Talk About People Behind Their Backs!

I had a dream the other night that I went to a library that sold books. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Suzy, that's called a bookstore. But it wasn't, though. It was absolutely a library, but you had to pay for the books and then you got to keep them after. How did I know, in the dream, that it was a library, not a bookstore? Because there were librarians working there. They were absolutely librarians. You could just tell. 

I know you think that's stupid. Okay, fine, bring me a librarian and a person who works at a bookstore. Just bring them to me and have them stand in front of me. 100% I'll know which is which. 

So.

Anyway.

The library in my dream was named Indigo—no, I know, I know, that's the name of a major Canadian bookstore chain in real life. But in my dream, it was a library. It wasn't at all the same as the real life Indigo, because there wasn't a Starbucks attached to it. And, like I said, the librarians! They were all over the place. 

So in this dream, I'm walking around this library, and I see this display with Valencia and Valentine (my first book) on it. Someone has made the cover artwork into a calendar, and it's very pretty and I call Barclay over and go, "Hey, look! They've made my book into a calendar!" 

I know. I know libraries don't generally have calendars, and that Indigo bookstores generally do. Your beef is not with me; this is a dream. So I guess your beef is with my unconscious self, which is not here at the moment, because I'm awake. So chill.

Anyway.

In this dream, I'm standing there looking at the calendar and someone passes by and says, "Huh, I wonder why they chose that book to make into a calendar? It's her worst one."

And that person walks away and I just stand there, looking at my sweet little debut and thinking, Is this not a good book? 

This, of course, is not the first time my brain has ever turned this question over. When I was querying that book and it got rejected, that was the first time I asked that question. And again when it was on subs and got rejected. And again when it was released into the world and people wrote mean reviews about it and, probably most of all, when people I knew in real life read it and then gave extremely half-hearted, "Oh, good for you for writing a book!" comments (or no comments at all!) (so well-meaning! I hold no grudges! I just internalize the self-doubt and move right along!). 

But there's this saying, "Frontlist sells backlist," which means that when you come out with a new book, and people like it, they might be inclined to go off and find your older books and read those too. And this has been a small source of anxiety for me (there are those reading this who are rolling their eyes and saying to themselves, "Good grief! Is everything a source of anxiety for you, Suzy?" Yep!). 

Because Valencia and Valentine was my very first attempt at fiction, and it was the most fun I've ever had writing a book, and it was a very vulnerable book to write, and one that sits very close to my heart, so when people shoot arrows at it, I get hit. And, also? It was probably my least well-received book—because it's a book about mental illness, and aging, and it's kind of sad and people found it fairly depressing, and again, I hold no grudges, but still! Ouch! 

So I'm not really surprised about this dream I had, is what I'm saying, with the Valencia and Valentine calendar and the stranger doubting the validity or the goodness or whatever of that book. Because the stranger, really, was my own brain. 

And because that book is now a full five years old, it's kind of faded away into the background—people aren't seeking it out, people aren't leaving reviews on it as much, people don't ask me about it in interviews. And I've been kind of okay to just let it float around out there, much more quietly—but now people might find it again and that's a little scary.

So I woke up from that dream and felt a little gross, the way you feel when someone sees you do something stupid and you can't take it back or make them unsee it. But then I logged onto TikTok and the very first thing that came up was...a video wherein someone was talking about how much they loved V&V. 

I love, love, love when things like this happen. It feels good, of course, but it also reminds me that it's always a good idea to say good things about other people (or other people's books) behind their backs. You never know when it might find its way to them right when they could really use it. 

Book Soundtrack: Valencia and Valentine (may contain spoilers)

I’m in my car on my way to a coffee shop to get some writing done. I turn the corner onto Hamilton street and Aqualung’s Easier to Lie comes on and suddenly I’ve travelled back in time and back the way I’ve come, across the city again to my house. The year is 2017! Just like my house is not that far from the Warehouse District, 2017 is not that far from 2024—but still, it’s jarring to just get snapped back like that. 

I’m in my reading nook in the living room; the house is quiet. Sully and Scarlett are both asleep and Barclay's working on stuff for his new business and we have a full French press and maybe two or three hours of work ahead of us. I’ve recently signed with my agent so we’re working on some final revisions on my first novel, getting ready to send it out on subs. I’m rewriting the last chapter, again, for what feels like the millionth time (that book has had so many endings. If you hated the one you read, take heart: it ended exactly how you wanted it to in another draft). I’m listening to Aqualung’s Easier to Lie on repeat, because the way this song sounds is the way I want this chapter to feel, and because the lyrics unlock the whole book, in a way (which is kind of a wondrous thing, to me, because I didn’t find the song until after I’d written the first draft).

This memory is weird, because there’s another memory nested inside it, and the other memory isn’t real—it’s not even mine. But it’s just as vivid as the one of me in my reading nook and it comes to me alongside that one.

I’m in New York, at La Guardia, eating a plate of spaghetti and watching a fireworks show off in the distance. There’s a bike helmet on the seat beside me but I’m alone. The Aqualung song is playing somewhere in the terminal, so quiet I can barely hear it, like it’s playing in a parallel universe and leaking into this one. 

This is one of the strange, unexpected things that have come from being a person who writes books—this second set of memories that are just as real and vivid in my head as the ones I’ve lived myself. This airport memory, of course, belongs to Mrs. Valentine, from the final scene—the one that stuck—in Valencia and Valentine, a book I haven’t even read since the last time I edited it, back in 2018, but which lives in my head and into which I am pulled whenever a I hear a song that accompanied the writing of it.

And it gets even more complicated than that!

Sometimes, a scene from a book will draw inspiration from something that happened in real life. (See where I’m going with this?) Take the scene in V&V where Valencia travels to New York by herself and gets off the plane and onto a bus and ends up in Manhattan and has her jacket stolen. This series of events was lifted straight from my own life, right down to the word-for-word conversation she has with a New Yorker who has never heard of Saskatchewan. And in that real version of events, I had my trusty headphones on and was listening to a little soundtrack of songs I’d created for myself for that trip, including Ghosts by On An On, The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon and Garfunkel, and Ruby Sees All by Cake. I listened to the same soundtrack when writing the scenes, hoping it would help jog my memory and remind me how that place felt when I was there so I’d get it right.

So, when I hear any of these songs, I am taken back to my bedroom, where I wrote the New York scenes during a few of Sully’s nap times, but I am also transported to New York, where Valencia is hit by a bike and goes on a date at Cheesy Pizza with a self-obsessed busker, and I visit New York in another timeline, a real one, where I, personally, did not get hit by a bike but did get tackled by a dog and found myself at Cheesy Pizza with someone I met in Central Park. I’m experiencing three different memories, and two are real and one is made-up, but they all feel equally real, and maybe even if parallel universes aren’t a real thing, they are, you know?

Okay, another one:

There’s a piece of piano music threaded through V&V—Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau in G Minor, Op. 33 No. 7. Mrs. Valentine plays it on repeat at full volume in her home throughout the book, and in her headphones on the plane, and Valencia hears it through the thin walls of her apartment, and in one of Mrs. Valentine’s stories, she stumbles across Rachmaninoff himself composing the piece in an old church on Fogo Island. The reason this song became such a backbone for the book, though, is because it’s a song that has threaded itself in the same way through my life. I learned to play it on the piano in high school, and I’ve blogged about this before (here), how that song was kind of my Linus blanket back then, how I’d sometimes sneak away during school hours into the unlocked church and play that song to calm myself down. So it’s connected to a lot of pivotal high school moments, because nothing cements a memory in your head like music, and nothing cements music in your head like emotion, and what's more emotional than a teenager? 

I’ve also written (here) about how, when I’d first finished writing V&V, and had just begun querying it, I went on a trip to Montreal with Barclay and we walked around downtown listening to that Rachmaninoff piece through shared headphones, and it was one of those beautiful, romantic, cinematic moments that I return to a lot.

This is just getting chaotic, but you can probably see how that piece of music takes me back to so many memories, real and imagined, all at once that I kind of splinter into a million pieces—or people—when I hear it. 

The same is true of the song Heart by Stars, actually. Another Linus blanket song, another reminds-me-of-many-moments song, and another song with lyrics that match the book, only this one is less of a coincidence because this time the lyrics came first. The lyrics came before anything.

Time can take its toll on the best of us

Look at you, you're growing old, so young

Traffic lights blink at you in the evening
Tilt your head and turn it to the sun
Sometimes the TV is like a lover
Singing softly as you fall asleep
You wake up in the morning and it's still there
Adding up the things you'll never be

[Chorus]
Alright, I can say what you want me to
Alright, I can do all the things you do
Alright, I'll make it all up for you
I'm still in love with you
I'm still in love with you

He held the flame I wasn't born to carry
I'll leave the dying young stuff up to you
You get back on the latest flight to paradise
I found out from a note taped to the door
I think I saw your airplane in the sky tonight
Through my window, lying on the kitchen floor

Hey! I'm Not Afraid Anymore!

It's July! We made it to July! 

Maybe you're like, whoa, Suzy, none of us thought we weren't going to make it to July; did you think we weren't going to make it to July?

Well I don't know. Kind of? It's been one of those years, and you can't tell me it hasn't been. I had a dream the other night where I looked up into the sky and saw a glowing ball of fire headed straight for earth and I knew we were going to die, and in the dream I just sighed as though I were a little disappointed and calmly said to Barclay, "I'm not even surprised, with the way this year has been." Like 2020 was my disappointing teenaged child who had, yet again, failed me in some major but not unusual way.

And then we just stood there with our arms around each other and stared into the huge night sky as the ball of fire grew bigger and bigger...

So my subconscious is, like, over it, right? My subconscious is like, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND I'M NOT EVEN GOING TO BE SURPRISED JUST TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, 2020.

But look at us! July!

Okay! 

So now that I've jinxed us good, on to the blog post:

I'd like to revisit a post I wrote in February—this one: 2020 A New Year's Resolution. In that post I wrote  about my resolution for this year, which was, in a nutshell, to be brave, and to stop telling myself and others that I was not brave, especially in regards to things like interviews and podcasts and stuff like that. Public speaking. 

This was a pretty lofty goal for me—after all, I wasn't just nervous about doing interviews. I was pretty much panic-stricken. I'd get physically ill about a week before an interview. It was all I'd think about. I'd shake through the whole thing. I hated, hated, hated doing them. And then after I did them, I'd feel sick about having done them, and I'd feel almost more nervous in retrospect than I had before or during the actual interview—nervous to the point where I wouldn't tell anyone that I'd even done an interview (like, not even Barclay, you guys) because I couldn't stand the thought of a single other person on the planet listening to these things. 

And you might be thinking, okay, so just don't do interviews. Just say no to people—and this is also something I've been working on, the just saying no when I don't feel up to something. (That's been going well, actually! I've been very picky about what I've said yes to this summer, and I think that's been healthy and good and nice.) 

But I also think—have always thought—it's healthy to do things that are hard for you. AND, I think it's important to figure out why the things that are hard for you...are hard for you. Especially when it comes to fear. Like, why am I deathly afraid of talking in front of people? Talking in front of people isn't dangerous, so why are my actual survival instincts kicking in over it?

Besides. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this wasn't just something that affected me when I was doing interviews or book club talks—which makes sense, because fear is rarely localized. It rarely pops up for no reason in one area of your life and then just stays where it is, affecting nothing and being affected by nothing. I've noticed this fear popping up in all kinds of weird places. Self-consciousness in conversations with friends. Having a hard time meeting new people. Second guessing EVERYTHING. Etcetera, etcetera. Blah blah blah. I felt like this weird fear had some serious vine-like potential to just grow all over my life and wrap itself around everything. So my motivation for getting rid of it isn't some vain I WANT TO BE A PODCAST SUPERSTAR AND TALK A BUNCH IN PUBLIC thing, it's more that I want to be a person who is comfortable in my skin and with my voice coming out of my face and with the thoughts in my head. I guess I just noticed that this is a fear with a trajectory, and I would like to point that thing in the right direction. You know?

So.

I don't know where this specific fear came from—like I said in that other blog post, I haven't always been this afraid of being seen and heard—and I'm not sure exactly what to do to get its roots out of me, but I'm a big believer in small changes. So at the beginning of this year, I started with the very smallest thing: I stopped saying (out loud to other people AND in the quiet of my own brain) that I was afraid of public speaking. I mean, sometimes I slipped, but most of the time I caught myself. And—wonder of wonders—it's...working? I think? Slowly but surely. 

(I should add that this isn't me telling all anxious people that if you stop saying you're anxious you'll stop being anxious; that would be silly and impossible. This is just me saying: Hey. Don't tell yourself you're bad at stuff because YOU WILL BELIEVE YOURSELF.)

Anyway. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. 

(Wait, why do they say that? I'll check. OH. Okay. Here's a thing I've [very] recently learned: The original version is "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." So. Interesting.)

So the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I did a podcast interview last Thursday and we talked about this a little bit, about this resolution and how it seems to be working, which is kind of a full-circle moment, to talk about not being afraid to do podcasts on a podcast. And I, who was not only not feeling ill, but even quite enjoying myself, had one of those rare moments where you can actually see and measure personal progress in a very tangible way. It! Felt! Great!

But also, the interview itself was very fun. We talked about Jimmy Eat World and Rush and Taylor Swift and Stars and Garth Brooks and Olafur Arnalds and Rachmaninoff. We talked about publishing and blogging and lasagne and Scotland. We also talked about reviews and I jinxed myself there too by saying people were leaving nice reviews for Sorry I Missed You. (I woke up this morning to many bad reviews, including one saying I was conceited for classifying my book as "book club fiction" and including book club questions in the back because what book club in their right mind is going to waste their time with the drivel I've written?—which is funny because Lake Union is a book club fiction imprint and I am not responsible for that classification AT ALL. Oh well. People be people.)

I will leave it here, for anyone to listen to who wants to, because I'm not afraid of you. (Please do picture adorable little Kevin McCallister marching out of his big white house yelling, "Hey! I'm not afraid anymore!")

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.