be out in 2027 from Blackstone Publishing and Simon & Schuster! 

Dream publishers. 

DAYdream publishers. 

I've been sitting on this news since December, which is wild, but it also means that now there are only 11 months til pub day (I've been told June for both the Canadian and the American releases)! And I know some of you read that and went, "only"? But if you know anything about publishing, you know that the year before a book comes out is actually quite busy and goes by extremely quickly. Like, maybe too quickly? The sweet spot is right after you turn in your developmental edits (which I just did, clap for me, clap more, clap harder, applause applause, that was so much work) but before the first early reader gives your book one star on Goodreads. It's a gorgeous liminal space where your book exists, it is real, it is finished, you have done your part, wrung your brain out completely into this Word document, but no one has said anything bad about it yet. You get to harbour all these sweet little delusions and hilariously out-of-touch daydreams. You get to feel proud of yourself without also feeling ashamed of yourself. It is SO nice. I cherish it more every time I get to it. It's like standing at the top of a mountain you've just climbed, knowing full-well you're about to get a hard shove right off the edge of it but trying your best not to think about that fall just yet.

I'm excited for you to read this book, and I'm excited to share some of the weird conversations and events and rabbit holes that went into the writing of it. It was like solving a riddle, writing this thing. A years-long escape room inside my head, with invaluable clues very sporadically meted out to me by people who didn't know they were a part of the process, like my mom's aunt at a family barbecue who told me about Faraway House, a famous old mansion that used to stand near my own house here in Regina, or my son, who out of the blue one night told me that his nightmares are affected by certain weather patterns. 

Anyway. This is where I'm going to leave most of you. That's the news, and you probably won't care about the really behind-the-scenes stuff I'm going to put below. But I am very nosy, and very interested in behind-the-scenes publishing things, so if I were reading this blog post, I would have Questions, and I would be quite curious to know the whole story of how this book deal came to be. I would be texting Jennifer Whiteford about it, speculating and wondering if there was anyone either of us knew who we could drag the story out of. (She can attest to this.)

So, just in case anyone out there is like me, let me save you the speculating and the wondering and the texting (also, I like documenting; you know this about me):

This story begins in 2024, shortly before I Think We've Been Here Before was published, when my editor at Lake Union announced she was leaving for Penguin Random House. It was really sad (for me; I don't think anyone is ever sad to go to Penguin Random House). And, I should say, I was happy for her! But Alicia Clancy was my very first editor; she acquired Valencia and Valentine back in 2018 (she made me an author! Aww!) and we did three books together. From our first phone call, I could tell we were on the same page and that my ideas were safe with her—not a small thing. I got very comfortable very quickly, and probably took it for granted that every time I finished writing a book I could just send it off to someone who would get it, and want it, and know how to make it better without changing it into something else. 

People often ask what happens when your acquiring editor leaves your publishing house. In my case, I had a contract stating that Lake Union would have the right to read and possibly offer on my next book before anyone else, so when Alicia left I was handed off to another editor at the same imprint, who was really, really lovely. We clicked! And in December of 2024, right after ITWBHB came out in the States, I sent her the first three chapters of my option project, we had a really great chat on Zoom, and she made an offer.

The thing was, I was writing two books at the time—the one I showed LU, which was very much in the vein of Sorry I Missed You, which had done really well with them, and another...weirder one.

The weirder one starts like this: a farmer is out harvesting his field when an entire farmyard disappears right in front of his eyes. He thinks he's losing his mind, of course, but the longer he stands there the more he realizes that this is a thing that has happened, and if it's a thing that has happened, it's a thing that has a physical explanation. And just like that, it was as if this bizarre thing had actually happened to me. I was the farmer, and I needed to figure out how to explain this thing. 

I got kind of obsessed with it. 

When this kind of idea comes to me, it feels like more than a book idea: it's a riddle I need to solve. And I get this feeling like I can solve it if I spend enough time on it, like someone else set it up for me and there is an answer.

So I was standing at this crossroads. If I took the deal, wrote Book A, and stayed with LU, the publisher who did a very lovely job of my first three books, my career would probably continue on in a certain (wonderful!) trajectory. But if I followed my obsession and wrote Book B, which may or may not sell somewhere else, my career would probably go a different way. (And...I was running the very real risk of not ever publishing a book again.) I had to decide which path I wanted to take, without knowing whether either road might lead to a dead end. 

Publishing is kind of like a strategy game (and I love a strategy game). You can play well enough by taking every good opportunity that comes along. But sometimes, the wiser thing is to wait, or even to give up something good to make way for something else—without really knowing what that something else is. 

I agonized. I made up my mind five hundred times in one day, flip-flopped back and forth both in my head and in my bed all night every night, weighed the pros and cons of each choice out loud so many times that Barclay could probably still recite them all from memory. 

And then, in February of 2025, I sent my agent an email that said, essentially, I wanna do the weird book. And then I almost changed my mind one last time. 

But I didn't. What I did do was this: I closed my laptop and got the calendar off my wall. I flipped all the way to December and wrote, just below the last square of the month, "BOOK DEAL BY THIS DATE." I wanted this decision, the biggest one I'd made yet in my writing career, to be verifiably THE CORRECT ONE. I wanted to prove it to myself that I could trust myself. I was very aware that I was being a little ridiculous, that publishing operates on no man's timeline, and that I hadn't even finished writing this book—I'd barely started it—but I also felt really excited about (obsessed with!) my weird little idea. I'd already written the first chapter and even submitted it to a writing contest (it got second place, and won me a plaque and a writing retreat at a monastery). I had no idea yet why the farm had disappeared or where it had gone or how the farmer was going to figure it out, but I was so excited to find out, and I thought that would help me to write it faster, if I wanted so badly to know how it was going to end. 

(Side note: you can't make it happen on purpose, but there is nothing more fun than when you are writing a book but it feels more like you are reading one.)

The months went by, as months tend to do. My goal was to finish writing the book by June, so I could just send it off to my agent and enjoy my summer. I was doing publishing math in my head: if I sent it off in June, we could edit it and send it on submissions by September. Book deal by December. My private little calendar goal I had mentioned to no one. Three months on subs. It could happen. Conceivably. 

But the ending didn't come to me until August. You can't help these things. I wanted to meet my deadline, but I also wanted the book to be good. I wanted the riddle answered in a way that felt satisfying, and I didn't want to sacrifice that for the sake of meeting an arbitrary personal goal. Ultimately, I sent it to my agent a few days before my kids went back to school. I was sweating; my secret December goal was getting more unreasonable by the second. My agent read the book and sent me edits in October; I worked on them like someone was standing behind me yelling HURRY UP. I did my best and sent them back and we went on subs. It was already November.

I kept looking at the last page of my calendar, thinking of stories I'd heard, of friends who'd been on subs for 6+ months. The first (and only) time I'd gone on subs it had taken three months to get a bite. I thought of friends who'd had books die on subs, who'd thought they were so close to the finish line only to be told, "Nice try. Start from the beginning." I had long heart-to-hearts with myself about why this goal mattered so much to me in the first place. If the book sold anywhere, in any timeframe, wouldn't that be enough? 

But I feel like there was an element of wanting to know that I could trust my gut, of, ironically, needing external affirmation on this point. Maybe some magical thinking, like if the book sold before January 1, that would be a Sign that I was on the right track. I know that's not how life works, but it is very much how my brain works (ironically, but not coincidentally, this is a major theme in this novel).

So you can imagine how much it meant to me and my weird little brain and my painfully uncertain little gut when we got an offer right in the nick of time, an email on December 3 with the subject line: OFFER FOR EVERYTHING IS LIKE SOMETHING ELSE FROM BLACKSTONE PUBLISHING. 

I immediately burst into tears. :) 

The rest, as they say, is history. Or, at least, it's a lot of minor details that are not very interesting to anyone but me. Blackstone sold the Canadian rights to Simon & Schuster in a pre-empt, I signed some things and went to work on developmental edits with the legendary Diana Gill (of Slewfoot fame). And now I'm sitting here, trying to get the important things down so I don't forget them. 

(Haha. As if.)

Thanks for reading all of that, and thanks for being excited with me, if you are. I'm feeling very relieved about what has happened and curious to see what happens next—but also, you'll remember the mountain metaphor. I'm bracing a little bit for the inevitable fall off the edge of this cliff. 

Everything truly is like something else.