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.

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!

One Year!

Today marks one year since I Think We've Been Here Before was published in Canada.

And what a year it's been.

I'm a reflective person by nature, the kind of person who talks about a party the whole way home from the party, who possibly enjoys analyzing things after the fact as much as [or more than] I enjoy the initial experience of them. Maybe it's because I'm so anxious? I find that when I'm living through something, I'm very distracted by my anxieties, by the pressure to do it, whatever it is, right, to have fun, to not say something stupid, to, ironically, enjoy it to the fullest. But in reflection, the pressure is off. I'm just observing. Reliving the nice things without the possibility of disaster or embarrassment or failure. And maybe there's something to be learned there—is this what people talk about when they say they want to be more present?—but I haven't learned it yet. 

The experience of releasing a book is no different; there is so much to reflect on after the fact, and people are constantly asking questions that provoke even more reflection. Questions like, "How did the book do?" And, "Was it successful?" 

Great questions. Surprisingly hard questions! Let me try to answer them.

Something I didn't understand before getting into Publishing World was that there are a million metrics for deciding if a book did well or not. There are sales numbers, obviously. There's reader feedback. Trade reviews and Goodreads reviews and other various internet places where people talk about your book. There are the experiences that come out of publishing said book, both private and communal. Did you earn back your advance? Are the reviews generally positive or negative? And so on, and so forth. There are a LOT of metrics. 

To start, I Think We've Been Here Before has the lowest number of sales out of all of my books—which is funny to me, because I think it's my best. But as of right now, it has sold more than 100,000 fewer copies than Sorry I Missed You, which is (don't tell Sorry I Missed You) my least favorite of my three novels. So by that metric, it didn't do very well. It also didn't get as many trade reviews as V&V or SIMY, nothing in Kirkus or Booklist or Library Journal. It doesn't have nearly as many Goodreads reviews as either of my other books. It didn't sit at the top of any important bestsellers lists.

But! 

This book took me to Toronto and Denver and Evergreen and Saskatoon. It introduced me, through the process of asking for blurbs, to Marissa Stapley, who then invited me into her glorious circle of author friends (and honestly, if this was the only thing that came out of this book's publication, I'd call it a win, because these people are the best and I get to keep them even after the book stuff goes away). It was optioned for television by the incredible Paul Davidson, and found its way into the hands of people I would never have imagined, in my wildest dreams, would ever read my work. It was nominated for four Saskatchewan Book Awards, and won in one category, and that was a completely magical experience, from the longlist announcement to the awards gala, where I sat at a table full of new and extremely talented friends. And it opened up the coolest conversations with strangers in my email inbox; I heard from people who'd recently lost loved ones, palliative care nurses, a very sweet family of Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on (and on and on), and we talked about death and life and quantum entanglement and deja vu and Berlin and music and grief and writing. The reviews, though fewer, were overwhelmingly positive. I even credit this book with helping me get over my fear of public speaking, because it brought about so many podcast interviews and book events.

So, how did the book do? Not well. But was it successful? YES.

So. What's next?

Something I love almost as much as reflecting is daydreaming. However, reflecting is easier, because the material is all there; you just have to, like I said earlier, observe it. Daydreaming in the publishing realm is not quite so easy, especially now that I've been in it for so long. I feel very aware of the fact that nothing is guaranteed, that just because you managed to get a book or two published, that definitely does not mean the journey ahead will be all downhill. 

Or downhill at all. 

Or that there will continue to be a journey. 

It's been an interesting year behind the scenes. I'm not going to go into the whole story just yet, because it feels like a foolish one to tell before it's finished, but I will say that I recently sent a new book to my agent. It's weird, definitely the weirdest one I've ever written. It starts out with a farmer standing in his field looking at a big empty place where not five minutes ago, there was a farm. At first, he thinks the problem is that he's losing his mind, but then he realizes that he's not losing his mind, a whole farm really has vanished in front of his eyes, and that's actually a much bigger problem. 

So my agent is reading it, and hopefully she decides it's something we can sell together. It's is a very nerve-racking thing, sending off a book that has thus far only lived in my head. I mostly trust myself to know when something's worth writing, but sometimes I wonder, yikes, what if this was a really bad idea? What if I just spent two years working on a really bad idea?

I guess we'll see! And I promise, you'll be the first to know if that book becomes, you know, a book. 

Book Tour!

Years ago, when I sold my first book, I made a list of writer goals. At the time, I didn't know very much about the actual life of a modern-day author. My ideals were informed by movies about fictitious authors, novels about fictitious authors, and magazine interviews with only very, very famous and successful real-life authors. I think this is why, when I made that list, it had on it all kinds of ridiculous, out-of-touch, nonsense goals. I really thought, there, I've done the hard part. Now it's all downhill; now I get to write down all my wildest daydreams and check them off as they come true, one by one.

LOL.

One of these goals? Go on a book tour! That was a feature in every single one of those movies and books, the debut author being sent by her publisher to various cool cities, picked up at the airport in a limo by a nervous publicist, somehow having amassed a large and loyal following in the three days since their book was acquired, edited, and published, despite not spending any time (on screen, anyway) doing any kind of social media marketing. 

I was like, yes, that! Me! Want. Need, even!

But movies about writers are rarely accurate or realistic (despite the fact that they would, one would think, sometimes be written by writers) and one of the first things I learned as an author newbie was that most publishers don't really send most authors on books tours anymore. Yes, you might see authors going on book tours, but often those are paid for by the authors themselves, not the publishers (the exception seems to be that if you are already a very famous, very important author, then, as with everything in this business, you get to live that dream movie version of the author life—which is why my magazine exposure to only the most important writers of our time didn't give me such an accurate glimpse into the life of the...less important authors, which in reality is most of us).

I've released two books now. For my debut my friends threw me a party at The Paper Umbrella, which I never really posted about on here because I was so overwhelmed that entire summer, but it was beautiful and amazing and I was spoiled with a massive crowd of good friends and cookies decorated like the cover of Valencia and Valentine and twinkle lights in the back alley for when people got too warm in the shop and needed to get fresh air. It was so perfect that I didn't even mind that no one was sending me on a tour. 

For my second book, I was meant to do a little signing at a book store in Saskatoon, as well as a launch party here in the city, and that was going to be the extent of my self-funded book tour, but everything got cancelled because it was June 2020 and there were, you know, other things going on in the world at the time. 

So when I wrote my third book, the idea of a book tour was like a helium balloon I'd let go of long ago and completely forgotten about. 

However.

When my agent sent me the deal memo from Radiant, who bought the Canadian rights to I Think We've Been Here Before, I was pleasantly surprised to see included in their offer that they would "support at least a three city tour" and that particular daydream came floating back into my brain. 

It's fun when you let go of a dream and then it sneaks up on you again out of nowhere like that.

So anyway, all that to say, above is an early draft of my little book tour announcement graphic thing. There should be another date added soon, but the ones on there already are fairly finalized. If you're in any of these places at any of these times, you should come hang out. If you own a bookstore or are a librarian or have a book club and you want to hang, I'd be very happy to chat about adding your bookstore or library or whatever to the little book tour announcement graphic thing. If you're in Saskatchewan, you can book me through this form, and if you're not, email me at suzy@suzykrause.com and we can at least talk about it. :)

Three Stories

Have I ever told you about the time I was invited to an undisclosed location for supper by a complete stranger?

I don't think I've told this story here yet. 

It happened a few years ago. I got an email in my inbox from someone who referred to themselves as 'The Concierge." 

Dear Suzy, the message began, You are cordially invited to participate in The Influencers Dinner. This exclusive dining experience brings together twelve industry leaders ranging from TV/movie stars, Olympians, scientists, and business executives to famed artists, entrepreneurs, and Nobel Laureates for great conversation, food and drink. 

Oh, I thought to myself, spam. 

I read the rest of the email anyway because I nearly never don't. It had a specific date on it, and a time (7:00 PM sharp), and it said that the location would be provided upon RSVP (it did specify that the event might not be in Canada). There was also a bullet point list of what to expect: 

* All attendees help prepare a simple meal together. No cooking experience is necessary.
* Guests do not discuss their careers.
* Once seated the attendees take turns guessing their fellow guest’s professions.
* The expense of the meal is covered by your host, Jon Levy.
* The guest list is kept secret.
* The invitation is non-transferable and only for you.

So then I was intrigued, right, because who wouldn't be? A meal at undisclosed location with quantifiably interesting strangers? It sounded cool, kind of shady, a little And Then There Were None-ish. I googled Jon Levy to see if there was a possibility that this thing might be real. 

Here's what I found: 

This

and this

and THIS.

Oh, I thought to myself, not spam.

I showed the email to Barclay. He said, "You should go."

I stared at him. 

"You think I should?" 

He nodded. "It sounds cool."

I frowned at him. "Doesn't it sound like we're all going to be murdered one by one by a host with a vendetta and I'm going to have to solve the mystery before he picks me off?"

"Well yeah," he said, "but there's a New York Times article saying it's not that. It looks legit."

He wasn't wrong. Still, I RSVPd no. 

Next story:

Did I ever tell you about the time I was invited to the Olympics in Tokyo?

This was a couple of years before the dinner party thing. I got a phone call from a guy I met once back in 2007. He lives in BC and he's a—well. He's a whole bunch of things. Podcaster, musician, studio engineer, etc. We hadn't spoken in years, but we followed each other on Instagram and he read my blog (maybe still does? Hi Jordan! Do you still read my blog?). 

Anyway. He called me up out of the blue and told me that he'd been commissioned by NBC to produce their Olympics podcasts, and he was going to Tokyo to do it, and he wanted me to come along with him as the writer. 

I told him I'd have to think about it. As one does.

Barclay got home from work and I told him about the phone call. I actually can't remember his reaction to that one, but it was probably similar to the dinner party thing. You should go and it sounds cool and all that. Barclay is truly the best, and that's one of the morals of these stories. 

But, once again, I emailed Jordan and said I couldn't go. 

(Side note, I just Googled him to make sure I was remembering correctly that it was NBC who commissioned the podcast and found out that, though the Olympics in Tokyo were kind of blighted by the whole Covid thing, Jordan went to the Olympics in Beijing in 2022 and won an Emmy for that podcast. One of two things is true: 1. I could've been on that team and won an Emmy or 2. I could've been on that team and kept Jordan from winning an Emmy and he's lucky I stayed home.)

So now you're blinking at the screen asking yourself, what is the point of these stories? You might be wishing I was standing in front of you right now so you should grab me by my shoulders and give me a good shake. You might be wanting more of an explanation as to why I said no to such objectively cool opportunities. Maybe you're wondering if I regret my decisions. 

So.

Here's the thing: Sullivan was born almost 11 years ago and in that time, I have never—not once, not one single time—left the city overnight without him. I have done one staycation in a hotel in Regina while he slept at his grandparents' house twelve minutes away. I have, twice, gone for a day trip while he was in school. 

I have watched friends go on trips without their children. Barclay has gone on trips alone. I see these people do this and while I do feel a twinge of envy, mostly I just think, HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE DOING THIS? It feels like watching someone swim with sharks or jump out of an airplane or sit with their legs dangling over the side of a mountain—things I abstractly want to do but cannot comprehend doing. My jealousy toward those who can is tempered with terror. I can't picture myself doing that, just like I can't picture myself stepping off a high diving board.

I know it's not healthy. I know it's objectively kind of silly. But it's my fear, not yours, and if you were right inside my head, you'd get it.

Have you read Valencia and Valentine (it's okay if you haven't, but there are spoilers ahead)? I wrote that book when Sully was a few years old and this terror was new to me. In the book, there's a woman who is terrified of leaving her city. She can't fly, she can't drive. She goes to the airport and eats airport muffins while she watches the planes take off, and she reads travel books from the library and she daydreams, but she doesn't get up the courage to get on a flight herself until <spoiler> she's an elderly woman. 

Lots of people on the internet were big mad about that ending. They said the book was depressing, because this woman spent her whole life afraid to do something and only did it at the very last minute, and even then she only went as far as the airport in New York and then turned around and flew home again. They felt that she didn't conquer her fear. But lots of other people understood the ending, and I think the people who understood it are the people who get that conquering a fear doesn't have to be this huge, extravagant thing, especially when your fear feels so insurmountable, and that there's not really a time limit on it either. To have done something that scares you, even at the last minute, and even if it's something that most people feel is no big deal...is a big deal.  </end spoiler>

All that to say: I said no to Tokyo and to the Mystery Dinner Party because I was afraid. And both times, I thought of the book I had just written and published, and I thought of the scene where Valencia is sitting in the airplane seat looking out the window and thinking I should've done this sooner, and while I felt a tiny bit hypocritical, I didn't feel hopeless or regretful about any of it. I just thought, hm, I'm already working this out subconsciously. I'll get there someday. And wanting to get there is probably half the battle.

Okay, one more story.

When I signed with my Canadian publisher, they asked me to go get blurbs from a few Canadian authors. I already had some American ones, but this was a Canadian book published by a Canadian publisher, so we wanted to have some Canadian authors on the cover of it. One of the authors I reached out to was Marissa Stapley (I've told this part of this story before, here). Long story short (because you can read the long version of it at that link), Marissa read my book and sent along the loveliest blurb.

Then, in June, she also sent an email asking if I would like to do an event with her in Toronto. Just me and her, at a bookstore, talking about our books.

I admit, I dismissed it right away as something that would be amazing, but which would not be happening.  I would allow myself a quick daydream, like I had with the Tokyo and dinner party emails, and then I'd come back to reality, my reality, where I can't leave the kids, and I would send a sad and apologetic email saying thank you so incredibly much, but no. 

I closed the computer and told Barclay about the email, and he did his usual supportive-but-not-pressuring husband bit. And I said, Yeah, yeah, I know. But no.

And he said, But maybe you should actually think about it. Before you say no.

So I did. Being invited to go to Toronto and do an event with a literary superstar was absolutely a dream come true—but even more than that, Marissa and I have become friends, and I really think it would be so fun to actually meet her and go for supper and get to know her IRL. Not to mention the other friends I've made but not met who live in the Toronto area—other authors and people from the blogging world and people from the publishing world and a whole sweet book club of people I've met only on Zoom...

I thought of Valencia on the airplane saying I should've done this sooner and I thought of the angry Goodreads reviewer who said that she couldn't think of anything more depressing than an adult being stuck in a jail cell they've made up in their head (and I mean, this is a terrible perspective on anxiety but I still thought of it). I thought of Tokyo and all of the interesting people I might've met at the mystery dinner party. I thought of the times I travelled on my own before becoming a mother, and about how much fun I had then, and I thought of how often I talk to my kids about anxiety and fear and how I tell them that sometimes it's okay to sit something out if you feel like you need to, but sometimes it's really, really worth it to push yourself and do something that feels scary.

And then I realized that if I kept thinking, I would go in a circle and end up at the beginning, so I stopped thinking and I sent Marissa an email.

I said yes and I hit send before I could change my mind.

And today I'm booking my flights. 

So. If you are in the Toronto area on October 10, you could come to Type Books (Junction)  at 7:30 pm and witness a 37-year-old lady doing something incredibly normal and chill, but you'll know how big of a deal it'll all be inside my head and we can exchange knowing glances. 

Spiraling

Our mailman is one of those weirdos who listens to podcasts at full volume on his phone's speaker instead of using earbuds or headphones. So, every single morning at about 9 o'clock, I hear what sounds like a small crowd of self-important men making their way up my sidewalk, talking over each other, forcing laughter, saying, "Yeah, no, but here's the thing, my guy, here's the thing—" 

This is about the time I'm making my first cup of coffee for the day. The kids go downstairs and play video games, and I sit next to the open window and try to work on the new book, or publicity stuff for the other book, or, if nothing's flowing in either of those places, I'll come on here and write a blog post. 

Clearly nothing's flowing in either of those places at the moment, because here I am.

This is kind of to be expected though and I'm trying to be gentle with my brain. My next book comes out in a little more than a month (unless you're in the States, because the pub date there has been changed, but more on that later), and I'm in this awkward space where I know I'm supposed to be yelling at everyone to post about my book! and preorder now! and ask your library to order it in! but...I still feel so weird doing that. I thought this part of things would get easier as I gained confidence in myself, but I have learned, as I've said before, that publishing is a humility boot camp and I have not actually gained said confidence. 

Maybe later?

But now is not later, and I know this because I posted a giveaway the other day on Instagram (which is still open), and the way you enter is just to share the giveaway post, either on Instagram, or by text message to a friend, or with your book club, or on Facebook, or whatever, and it is so ridiculous how nervous I was to do that. I made the post the day my author copies came in the mail and then sat on it for a week, and then decided I might not do it after all, then made a quick mental u-turn, cutting dangerously across several lanes of oncoming traffic (this is maybe a metaphor for ignoring my self preservation instincts?) and hit that terrifying post button head-on.  

Then I spent the whole day cringing, wound up so tight I thought I was going to snap my neck if I turned to look at something behind me. The worst was when the name of one of my friends appeared on my screen. I worried they were secretly judging me for being so annoying about the whole book promo thing—or, worse, not secretly judging, but openly judging in group chats and in-person conversations with other people I know. And I was sympathizing with them! At what point do you start rolling your eyes a little, you know? At what point do I start to sound like the self-important men on my mailman's blaring podcasts? Join my Patreon! Buy my sponsored products! I have opinions about the infrastructure of New York!

There's just so much noise online these days, and we're all very tired of being advertised at; I'm worried about adding to it. Words like 'must read' have begun to sound less like a glowing endorsement and more like a homework assignment. I wish my books could just go out into the world, separate from me, and do their thing, but they're clinging to my legs, hiding behind me, making me speak for them like shy children. And I have to do it, because if I want to write more books, I need to sell the ones I've already written. I hate the word 'hustle' and yet hustle I must.

I guess at some point you just need to trust that your friends are going to love you even if they need to mute you on social media for a month or two? Or maybe you can even dare to believe that some of them enjoy seeing your name pop up on their screen, yet again, because they understand that a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do and she is so, so, so sorry but she's gonna do it anyway?

Anyway. There is no point to this ramble. I'm just spiraling (just a dainty, neat little spiral, nothing dramatic) and I need you to know that I am EXTREMELY aware that I'm very annoying, and I will continue to be annoying until probably December, and then I'm going to chill right out and be so fun to be around. 

(But actually I will be spiraling in a different direction at that point because my book will be out in the world and I never handle that well. Who keeps letting me do this?)

Something Like Fame

 I’m having extra thoughts this morning. I’m a person who has a lot of thoughts at the best of times (I’d say “don’t we all” but sometimes I ask Barclay what he’s thinking and he says, “Nothing,” and he really means it, and I can’t relate to that at all, though I admire and aspire to it) but they feel much more pressing today. And I do mean, literally, pressing. 

Like:

I generally picture the thoughts in my head as a cloud of mosquitos, just buzzing around in my whole skull, and sometimes these thoughts are at the front and sometimes these other thoughts are, and I’m aware of all of them all the time but I’m more aware of the ones that are buzzing around right behind my eyes. Today, I feel like all of the thoughts in my head are demanding my attention, up against my forehead, the backs of my eyeballs, filling up my sinuses. 

Miserable as that sounds, I don’t hate it. I just feel extremely…present. I can feel myself in my head.

One time, I saw someone on Twitter pose this question: Where do you exist in your body? I thought that was the weirdest thing to ask. I’m in my head! I thought. Aren’t we all in our heads? When you think about your self, isn’t it, whatever exactly ‘it’ is, in your head? If you got decapitated, wouldn’t you think “you” were in the head, not the body? 

But then people were replying that they feel like “they” exist in their chest, in their stomach, sometimes even outside of their body looking at it from somewhere else in the room, and my mind was blown. I am constantly being reminded that my experience of being a human person, my experience of existence, is not the same as everyone else’s, even down to these things that feel like they should be universal. 

I bet you’re very interested to see where this particular rabbit trail is going, aren’t you? Well, sorry, it’s going nowhere. It’s just one of the mosquitos buzzing around in my noggin. It does get weird in here.

Anyway.

I think this particular thought swarm is somewhat a result of last week’s news. It was really fun, sharing the press release about the book being optioned for TV, receiving so many encouraging notes and messages. And because I exist in my head (oh, here we go, I can tie that rabbit hole in here and make it a little less abstract), I don’t ever just feel my feelings; I think them. I observe them, I analyze them, I wonder about them. 

So I woke up this morning really thinking my feelings. I was thinking, specifically, about a couple of messages I got last week that jokingly were like, “Don’t let all this fame go to your head!” And, like, it was very much a joke, I do not actually have fame, but it got me thinking about fame, about why people want it so much. Or why they think they want it. I mean, when I see videos of actually famous people being mobbed as they try to just go to a restaurant with their friends, I mostly feel sorry for them. It doesn’t look fun. I feel like very few people actually want that. But I also feel like it’s a very common human thing to desire something tangential to it. Something easily mistaken for it.

This is an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with my friend Sarah, about why writers want to be published in the first place, about why we don’t just keep our stories in notebooks under our beds, why we’re constantly trying to push them out into the world even though the thought of doing that is so often physically uncomfortable for introverted, private people like her and me. 

We have landed on the idea that one of the best parts of writing is feeling seen. Not in an ‘I love people looking at me’ way, but more in an ‘I love people understanding me’ way. 

I actually started writing this blog post last Tuesday, the day after the announcement went out. I was sitting in my usual spot at the Brewed Awakening downtown, at the window bar looking out on Victoria Ave. It’s the best place for people watching and I feel fairly invisible there even though it’s such an obviously visible spot. But people aren’t peering into the window as they walk past; they’re in a hurry, they’re going to work, they’re meeting someone for coffee. I’m just sitting there, a little above eye-level; I have the advantage. 

On that particular day, I happened to see a familiar person walking past my perch in the window: my father-in-law, Marty.

He had his head down; it was a little windy that day, the temperature was still below zero, so he was buzzing along, but he must have sensed me in the window because he looked up and smiled at me. We waved at each other, he made a funny face—a natural reflex for him, I think. 

A moment later, the bell over the coffee shop door dinged, announcing Marty’s arrival in the shop. I thought, oh, he’s meeting someone here. He went up to the counter and ordered a large coffee and made his way over to me, walking the way people do when they’ve got a large cup of hot liquid filled right to the very top. I thought, oh, he’s coming to sit with me. But when he got to my spot, he merely set the cup on the bar in front of me, made small talk for a couple of minutes, and then said, “Well, I’ll let you get back to work!” And with a wave and a smile, he was back out on the street, going wherever he’d been going in the first place. My latte was almost gone and I was extremely happy for another cup of coffee, but it also felt like such a perfect illustration of the whole entire publishing Thing for me. 

Me, sitting in a coffee shop, observing, writing. A very enjoyable thing all on its own. But…if I’m being fully honest, the desire is not for it to be a thing all on its own. The desire, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously, is for it to be a transaction. The desire is to be seen, to have someone not just glance at you, not to just register your basic existence, but to understand you. Like Marty, looking up and noticing me in the window, understanding me enough to know that, yes, I would love another cup of coffee, and, yes, while I enjoy your company, I have come here to work so I don’t have a lot of time to sit and visit. I felt seen. 

And that’s the way I feel when people read my books and send me emails saying, “I read this and I GOT it.” And that’s the way I felt when Paul emailed me and wanted to talk about making my book into a TV show. He had all these ideas and thoughts and all of them made me feel very seen, very understood. Evidence that I had been successful in portraying the weird vision I had in my head when I started writing that book, because here was someone picturing all the same things and describing it back to me in a way that showed it was understandable. This is the exciting thing about picturing this story on a screen—the thought of people watching it and understanding the things I wanted to say with it. The thought of seeing other creative people interpreting it and adding their two cents to it, adding nuance and meaning that I didn’t originally put in there. Being part of something more collaborative than I’ve had the chance to be part of, previously. 

But, I don’t know. 

Maybe lots of people just actually want fame.

Maybe everyone reading this is like, “Nope, you got it all wrong. People just want fame and that’s a bad instinct that we should get rid of as a society.” Maybe they’re like, “You want fame and you’re trying to justify it by dressing it up as something else.” Maybe they’re still stuck on the weird part at the beginning, where I lost them by using the word “decapitated.” 

LOL. I don’t know. The thoughts are just buzzing around. I’m just telling you about them. 

If you get it, you get it. And that makes me happy.

Weirdness Journal Entry #1: The Mercury Cafe

I have now been in Publishing World for seven or eight years, and in that time I’ve never met any of the Publishing World main characters in real life. I’ve never met my agent, for example, never met any of the people who work at the publishing house (or any of the other authors there, many of whom I have become very close to online). I’ve never met any of the people working behind the scenes doing foreign translations or marketing or film rights stuff. There are even people I only communicate with through other people; I've not shared so much as an email with them myself. It’s a very disembodied thing, happening over the phone and the internet, which can make it feel a little unreal. 

And it’s not just the publishing professionals with whom I’ve felt this disconnect; it’s the whole literary ecosystem. Lake Union, who published my first two books, is in the States, so obviously they market my books to American readers (and they do a VERY good job of that). That’s where my readers live, where the book clubs are who invite me to join them on Zoom. Like the agents and editors and publicists, I don’t really get to meet readers. I get lovely emails from them, and they tag me on Instagram, but I very rarely get to see them face to face.

People say, you’re an author! That’s so fun! And I’m like, Yes, very fun! But…I’m not actually sure any of it’s real. What I might be is the victim of an elaborate hoax. It might actually be quite embarrassing.

So last spring, when my agent, Victoria, and I started talking about my third book, I threw out kind of a weird idea: I said, I want to stay with Lake Union, because I love my editors there, I love the way they treat their authors, I love their cover design and marketing and communication and—well, many other things. I love Lake Union. 

But.

Could we possibly, I asked her, hang on to the Canadian rights and sell those to a Canadian publisher? I even had one in mind: Radiant Press, an indie publisher right here in Regina. I met John Kennedy, the co-publisher of Radiant, at a Penny University event and had a brief conversation about publishing and marketing and creativity that was exciting to me, and I’d gone home and researched them a bit and felt very interested in working with them.

But also, and I didn’t say this to Victoria at the time, I’d long had this romantic idea of being an author who lived in the same city as their publisher—like every author in every movie, who writes in their New York apartment and then strolls down the street for an in-person meeting with their publishing team, who is VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS BOOK! and leans across a table—a real table, with a good, solid cup of coffee on it—gesticulating wildly as they discuss cover design and marketing strategies and launch parties. I think I’ve grown out of my desire to actually live in New York, but I’ve developed a Canadian version of that daydream: I've pictured myself in Regina’s Cathedral Village, in the Mercury Cafe, in one of those bright red booths by the window, my editor across the table holding a cup of coffee and speaking in that Publishing World lingo I’ve grown so fond of but don't often get to use in my everyday life. 

This is the daydream I’ve been having for well over a year now. I’m not making this up. 

You’re thinking, Suzy, why would I think you’re making this up?

You’ll see. Hang on.

Victoria is wonderful. She is smart and industry-savvy and willing to try new things. Still, this plan made her pause. She warned me that holding back rights was a risky move, that most publishers wanted world rights, and that if I kept those rights and then couldn’t sell them, the book would simply not be released in Canada. 

At all.

So I paused too. For all of 30 seconds. 

And then I was like, “Let’s try it anyway.”

Because I had that vision, about the red booths and the coffee, about being part of the Canadian publishing ecosystem and meeting my readers and not feeling like I didn’t exist in my own country.

I should try to make a long story short, here, because a lot happened between this and the next thing. We sent the book off to Lake Union in...October? I think? 

We had a tentative offer in December; it came through while I was sitting in the school gymnasium waiting for Scarlett's Christmas concert to start.

The deal memo came in January, and I signed the contract in March—for world rights except Canada. It was official! We were going to try to sell the Canadian rights all by themselve. It was a bit leap-of-faithy, and pretty scary. What if Radiant didn't want my book? 

Then again: what if they did?

Ah, here's where I can shorten the long story a bit more: they did. 

Phew. Right? PHEW. 

I signed with them in November, a little over a year after sending the manuscript to Lake Union. (Publishing is nothing if not the actual slowest thing in the world.)

And then, in January of 2024, I got an email from Debra, the publisher at Radiant Press, and—I'm being 100% honest with you right now—in this email she asked me if I would like to meet up at the Mercury Cafe for coffee to discuss my book. 

It was only in that moment that I realized how weirdly specific my daydream had been, about meeting up with a publisher in one of the red booths at the Mercury Cafe. It's not like I live in a tiny village with one local watering hole, you know what I mean? There are many, many places to conduct business in Regina, Saskatchewan. But my brain was like, "THE FIFTIES DINER ON 13TH. THAT'LL BE IT." 

And it was.

Our meeting happened on Tuesday. I walked up to the Mercury, experiencing the oddest sense of deja vu, because it was just like in my daydream. And John was there, standing out front, and he turned to me and said, "Ah—Suzy?" 

And I said, "Yes, hello!" 

And we shook hands and he told me Debra would be there soon and we went into the diner and we stood there for a moment, surveying the space—tables and chairs to the left, the big red window booths to the right. John gestured at one of the booths, like he knew he was supposed to, and said, "Shall we sit here?"

Do you want to know what the weirdest thing about all of this is? My book, the one we met at the Mercury to discuss, is about a family who finds themselves at the end of the world. And as they face this completely unprecedented thing, they find that it feels like something they remember. And they keep having these moments of deja vu, these glitchy little things that happen that make it seem like they've seen into the future, but it doesn't feel to them like seeing the future, it feels like remembering it, like having a daydream and then having the daydream come true. 

So, I don't know, man. I'm having a weird time. You don't know the half of it.

ANYWAY.

The meeting was wonderful; it was exactly what I dreamed it would be, because of course it was. We sat in the big red booth for two and a half hours and I drank probably five cups of coffee. We talked about my book and about books in general and about cover design and marketing and launch parties and it felt collaborative and fun and New Yorky, but in a very Saskatchewany way. 

Life is so weird, isn't it?

Weird and good.

A New Project

I’m back at the Bean this morning. This is no small feat today; it’s almost -50 with the windchill and the walk from my car to the coffee shop was treacherous—by the time I made it inside, my eyeballs were frozen like grapes in their sockets and I’d completely forgotten what it was like to feel warmth or comfort or joy. Victoria was standing behind the counter and I stared at her for a moment, trying to catch my breath. 

“It’s cold out there!” I said at last. 

Because I am a writer, a wordsmith, a capital C Creative. 

I wonder how many times this past week and today and this coming week Victoria has had and will have this exact sentence spoken to her in exactly this way. It makes me sad to realize I am so derivative, so pedestrian, so lacking in pizazz or originality.

But I am cold, okay, my brain is frozen, the synapses are not firing; I am like a car who needs someone with a bigger, more durable winter brain to come along and hook me up to jumper cables.

In lieu of that, I am writing here, on this blog, trying to jump start my brain by myself. 

I’m working on a new project. 

I Think We’ve Been Here Before comes out next September, which means that I have eight months ahead of marketing and promotion and meetings and publicity. In some ways, this is my least favourite part of publishing. I hate—have always hated—talking about my books. (I thought this shyness would go away with time but it hasn’t.) But there are also things that happen in this period of time that I like a lot and am so excited for. Reaching out to my favourite book bloggers to send ARCs, taking fun little pictures for social media, brainstorming ways to make connections with booksellers and libraries and readers, holding the finished copies in my hands and reading early reviews. It sounds like such a contradiction to say I hate promoting my book but also I love promoting my book and I don’t know what to tell you: I contain multitudes. 

But I have found that the very best use of this time is to work on The Next Thing, so that’s what I’m doing, and I’m having a very nice time. It’s quite weird and I’m at the stage where it’s new and shiny and I’m just watching the words appear on the screen like someone else is writing through my fingers, just daydreaming and letting the story be as strange as it wants to be without having to consider whether an editor at a publishing house will be able to win over an acquisitions board with it. In some ways, this is my favourite part of publishing. I love—have always loved—being surprised by an idea as it forms, daydreaming about where it could go and where it will land. But there is also a very uncomfortable aspect to this stage, if I’m being honest, an impatience to get the whole thing out and send it off to my agent, to see if has any merit or if I’m just being silly. It sounds like such a contradiction to say I love the beginning part of writing a book but also that I hate it and I don’t know what to tell you. 

Okay. I think my brain battery has been sufficiently jump-started, so I’m going to get back at it. May we all survive this ridiculous polar vortex.

I Think We've Been Here Before

Happy New Year! 

I hope your holidays were eventful, if you like eventful holidays, or uneventful if that's what you prefer. I hope you partied hard or slept a lot, or some pleasant combination of both.

As for me, I did more partying than sleeping and I'm tired but very happy to get back into routine and eat something healthy...right after I finish all the left over snacks I've hidden from the kids on top of the fridge.

Anyway! New year, new news: I've written another book and it's Official:

It’s called I Think We’ve Been Here Before and I’ve been describing it to people as slice of life speculative fiction—think, the coziness of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café with the something's-not-quite-right undercurrent of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It comes out September 2024. 

Here's a picture of me signing the contract, for posterity (not sure why posterity wants it, but anyway):

And here's the synopsis, straight from my publisher:

With the end of the world predicted, reality bends in an unexpectedly quirky and heartwarming novel about human connection and the meaning of life and death by the bestselling author of Sorry I Missed You.

Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm could be their last.

Preparing for the inevitable, they navigate the time they have left together. Marlen and Hilda have channeled their energy into improbably prophetic works of art. Hilda’s elderly father receives a longed-for visitor from his past. Hilda’s teenaged nephew goes missing, and his mother refuses to believe the world is ending. All the while, Hilda’s daughter struggles to find her way home from Berlin with the help of an oddly familiar stranger. For everyone, there’s an unsettling feeling that this unprecedented reality is something they remember…

I sold this book to Lake Union, the magnificent publisher behind my first two books, last spring, and because I sold it on spec. (a general synopsis of the book idea and first three chapters) I had to then write it super fast, which was exhilarating and terrifying and all-consuming. I spent the summer editing it, working early mornings and late nights, and now it’s in the weird purgatoryish place between editing and publishing, where my only job is to convince as many people as possible to buy it. (like so: I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE is available for preorder for all of my non-Canadian friends wherever books are sold. You can order it from your local indie, which is always my favorite option, but it’s also on Chapters, B&N, Target, Amazon, etc. Canadian friends: I will absolutely let you know when it’s available for you.)

Would you like to see the cover? This is not it:

That’s right—I said not. The graphic above is one of the cover designs that didn’t quite make the final cut. Isn’t it so pretty though? It’s currently the lock screen on my phone. The artist is Philip Pascuzzo, whose name you might recognize—as well as designing that iconic little blue bird formerly known as the Twitter symbol, he also designed the cover for my first novel, Valencia and Valentine. And now, he’s responsible for the beautiful artwork you see above, and also for the artwork that will be on the final cover of this, my third novel. 

The actual cover: 

I love it. 

But wait! More news! Just a little bit more.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that the incredible Radiant Press will be releasing this book in Canada.  I met them a few years ago and had a very fun conversation about publishing and creativity and marketing and I remember leaving that conversation all amped up and trying to brainstorm ways that I could work with them in the future.

Well, as they say, the future is now.

Okay. That's all the sharable news I have at the moment, but I'll keep you in the loop.

Thank you so much for being here, reading this, reading my weird little books, being so great. I'm thankful for you—if there were no you, there would be no any of this, and I would just be bored all the time.

On Shelving a Book

According to my DMs, the thing that most seemed to leap out at people from my last post was the fact that I wrote an entire 80,000 word book and then just…set it aside and wrote a different one. People want to know if it’s painful to shelve a book, and my answer is: at first, yes, very, excruciating. It sucks so much and you feel incapacitated and demoralized and depressed but then…you get over it. You move on.

I remember listening to a podcast years ago, right after writing my very first book, hearing an author talk about how many books she’d shelved in her career. I remember thinking to myself, How is that woman still living? I will never. I could never. I would die. 

Because writing a book is hard; I had just learned this firsthand. 80,000 words is a lot—a lot of research, a lot of mental exertion, a lot of time. Writing a book is like catching a wild animal. 

No. No, I need a more violent metaphor. Okay, this: 

Writing a book is like catching a wild animal, but the wild animal is in pieces, and that thing is elusive. And you have to attempt to put the pieces together while the in-pieces animal attempts to eat you and claw your eyeballs out. And there are 80,000 pieces and they are mostly nails and teeth.

(At least, it’s like that for me. Maybe other authors, like Nick Hornby or Rainbow Rowell who have written an inordinate number of novels and seem to breathe them out in their sleep, would compare writing a book to laying on a couch or falling down stairs made of cotton candy and landing on a giant pillow full of marshmallows. Or maybe they’re just really good with wild animals! Who knows?)

Anyway, when I heard that podcast episode I was really skeptical of the idea that a person could invest that kind of metaphorical blood, sweat, and [not metaphorical] tears into a project before realizing it wasn’t going to work/sell/be something into which they wanted to invest more. Surely you’d know a few chapters in? Surely you’d only let a wild animal take one or two bites out of you before you realize this specific one’s not worth the pain?

But now I get it. 

My shelved book, which I once affectionately referred to as The TFLC but which now I don’t generally refer to much at all, was one I started writing in 2019. Valencia and Valentine had just come out and I was in the middle of copy edits on Sorry I Missed You. I wrote this post around that time, to give you some emotional context. I was tired. I had been unpleasantly surprised by how hard it actually was to send a book into the world and receive feedback from so many people all at once—feedback on the book, feedback on ME. This wild animal, which I had painstakingly pieced together and set free, turned right around and tore me to pieces. It was weird. I was sad.

But something I know about myself (and always, always forget) is that I have some serious emotional range. I’m like Celine Dion, but with feelings. I can hit all the notes. Where I differ from Celine is that I don’t tend to travel as quickly from one end of my range to the other. When I’m hitting the emotional high notes, I tend to forget that I’ve ever spent time in the lower end of my range. I sing entire songs in falsetto, entire albums in bass. This metaphor is weird and probably you can tell that it’s 10:05 at night and I’ve had too much coffee today but the point is that in October 2019 I was moping around my house like Eeyore, ears dragging on the ground, being all, I’ll never write another book and I hate the thing I once loved and what even am I if I’m not this and why do the fine people of Goodreads hate me so much…

So within just a few short weeks, I was singing high notes again (you can tell when you read this), and with this shift in the atmosphere of my head came a new book. I could picture the cover art. I could vividly imagine the characters milling around in my brain like actors backstage before the curtains open. I felt grateful and happy, I was living my dream life once again. 

I started writing. I wrote fast. I felt like I had gotten a bit better at taming and assembling wild animals. I sent chapters to friends for feedback, and they were nice to me. 

And then…welp. March 2020 happened. You already know what this means. The kids came home from school, the world shut down, everyone started fighting with each other (honestly, I think this was the thing that affected me the most). I was set to launch my second book in just three short months and instead of prepping for a book tour I was obsessively watching the news and attending Zoom birthday parties and not ever leaving my house.

I finished the book, but I did it in a fog. I sent it to my agent, but when she called me to discuss edits I found that I just couldn’t do it. Every time I opened the document I felt ill and the thought of spending more time in that world felt inexplicably bad. Maybe it was the pandemic, the uncertainty, the animosity, the isolation. Maybe the lingering stress of V&V’s launch was looming behind me or maybe the thought of SIMY’s impending launch was looming up ahead.  Maybe it was all of these things and some other things too. Whatever it was, that book had bad vibes and I couldn’t get rid of them.

So finally, I set it aside and I’ve never picked it up again.

I think there are lots of reasons people abandon their books. For me, it was the bad vibes. For others it might be that the book was too hard to tame, or not worth taming, or not tameable, period. I’ve known people who have shelved really sweet books because the publishing industry just couldn’t see how sweet they were. I’ve known people who have shelved books because, simply put, they were tired of them. There are, I see now, no invalid reasons. My only advice to my past self would be to abandon an unviable book a little sooner. You can always come back to it, I’d say to me, but sitting here trying to wrangle this thing into submission is just wearing you out, and you’re starting to put the pieces together in ways that make zero sense. This book is all claws.

But, alas, knowing me I’d reply, Just let me try one more thing…

I can be so annoyingly stubborn sometimes.

Okay, where am I… Right, so I shelved that book. The TFLC. It felt like, if you don’t mind one more metaphor, setting a house on fire. Do you save stuff on your way out? Do you copy and paste your favorite lines into a fireproof document to come back to later? Do you take the best characters with you?

Probably the most pressing question: do you have the energy to build another house, knowing that burning it down is a thing that is, apparently, on the table? For a while, I thought the answer to this was no. You can tell not by a sad-sounding blog post or an upbeat-sounding blog post I wrote in that time, but by the fact that there were no blog posts at all. (Yikes, this blog makes me very easy to analyze.)

But the launch of SIMY was healing. I was ready, this time, for the public-facing elements of releasing a book, and for the weird personal elements too. I was ready for the buildup and the comedown and, honestly, I think a big part of it being better the second time around was that I finally understood how not a big deal the whole thing was. People send books out into the world all the time. Good books, bad books, mediocre ones. Some people love the terrible ones, some loathe the beautiful ones. It is, as they say, what it is, and I learned that you just have to do the best you can at capturing and assembling your weird book animal thing and then you have to take it out to an open field and set it free and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction so it doesn’t turn on you and tear you to pieces. 

:)

After SIMY came out, I waited for another book idea to come along, because they are out there, roaming around, nonstop, and it did, and I wrote it. It was not easy; it had claws and teeth and chainsaws. This was fine, because it also had very good vibes.

(More on this soon.)