The Ghost in the Central Branch

I always walk around really conscious of my past self—is this weird? Do you know what I mean though? Like, Barclay and I went for a walk yesterday, in the east end by the golf course, and we were talking about something and at the same time we both went, hey, we were walking down this EXACT same path the last time we talked about this thing; we were right in this exact spot. And it was like our past selves were ghosts walking along beside us and we were laughing at them, at how little they knew about the future (to be fair, Barclay and I have never claimed to be fortune tellers). 

But I love moments like that, where you can see your past self, totally oblivious to your present self, maybe worrying about something, or planning something, or working on something, and they have no idea how it's going to turn out but you do. 

(Or at least, you know a little bit more than they do. Because someday, your future self is going to laugh at your present self for not knowing now what you will then.)

Anyway.

I had a moment like this today. 

My ghosts are all over this place—that's one of the cool things about living in the same city for such a long time—and one of them lives in the Central Branch of the Regina Public Library. She went to see the Writer in Residence there about a decade ago, clutching a half-baked manuscript that needed two more years of edits before an agent would take it seriously, basically to ask if she was any good at this writing thing or if she should quit. 

I don't know if you remember this, but you might: I wrote this blog post about the moment I pulled the trigger and send off that terrifying email to the WIR, and this blog post about the day I went in and met with her.

Today, I went to that same library for the Saskatchewan Book Awards shortlist announcement, and found out my book was shortlisted in four categories(!). As the SBA members stood at the podium and read the names of the nominees, I watched my shaky little ghost walk behind them, up the stairs and into the WIR office, manuscript in hand, heart pounding so hard I can hear it ten years later. My ghost went into the office worried that she was being silly, that this whole book thing was a bad idea, that the Writer in Residence was going to give her a few pity compliments and then drop kick her heart right out the window onto Smith Street. 

She didn't, by the way. That woman, Dr. Nilofar, was one of the first professional people who told my ghost that she wasn't being silly, and that she should try to publish a book. It's one of those Really Important Moments in my life, which is why my ghost haunts that library still, walking from the sliding doors at the library entrance, through the stacks and up the stairs, trying to be brave because this thing was really, really important to her even though she felt kind of ridiculous saying that out loud to anyone. 

The sad thing about these ghosts is that you can't talk to them. I always wish I could. I wish I could just yell back in time, like, even something vague and encouraging, just give them a glimpse into the future so they could know that what they're doing is working or that such-and-such a thing is going to be okay or, at the very least, just isn't going to matter in a few years. 

But you don't get to. You have to live your life in order and find out how it's going by going there. And you have to be oblivious to the future versions of yourself doing the things you dream about doing someday. And I think maybe this is the key to being a person with big dreams: being aware of all of your ghosts. Knowing that no matter where you are in your journey, there are more versions of you ahead, so excited for you to catch up and see what's going to happen next.

 

A Breakdown

I’ve just crossed the 50,000 word count mark on book 4/5*! 

This is probably different for everyone, but for me, the 50,000 word count mark is a giant sigh of relief—actually, let me break it down for you, because I have a minute, and you have a minute (I bet), and I like writing about writing:

10,000 words: Barely acknowledgeable, easily doable. Can be achieved in a few days on a wave of caffeine and naïveté and the slightly misplaced confidence that this is your best idea yet and that the last 70k will fall out of you as easily as the first ten. Any old idea has the legs needed to make it to the 10,000 word mark, truly. You don’t mention it to anyone because you know how fragile it is and it would be embarrassing if you told people about every single first 10,000 words you ever wrote. 

20,000 words: Okay, a little better than 10,000 words, but all you’ve really done is raise the stakes and made the idea harder to throw in the trash because now you’ve spent more time on it. Killing your darlings becomes harder the more darlings there are to kill.

30,000 words: Feels like the halfway point but it’s [probably] not. This is where things start to slow down and you start to reexamine not only the project but also your ability to write and sell and talk about books. You start to feel a bit silly as the adrenaline and false sense of confidence you once had wears off all at once. You think to yourself, “Maybe this is a novella?” But you know that no one’s going to want a novella from you, and you know it’s not a novella, and everything feels daunting and you start scrolling social media a lot. Despair, but still somewhat hopeful despair.

40,000 words: The actual halfway point! Just sheer panic, now! You have put a lot of time and effort into this book; you have told your agent and editor that it exists, maybe even sent along the synopsis and first three chapters, even though you don’t really know how you’re going to land the plane yet. What were you thinking? Cry a lot! Less hopeful despair, much less!

50,000 words: This is where you might realize, in a moment of sudden and undeniable clarity that feels, honestly, a little trippy, what your book is actually about. You notice all of the little Easter eggs your subconscious has planted all along the way that point to the larger themes and which kind of make you feel like a genius even though they weren’t intentional, but you also notice all of the red herrings and useless characters and plot points that have wandered into your book and don’t belong there at all and which are now congregating in all the chapters looking lost and awkward. You are going to have to ask them to leave, and it is going to be unpleasant. You think to yourself, that’s a problem for Future Me, and you ignore it. You experience a shot of adrenaline similar to the one you had when you first had this idea. You write faster again. You start daydreaming about the book again. You realize that, at some point, this went from being a thing you should probably quit to being a thing you can’t quit.

60,000 words: This milestone doesn’t even exist. You sail straight past it to 70k without acknowledging it.

70,000 words: This is where you get a little more clarity, maybe one last panic attack, one last shot of self-doubt (important clarification: I don’t mean you get the last shot of self-doubt ever, I just mean…okay, maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘last.’ There will never be a last shot of self-doubt if you are a writer). Maybe the first draft is done at this point, and you realize that when you go back to edit, the book is going to swell. Surprise! Celebration! You get to put it in a drawer for two weeks and reclaim some valuable brain real estate! OR you realize that your first draft is actually going to end up being 120k because you’ve overwritten it and you are not even close to being done. Agony! Anguish! WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO YOURSELF?!

80, 90, 100, 110, 120k: More of the same, repeat until done. 

So, now you have a bit more context for, “I’ve just crossed the 50,000 word count mark on book 4/5!” I’ve just had that moment of clarity (it happened last week at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, in the foyer); I’ve just realized that there are a solid five chapters that need to be cut, and I’ve just understood, for the first time, how this thing needs to end (but I don’t really know how to make it happen just yet. I need to do some research). It feels less like something I’m making up and more like something I’m uncovering, and it has crossed the line from “should I abandon this?” to “it’s too late to turn back now,” which feels like a terrifying relief. 

Okay! Onward! TTYL!

*(I say 4/5 because it’s one of two books I’m working on right now and they’re kind of racing each other to see the light of day. The other book 4/5 is technically a complete first draft but needs a lot of work.)

Book Soundtrack: Sorry I Missed You

Shortly after Sorry I Missed You came out, I began to get emails and texts and passing comments from various people asserting that they knew—they knew—exactly who I had used as inspiration for the character of Larry, the slightly embarrassing, badly-aging ex-punk. And their confidence was so funny, because no two people guessed the same person, and no one guessed the person who had really inspired him. 

Partly because no single person had inspired him—he was an amalgamation of people I’ve seen in coffee shops and people I’ve met once or twice and now follow on instagram and people I knew in high school and people I know now and…well, me. 

Actually, mostly me. 

I get why people didn’t guess that one—Larry is a man, first of all, and I’m not a man. Larry is a solid decade or so older than me. Larry listens to old punk at the exclusion of all else while my taste in music spans a lot of genres and decades. Larry is a whole bunch of other things that I’m not.

Besides all of that, a lot of people just plain didn’t like Larry, and thought I had written him in an unlikeable way because I didn’t like him either. So how could he be me? If I were basing a character on myself, wouldn’t I cast them in a more agreeable light? 

But this is true for pretty much every unlikeable character I’ve ever written: I think they come across as unlikeable or unliked because they’re based on me—because when I’m writing looking inward, I’m not afraid to be mean the way I would be if I’d been inspired by someone who could conceivably read the book and recognize themselves. Aren’t we all our own worst critic? And isn’t that, kind of, an asset in this case?

So what of mine did I give to Larry? A deep love for music—live music, especially—and an instinct to be a little gatekeepy about it, borne mostly out of sadness for the way the world is changing, sadness for the way that he himself is changing, sadness that things can’t just stay the way they were (because how they were, in that little pocket of time, in those venues, with those people, was just so fun. And maybe Larry, like myself, suffers from a lack of self-awareness about this. He has a hard time recognizing that things are fun for the next generations too, even if it looks different now). 

But, as characters often do, Larry also gave some things to me!

Like I said: he was more than a decade older than I was when I wrote that book, so the music scene of his youth was pretty different from the one I’d experienced. I grew up in Frontier, a tiny village far, far away from…well, anything. We did not have a thriving punk scene. We did not have an indie record store. We didn’t even have high speed internet; if I wanted to download a single song it required four hours of internet connection, usually thwarted by a family member innocently picking up the phone somewhere in the house. So my exposure to punk music in my teen years was limited to a couple of local bands (“local” meaning within a two hour radius of me) and a CD binder I borrowed from a friend for the better part of a year that contained a lot of burned CDs and every single Fat Wreck Chords compilation album ever made. There was also one Very Exciting Road Trip to Calgary for the Warped Tour at the end of my grade 12 year. After that, I moved to Saskatoon and started going to punk and hardcore shows at the Bassment all the time, but that scene was, by then, fairly far removed from the DIY punk scene of the 90s. 

So I had to do a little research, is what I’m saying, which was very fun. I read Razorcake and a lot of very pretentious but wonderful blogs and I scoured Reddit and followed several musical rabbit holes all over the place on Spotify. I found, expectedly, that people who are really intense about music are intense about it in very similar ways across genres and generations—and maybe that’s why so many people read Sorry I Missed You and thought, “HEY, that’s meant to be so-and-so!” or “Hey, I think that’s me!” or whatever.

Annnnyway. 

Here’s the playlist I made when I was writing that book. It has a few songs from my “research,” as well as a lot of songs about ghosting and being ghosted, songs about aging, and songs about getting over people who feel impossible to get over. Because those are the things that book is about. :)

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.)

In a Cabin in the Woods

My friend Erin moved away last year, out of my neighbourhood and out of the city. She bought an acreage with this gorgeous old farmhouse on it, and a barn, and a little guest cabin. Her three children will get to grow up like I did—running around unconfined by city blocks and busy roads and other people's pesky property. They seem pretty happy about all that, so far.

Another friend, who happens to be Erin's sister-in-law and whose name is Kate, also moved last year—to a small town just outside of Regina. She's still close enough to maintain the illusion for most of her other friends that she didn't actually "leave," but I am not fooled. Because she, like Erin, used to live within walking distance of my place, and now I have to get into a car and go on the highway to get to her house. That absolutely counts as leaving.

I stayed here. (I will probably always stay here.)

(Also, a funny, completely unrelated thing is that these two women married brothers who grew up in the same small town as me, four hours from here, and their mother-in-law is tight with my mom, but that's not even how I know them. Isn't that a funny thing? And so completely unrelated?)

On to the point of it all:

After she left, Erin kept reminding Kate and me that they had a little cabin on their property that would make a great writing space, and that she wanted us to come use it.

And we said, well, we'd love to come, but we'll just want to sit and visit with you.

And she said, no, you should come write in my cabin.

And we said, but we want to have coffee with you.

And she said, yes, come for coffee.

So yesterday, at last, Kate and I arranged our children into two neat rows in her minivan, threw food, toys, and an iPhone at them (literally, and I hit Kate's four-year-old son in the eye with a plastic Cavendish potato), and travelled to Erin's new home.

We set out from here at 8 am and got there at 10 am. Our kids ran off, revelling in the open spaces both in and outside of the farmhouse. Erin fed us well and gave us coffee. And then, after lunch, we put the younger kids down for their naps and shuffled the older ones into the playroom for joint quiet time (which worked much better than solo quiet time ever has), and Kate and Erin said to me, "Okay. You're going to the cabin to write." Erin had packed a bag with cake and coffee and cream and water bottles and Werther's Originals.

I said, "What's all this? How long am I going to be in there?"

And they said, "As long as it takes."

(To anyone reading this who is not a writer, this sounds kind of mean, maybe? You should know that anyone reading this who is a writer and also a mother at the same time is salivating on their keyboard right now.)

So, obediently, I followed Erin out to the cabin. It was small, an open-concept-with-a-loft-type deal. There were books in all the window sills and a great yellow couch and a table with one chair.

Erin got the coffee going, said, "Haaaaave fuuuuuun..." and shut the front door behind her. The house filled up instantaneously with the kind of quiet I haven't heard in a very long time. Country-quiet. There-is-no-noise-in-the-house-and-not-outside-of-it-either quiet. I took a picture with my laptop, because that is what one does in the absence of a cell phone. Right? CAN'T NOT DOCUMENT.

Then, I sat down in the one chair and started writing, because that was the only thing there was to do. I hadn't grabbed my phone on the way out, so I had no Instagram or Facebook to distract me, no Internet hotspot for my computer, even. I had cake and a whole pot of coffee all to myself. It was incredible! I wrote and wrote and wrote and then, suddenly, inexplicably, I was done writing. Because, I guess, that's how writing works.

I picked up my laptop and went back to the house.

I found Kate in Erin's office, also writing, and Erin in the kitchen with her laptop. Everyone was happy and had gotten something done and the kids were still loving each other and we reconvened and ate more food and discussed our various works and writer's blocks and questions while the kids ran through the sprinkler and jumped on the trampoline.

So that was that. The writing retreat/coffee date was a complete and total success. How nice to be locked in a cabin in the woods by one's friends. How nice to have the kind of friends who know you want to be locked in a cabin in the woods even when you say they shouldn't lock you in a cabin in the woods.

Erin called herself bossy yesterday, and, in this case, she was a little bossy, but she was only being bossy because she wanted to do this super nice thing for me and I wasn't really letting her, so she had to be bossy. And I was kind of proud of her for being bossy too, because I think she had to try pretty hard at it. You can't help but love a person who is only ever bossy when it benefits someone other than them.

Erin and Kate, if you're reading this: next time, I will take the kitchen and you two can duke it out for the delicious cabin-writing experience. We're onto something real good here.

Writer's Block Again

Writer's block is here. It is belligerently and heavily and annoyingly here (gesturing to brain area). I'm trying to work on book #2 and I have no words to put into it. I tried to jolt my mind into action by adding ridiculous characters and some equally ridiculous situations but it didn't work. All these characters are piling up inside of these situations, doing absolutely nothing. It's like someone threw a Halloween party in a broom closet and then turned off the lights and shut the door and everyone's just standing there, feeling dumb in their stupid costumes, blinking a lot.

So I left the party and came here, to my neglected blog.

Book #2 is not due to my publisher until February. Which means, sometimes I think to myself, that I have lots of time.  I have eight months.

And then I think, EIGHT MONTHS??! I CAN'T WRITE AND PROPERLY EDIT A BOOK IN EIGHT MONTHS ALL MY HAIR IS GOING TO FALL OUT.

Not to mention, book #1 is still not finished going through edits (I know! I know. Editing is a whole thiiiing). So I don't have eight actual months of book #2 writing time. I have about six weeks of book #1 editing time, and a week or two of freelance writing time, and need to allow a month or two for "breathing time" (the period after you finish writing a book where you don't look at it or think about it before you jump into editing it). Plus, there are, you know, kids to raise and a husband in his busy season at work and a house to clean and sleep to be had and maybe a social life (negotiable). All that on the table, and I feel like I'm looking at a solid minus five minutes to write this thing.

Yet here I am, blogging, while my ridiculous characters sit in a darkened closet and blink a lot.

But the thing about writer's block is that you can't just decide you don't have it anymore. It's like a dragon, you know? If you have a dragon, you can't just decide you don't have a dragon; you have to conquer it.

...or wait until it wanders away to torture someone else. Which is, generally, my method of dealing with both writer's block and anything that breathes fire.

However, if anyone has a good tip on how to speed this particular proverbial dragon on its way, I would love to hear it.

Please, Okay?

I think I made a mistake when I admitted on my blog that I was writing a novel.

The more I think about it, the more I think: yes. That was absolutely a big, dumb mistake.

Who knew that writing a novel would feel like such a private, personal thing? I did not. I wrote about it, initially, because I didn't realize how much I would dislike talking about it to real people. I talked about it to long-distance friends and online people quite a bit, and I really liked that, so maybe I thought talking about it to real, in-person people would feel the same. Maybe I also sort of forgot that people I know actually read my blog - there was a time when the only people who read here were Crystal Kimber and a handful of women from Korea and Scotland.

I still remember the day my dad called after coming across this post somehow, like, "Hi, Suzy. Your mom and I aren't so sure you should be wandering into back alleys on the advice of homemade posters promising you the best time of your life." I should've learned my lesson back then. Not about back alleys - though that is, also, for sure a valuable life lesson that my dad was right about - but about writing things online without expecting that real-life people will read them and then want to discuss them with you.

Because it's really, really nice of people to read here and it's super wonderful of them to take an interest in what I'm doing and ask me questions about it. I'm for sure not mad about it - it would be quite silly of me to put stuff out there and then be mad at people for wanting to talk about it with me.

But if you've ever asked me in real life, "Hey, how's that novel going?" you might have noticed my lips curl back and my eyes cross and my gut suck right in to my spine as I stammer:

"It, uh, it uh, it's...just not. I don't know. I'm busy doing other things. I don't want to talk about it."

And while I'm talking, I'm thinking, This is the most embarrassing thing ever. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know how to talk anymore. Am I saying, 'Blub blub blub blub?' Like, I can't even admit that I'm working on it. It's so ridiculous. It feels exactly like someone is asking me if I still like to play with Barbies and I'm admitting that, yes, I do like to play with Barbies still and that is what I do with all of my free time lately. Just playing Barbies all day every day. Giving them names and dressing them up and making them marry Ken over and over and over again. Why did I admit to this ON THE INTERNET?

Let's pretend in real life that this whole thing doesn't exist. Please, okay? I am seriously considering publishing it under a pseudonym and never admitting to anyone I know in real life that I did it. It might seem counter-intuitive to bring it up again on here just to say to forget about it, but every time someone asks me The Question in real life I pretty much swallow my nose and turn into a blubbering idiot, so there's zero chance of me tactfully saying, "You know what? I'd prefer not to talk about that at this time - I actually shouldn't have brought it up in the first place."

I would love to know if I am the only person who feels this way. Like, if I'm passionate about something, is it completely weird to also not want to talk about it ever at all? It it weird to want to keep that thing in a completely separate little personality box that I only show to a couple of people and keep away from pretty much everyone else? Blub blub blub blub?

Bread, Thora Birch, and a Book Announcement

After the train wreck that was last week, I was going to sit down just now and write that this week has been better. But then I began to write about my morning and realized that it's just last week all over again. Hold me.

I was baking bread, see, and realized halfway through, right around the crucial no-turning-back point, that I didn't have any yeast in the fridge. I'd been so proud of myself for getting right to it so bright and early - I thought I'd have it finished by nap time - and now I'd have to run to the grocery store and set myself back. Sullivan and I were still in our PJs and hadn't had breakfast yet, so there was a lot of pants-putting-on and missing-other-shoe-locating that isn't usually a part of my bread making routine.

We made it out the door in record time, though, and guess what happened when I got to the cash register with my yeast?

I will tell you; it seems relevant: I opened my wallet and found an empty slot where my debit card should have been. In case you missed my last blog post, let me fill you in on the significance of this: I just got a new debit card last Thursday. I lost my last one last week. Into thin air. Poof. Smoke. Magic. Rabbits.

I stared at the cashier like an idiot for a few moments, and then said, in this really sad, really small voice, "I don't know where my money is."

And she said, "Okay."

And I said, "That's the kind of week it's been." There was a Canadian journalist who used to say that (or something like it) at the end of every news broadcast. I always hear his voice when it comes out of my mouth.

She shrugged at me, and I realized I shouldn't say stuff like this to cashiers. They can't do anything for me, probably just want me to be a grownup and take care of my stuff like grownups [supposedly] do. Probably just want me to pay or get out of the way.

Gasp, I thought. Am I turning into an oversharer? The woman in public who goes up to other women in public and empties her heart out, like a bucket, on the floor in front of them? Who thinks strangers actually want to know how you are when they ask how you are?

So I got out of the way. I offered to put my yeast back and she smiled kindly and said she didn't have much else to do (the store was dead; it was, as previously established, early in the morning). That was nice of her. I picked Sullivan up and made my way back to my car, wondering what to do next.

He was confused. We'd come to the store for yeast, picked out the yeast, brought the yeast to the cash register, and were now leaving without the yeast. "Mom? Where's the yeast?"

I sighed. "I can't find my debit card, so we can't buy anything right now."

He grinned at me. "Debit card." It was not an unknowing grin. He was implicating himself.

I set him down on the ground by the flowers at the store entrance. I held his little hands and studied his little face. "Sully. Do you have my debit card?"

"Yeah. I do."

Sully's little still; when he says, "yeah," it could really mean either yes or no. He doesn't always understand the question. But when he tacks an "I do," on the end, it means he knows what I mean and he means what he said. I searched his person.

Imagine my relief upon discovering my lost debit card in his jacket pocket!
Imagine my distress upon discovering that I'm raising a pickpocket!

I immediately thought of one of my favourite childhood movies, Monkey Trouble, starring Thora Birch. She adopts this monkey who was trained by a con man to pickpocket...anyway. It's not important. It's barely relevant.

Thora Birch was my fave back then though. You should know that about me.

(While I was writing this, I remembered that my bread was in the oven, and that I'd forgotten to set a timer. I'm beginning to suspect that part of my brain has actually shut down.)

This blog post is out of control. I'm just now going to get to the actual point, which has nothing whatsoever to do with bread or Thora Birch.

I wanted to tell you about something that has taken up most of my free time this spring: I've been co-writing a book with my lovely friends over at Coffee+Crumbs! It's all come about pretty fast: last November (I think?), we got an email from Harper Collins wondering if we wanted to write a book, and we said yeah, and they said ok, and so we did. It's a book of essays about motherhood, and it's really quite beautiful (to read but also to look at). Ashlee handed in the manuscript yesterday and it's due in bookstores next April, which feels like a very long time from now.

Ashlee wrote a much better, more thorough, book announcement here.

I may never be 90's-era Thora Birch, but I will be a published writer, and that, I think, is also good and fun.

This Day

The funny thing about my meeting yesterday was that it was held in a small room in the back corner of the library. As in, I had to walk through the library, past rows and rows of colourful books - published books - to get there. Walking through a library was one thing last year. This year, it is something else. Also, it was one thing on the way in and another altogether on the way out, something I'll try to explain later.

The librarian who led me to the room walked quickly, so I had to cram all of my thoughts into a much smaller time frame than if I'd known where to go and went there myself. I, personally, would have walked much slower; I had a lot of things to think. I was nervous, for one thing, and excited, for another. But mostly I was looking at the books around me and realizing, maybe for the first time, that a book is not just a book. It's months, or more often years, of hard work and years, or more often a lifetime, of dreaming and planning and thinking and researching and, ultimately, it's someone's dream come true.

Shelves and rows and racks of those things.

Add to this that a book is a much more personal thing than I'd ever realized before I tried to write one. Whenever someone I know asks me what my book is about, I get all awkward and weird. Like I'm thirteen and they're asking me who I like. I can't talk about it. I can't imagine anyone else ever reading it, but also: that's the point of trying to get it published. I have a whole new respect for the people whose books inhabit that library. There are big, meaty chunks of their hearts in those books.

Shelves and rows and racks of heart chunks. Gross.

And kind of breathtaking.

Anyway, I was thinking all of these things as I was speed-walking to keep up with the fast librarian. Thanks to her, I arrived at the office fifteen minutes early. If we'd dawdled, it might have only been twelve or thirteen, which feels a little less extreme. I didn't want to be extreme. I don't like to appear too eager. It turns people off.

But there I was, fifteen minutes early. Too keen.

So I stood and waited. And I remembered that I hadn't eaten lunch yet, even though it was 2 pm. I just hadn't thought of it. And I remembered that I'd drank an entire Bodum of coffee that morning. That was dumb of me. Add that to an already overwrought, nerve-wracked mind, and you get very shaky fingers. The Writer in Residence would notice this, I thought, and that made my fingers shake more. (She has a name, the Writer in Residence, but I prefer to call her Writer in Residence. It's just such a great title. I aspire to it.)

But you probably don't really care to hear about me standing in the back of a library shaking my fingers all over the place; you just want to know how the meeting went. That's what I meant to tell you from the beginning anyway.

It went...great. Really great. The greatest, actually. It went better than I daydreamed it could go, and I am a person given to extreme daydreams. I'm going back. We're going to keep in touch. She believes in me and in my little book and that is a fantastic, amazing feeling. She 'got' it, even though I think it's kind of a weird book and I mostly worry that people won't. She wants to help me find a home for it and she wants to read more.

My heart burst a thousand times over the course of the meeting. I didn't know what to say back to her most of the time so I just kept saying, "Thank you," and, "You're so nice," over and over.

We talked for over an hour and when I left, the corners of my mouth hurt from being stretched out so far to both sides. And this time when I walked past the books, like I said earlier, they looked different to me. Less like other people's dreams and hard work and heart chunks and more like mine. Does that make sense? Not that these books were mine, but that mine could be in there too. Less like these authors were mythical creatures and more like they were just regular people who worked very hard and had some neat ideas. Less unattainable. Mainly, I think, they just didn't taunt me anymore.

I have spent my whole life dreaming about writing a book but feeling cautious about it. I've been optimistic and pessimistic and nothingimistic and I've worked at it tentatively, not wanting to get too wrapped up in something that would probably go nowhere. And then along comes someone who says, "This could go somewhere."

And even if it doesn't go anywhere, I'll still remember this day. This day was important to me.

Here I Go

Today's the day.

To be more specific, which is a thing I like to be so as not to be vague, today's the day for my writing critique with the Writer-in-Residence at the RPL (see this post). I brought her the first three chapters of my book a few weeks ago, she read them, and today I'm going in to sit in front of her and hear her say the honest truth about them. 

Terrifying. 

I've handed my book, the whole thing, off to friends to read through and edit, but this is very different because this woman has no obligation whatsoever to be nice to me, to protect my feelings, to lie to me. In fact, her only obligation to me is to give me her honest opinion about my work.

Horrifying.

My appointment is in one hour and nine minutes. 

Thankfully (so thankfully) the dear WIR sent me the most wonderful email last night about the pages I sent her. She was so kind and so encouraging, and she made me feel like the Queen of England, and that makes this just a billion times easier. 

I still feel a little like I'm going to throw up and faint and drive into a pole on the way to the meeting, but at least I don't have to also entertain the fear that I'm going to show up and immediately be torn to shreds. Before I received that email, I was a nervous wreck. Now I'm just nervous, but more excited than wrecked.

Maybe that's the scariest part about getting your book critiqued: the part at the very, very beginning where the other person says either, "Yes, I believe in this/you/your writing," or...well, basically anything else. The part where they respect you and take you seriously or not. 

Anyway. Here I go. 

Brave Days

Some people are brave all the time. For me, courage comes in waves.

I'm talking about the kind of waves that suck you under and hold you there until you think you'll never come back up again and then, at the very last possible minute, pick you up and throw you onto the beach. And the beach, in this particular metaphor, is where brave things happen. Maybe, probably, because there are no sharks on the beach and no water to drown in. It's always, always easier to do anything, especially anything considered 'brave', when you are not distracted by drowning or being eaten by a shark. 

What I'm trying to say is that I did something brave this week. 

There's this mentorship program at the Regina Public Library called the Writer-in-Residence Emerging Writer Connection. Basically, you make an appointment with the Writer-in-Residence and then bring in up to 20 pages of anything you've written. She looks it over, makes notes, and then you go in and sit with her and she gives you her professional feedback. 

It's an incredible opportunity, but it's also terrifying. It's one thing to send your work away to an anonymous literary agent in New York and have them write back that it's "not quite what they're looking for at the moment but thank you so much..." It's another thing entirely to sit face-to-face with someone you've only just met, someone who knows the publishing world and has already 'made it', and have them potentially hate every word you've put down on the paper. 

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Unfortunately, you are an awful writer and you use too many metaphors. You're like a fish who thinks it's a bird but isn't a bird and dies as soon as it hops out of the water."

What if she says that to me?

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Unfortunately, I lit your pages on fire one by one as I read them. They were that bad."

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. I photocopied your pages and passed them out to all the librarians here; thanks for the laugh."

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Actually, I take that back: I wish you hadn't."

I would die. 

Pending death notwithstanding, I emailed her yesterday. I set up an appointment. I was having a Brave Day, and I know better than to waste those. 

(Thankfully, my friend Theresa signed me up for a writing workshop Dr. Nilofar is putting on at the library next week, which is nice because she won't be a complete stranger to me when I go in for my appointment in November.)

(NOVEMBER. November comes, like, right after October. Gulp.)

The problem with Brave Days is that they are always followed by Drowning Shark Coward Days, during which I second-guess and generally freak out about all of the decisions I made the day before. Today is that kind of day, so I'm writing it all out in an attempt to remember why I made the decisions I did yesterday. Like a person under the water reassuring themselves that the wave will push them up onto the beach again very soon. It's working, I think. 

Anyway. It really is exciting, and a privilege, to be a student, to learn how to do the thing you like doing better than you're doing it now (The WIR would probably ask me to reconstruct that sentence into something a person could actually read and understand, for example). If there's anything I've learned through this process, it's that you should always be learning. You should always be seeking out community and help and feedback and encouragement. And you shouldn't turn it down or avoid it just because you're afraid it won't be exactly what you want to hear (this is true of a lot of things in life, not just writing).

So, yes, I'm terrified. But I'm also excited. 

Cheers to Brave Days. 

Mountains and Minefields and Query Letters

Writing a book is easy and fun. Trying to get a book polished and published is like having someone suck your soul out with a vacuum cleaner and put it through the washing machine on the heavy duty cycle with a bunch of thumb tacks.

In retrospect, that sentence seems to be filled with latent guilt about all the chores I haven't been doing this week. Stop it, subconscious, I'm trying to be an artist here.

When I first embarked on this ridiculous venture, I read a blog post by a guy who had written a book but never got it published. It was all about how the odds of actually finding a lit agent to represent you and then them finding a publisher who would buy your book was a lot like winning the lottery. He said, basically, that he never even attempted to get his work published because he knew how slim the chances were and how much work he'd have to put into it.

I was like, "Dude. You are grossly pessimistic and lazy."

It turns out, he'd probably just done his research.

Getting a lit agent is hard. It's hard. Harder than climbing a mountain, actually. Because in order to climb a mountain, all you have to do is find a mountain and climb it. The mountain doesn't have to like you. It doesn't have all these rules about your grammar and your online presence and your formatting (some of which you don't even know about until you break them). The mountain won't say to you, "Hey, climb almost all the way to the top! It's a lot of work and it might not even pay off!" only to fling you off of itself when you're mere steps from the summit.

Mountains are fairly easy-going, that way.

For those of you who know as little about this process as I did two months ago, here's the little bit more that I know now:

First, you write a book. You read what you've written and you fix it. Because it'll need fixing.

Then you get someone else to read your book and tell you if it makes sense and also if it makes them feel anything and also if they noticed a glaring lack of grammatical adeptness. You ask a few other people to read it too and ask them a bunch of questions about it. You take their responses super seriously even if you disagree with them, because you'll have a lot of blind spots.

(Aside: This is why it's good to choose your readers carefully. I chose a few friends whose taste in entertainment I really trust - the kinds of people I normally ask for music and movie and book recommendations. Two of them are librarians. And I said to them, I said, "Be stupid honest with me." Because otherwise, what's the point, exactly?)

Then you basically rewrite your whole entire book again. And then you read it again and you go, Oh, yeah, these people were all right even though I thought they were wrong at first. It makes way more sense now. I like this character better. I hate this character more. I patched up that massive plot hole. That's much better.

This goes on for a while, the fixing. It turns out you can't just sit down and write a book perfectly the first time. Well, I mean, it turns out I can't. Maybe you can. Good for you. Shut up.

Enter the lit agents. They're like real estate agents for books. Most big publishing houses require books to be represented by one, so they're important. But they're unicorns - catching one feels near impossible.

You start by picking an agent that you think might like your book. There are a grizillion different kinds of books, and all of the agents have different tastes because, despite what I said earlier about them being unicorns, they're actually people. And not all people like the same things. So, basically, research. You have to research these people and see what books they like and what books they're already representing and what kinds of books they're looking to add to their lists. It's a lot of work. It's, like, the first day of your climb up this mountain.

So, after you've picked an agent, you have to write them a query letter. And all of the agents have different rules for what they want in a query letter. Some of them want you to tell them about yourself, some of them don't. Some of them want a synopsis, or a word count, or a note about why you're the best person to write this book, some of them don't. Some of them want you to include a sample chapter or three, some of them don't. Some of them have their very precise preferences written out for you on their website (bless them), some of them, gulp, don't, and you have to guess based on what the majority of the other lit agents want. If you get it wrong, they most likely won't even read your letter all the way to the end.

It's crazy.

It's like this mountain is also a minefield. Imagine that. Climbing a mountain minefield. You're so screwed.

And you do all this work, you research this agent and write them a personalized letter and include whatever they want you to include and make sure it's error-free and lemony-fresh...and then you wait. For probably six to eight weeks. And then you get a form rejection that's really polite but very short compared to your initial query that says something like but not necessarily, "Good try! Keep trying! I'm flinging you offa my mountain!" (Lit agents are actually really nice though. They just can't represent every single book or else they'll die.)

So then you pick a different agent and start all over again. You can query more than one at a time, too, so some days you'll get flung from three or four mountains in a row. Those days are tiring.

Perspective? Do you want some perspective? I've heard stories about published authors who sent out more than 100 query letters before finding an agent. I've read countless articles encouraging authors to not even breathe a breath of defeat until they've sent out at least 80.

80 mountains. That's a lot of climbing. That's a lot of almost summits and mountain minefields. Phew. I am a little winded already.

But, if we can stay with the mountain metaphor for just a second longer, this is also the cool thing about searching for a lit agent: all this climbing makes you stronger.

You send out a letter, you get back a reply, you reread your initial letter or the chapters you sent and think, "Ah!" (and a cartoon lightbulb appears above your head) "I bet they rejected this because..." And before you send your next letter, you make some changes, you do a little more research, you ask a few more questions, you make more changes. You like your book more, you get better at writing query letters - it stands to reason that you get better at writing in general. It's good for you if it doesn't wring you out first, if your heart's strong enough for it.

All of this is to say that I'm enjoying this process, mostly. I'm learning a lot. I'm not discouraged yet. I have been catapulted, kicking and screaming but not crying, from nine mountains. I have written the equivalent of nine books, and the ninth one only vaguely resembles the first, but I like it much, much better. I feel like I've been part of an intensive literary bootcamp.

And I have a whole new huge respect for published authors. And lit agents.

I will definitely keep you posted. 

This Means Something

The Saskatchewan Festival of Words is happening in Moose Jaw right now. It's a four day literary festival - think readings, interviews, panel discussions, workshops, a slam poetry contest, shows (music and theatre) and anything else that you can possibly imagine a bunch of writers and poets and word nerds doing when they're scraped together from all the corners of Canada and plunked down in a small town for a weekend.

Last night, there was this thing called a - ready for this? - Readception (When I told Barclay about it, he said, "Sounds fun. Is it before or after the Novel Tea?"). There was cheesecake, first of all, and there were also six authors who each had three minutes to read a small portion of one of their books and say a few words. I've been to this event before, two years ago, but that time it was very different. Not, actually, because it was different, but because I was different. Or, I was in a different place.

Life-wise, I mean.

I was pregnant, first of all. I was just starting to tell people. I was anticipating motherhood. I was crib shopping and asking my sister-in-law grossly personal questions about labour and child birth and epidurals. I was excited about it, overwhelmingly excited, and I saw everything in life through the lens of this new beginning.

And this time, last night, two years later, I was on the verge of another new thing. A very different kind of new thing. I'd written a book, a whole novel. With people in it, and some metaphors, and a plot (It might not be any good at all, but the point here is that I did it). I was just starting to admit it to people. I was anticipating this life-long dream I had coming true. I feel like some people might think it crass to compare the upcoming birth of a baby with a silly little hobby, and I know they're not the same thing, but, also, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW. Or maybe you do. But, like I've said probably a million times before on this blog, this is just something I've always, always wanted to do.

So.

Last time, I'd watched with a passive kind of interest as the authors took the stage and shared their words. There were one or two that I loved, but I was a tough audience. I enjoyed the evening immensely, but was okay with the program being short and sweet.

This time though, as each author was announced I was on the edge of my seat like I was reading a thriller. As the lists were read of the books that they had written and the magazines they'd contributed to and the other various and interesting ways that they used their skills, I leaned in. As they walked toward the stage with the confident, comfortable air of people eager to share their words, proud of their work but not arrogant about it, I found myself wanting to go up there too.

Which is weird and crazy, because I can't think of anything more terrifying than reading my very own, very personal words to a room full of literary snobs. But still, I thought to myself: wouldn't it be cool? To be one of those authors up there? Reading from my book?

I was, as they say, inspired. The kind of inspired that makes you feel like your legs are made of straw and your stomach is full of helium. It's not very comfortable, but it's also quite nice. I love hate it.

We'd been given raffle tickets as we entered the room. The last little event of the night was the draw for a door prize. I, full of inspiration and daydreams and naivety, held my ticket with both hands and thought to myself, rather dramatically, If I win this, it means something. Because I'm five. I quickly laughed the thought off. I know, I know, that that's not how life works. But my brain just gets so caught up in these things sometimes. And I feel like it's probably okay to let your imagination run around in the confines of your own head sometimes. Right?

So, anyway, the lady read the numbers off, and I mouthed them right along with her. "Nine," we said. "One, Four." We took a breath and paused for dramatic effect. "Three, eight, seven."

And then I said, right out loud, startling Hannah, who sat in the chair to the left of me, I said, "WHAT!?"

I know it didn't mean anything, but still. I stood up, and I walked to the front of the room. In front of everybody. Just like the six legitimate authors had done before me. For a very short minute, I pretended that I was one of them and that I was going to stand behind the podium and say, "Hi, guys. It's so great to be here. I'm going to be reading a small chunk out of my first novel, Violent V. I, uh, I really hope you like it."

It felt like I floated to the front of the room, but it was probably much more awkward than that. I am not a graceful human being. I headed straight for the podium, and at the last possible second, I turned to the man standing there and accepted my big blue gift bag. I bet he was thinking, Wow. I've never seen someone so excited to get a frisbee that says SaskPower on it.

What can I say? It's very nice, durable plastic.

Interesting Things

Can you tell I had so much to do and now, suddenly, have nothing to do at all?

Well. I shouldn't say "at all". There is, actually, plenty I could do. But Sullivan is asleep, and I am trying to be quiet. And normally this time of day I'd been sitting here doing a little research into Bolivia or naming imaginary people or trying to figure out how to make a certain character disappear into thin air in a way that is interesting and mysterious and traumatic and, also, noble.

So today, it really does feel like I have nothing to do at all and here I am. Talking your face off. I'm going to tell you all sorts of interesting things, (but mostly just things) about myself and my life as of late. You look curious.

First of all, I've wrecked my foot. Last Wednesday, I was walking out of my house and off of the step and suddenly I was over there on the ground saying, for lack of better words, "Nope! Nope! Nope!" I'm sure it's just sprained, but a week later it still hurts day and night and is a beautiful shade of bright purple-y blue. I can walk on it though, so that's good.

Although.

Yesterday, when I was walking on it, I stepped on a piece of glass. There was blood and more pain, and if I had not been able to walk, that wouldn't have happened, so I don't know.

You must think I'm very careless. I am.

What else?

Oh yes, one morning before work, I asked Barclay to cut my hair. He said no. He said, "I have to leave in ten minutes." I said that that was a valid point.

And then a week later, at about the same time, I asked him to cut my hair again. He said no, and I said, "But please? I just want it gone. It'll only take a minute."

So he did. He cut off 18 inches and then, guess what? I fainted. Right into his arms. I don't know why. It was weird.

So that's me in a nutshell. Hair cuts, foot cuts, etc. What a fine life we are livin.

Waiting Mode

My coffee tastes so good this morning.

I don't get it. It's the same beans as usual, same Bodum, same water...must be something extraneous. Maybe its me: my taste buds or my attitude. Maybe it's the cup I'm drinking it out of. Maybe it's the weather forecast or the music I'm listening to.

There sure is a lot that goes into enjoying something.

I feel jittery today. My chest feels like it's full of birds, all flapping around, trying to get out. It is not because of the coffee.

(Though, the coffee sure isn't helping.)

It's because yesterday I sent the first draft of my book off to three people for them to read. Their job is to tell me if it sucks or not. I chose the people very carefully, two librarian friends and a writer friend, and am, like, super, super nervous about it.

(By the way: thank you to everyone who offered to edit for me; you are all amazing. That's a lot of work to offer to do for someone. I will probably email a few of you when second draft time rolls around, but probably not all of you because there were roughly thirty of you who offered, either here or in emails or in real life and I still want to have people left who have not read it when I finish it. But you should know that you offering was pretty dang encouraging and made me really happy, so thank you.)

Anyway. I'm in waiting mode now. I feel ill, I feel excited, I have that song from Mary Poppins about feeding the birds stuck in my head, I have imaginary wings rearranging my internal organs... I am, in short, a wreck.

But also, I'm having so much fun. 

What I've Been Up To

So, I'm writing a book.

Yikes, did I just say that out loud? Can we treat this like that time I cut my own hair and told you about it here but asked you not to mention it to me the next time you saw me in real life? I don't really want to talk about it. But I also don't want to pretend it's not a thing that I'm doing. Because it's a thing that I'm doing.

In fact,  it's so much a thing that I'm doing that I'm almost done doing it. I finished my first draft, beginning, middle, end, on Tuesday, and now I'm editing it. (Editing is hard! I might die!)

It's what I've been up to on Wednesday mornings at the Bean and every single day during nap time. I put Sullivan in his crib, hole up in my bedroom with a coffee and chocolate and Cloud Boat, and write like there's no tomorrow (because what if?). Some days I write so much that my laptop starts smoking! Just kidding, but almost not.

It's this thing I've always, always wanted to do. And, I mean, I've sort of written books before. Like, in elementary school. They were all probably five to ten pages long, but when you're a little kid that's pretty long. When I was in grade one, for example, I wrote a book about a sad girl who had no friends because the girls she knew were all glittery (I don't know) and she wasn't and it ended with her trying to cover herself in glitter and all the glitter falling off and her sitting on the swing set alone watching all the glittery people play together without her. When I was in grade two, I wrote a book about a sad girl who had no friends because she had to change schools and everyone at her new school already had friends. When I was in grade three, I wrote a book about a sad girl who ran away from home because, you guessed it, she had no friends. (Which doesn't make a lot of sense, I guess. I wasn't too concerned about plot holes back then. I just wanted everyone to be sad and lonely and everything to be dramatic and what is more dramatic than running away from home?)

Guess what this book I'm writing now is about? Yep. A sad girl. What is the deal with me, guys? Sadness is just so beautiful. I don't know.

Anyway. It's this thing I've always wanted to do. So, following my short career as a single-minded (unpublished) child author and a twenty year hiatus, I just...starting doing it, I guess.

Actually, no, I owe it to a friend, who probably doesn't want me linking to her sweet blog because she's all secretive and mysterious about her online persona. (Which is fair but too bad because I think you'd really love it.) A few months ago, I hung out with her for the very first time (we had a whole bunch of mutual friends), and I asked her what she liked to do and she said she was writing a book. I was awe-struck. I said, almost exactly, "What! Lucky! Fun! Jealous!"

Because I have a way with words. An important attribute in an author.

She was instantly my hero. Writing a book. Man. I almost clapped for her. It was like if I'd grown up wanting to be an astronaut and then I hung out with someone and they were like, "Yeah, I take bi-weekly trips to the moon for kicks."

I asked her a bunch of questions about her book's genre and plot and characters and how she got started and where it was going to go and who it was for and all that, and I told her how much I'd always wanted to write a book. I said it like I was an old woman who had exactly sixty minutes left to live. Like, "Oh, man, I've always wanted to write a book. I wish I had just done it, you know? And now it's too late, because I've only got sixty minutes left to live and the most I could write in sixty minutes is a blog post."

And then she said, "Well, why don't you write a book?" Because, obviously, I had more than sixty minutes left to live. I know it for a fact, because it's been more than sixty minutes since we had that conversation.

And I looked at her and said, "Well, uh, because..." And I couldn't think of any reason not to. So I went home and started writing a book, and now here I am, editing it.

It's been so much fun. If you've always wanted to write a book, you should just start doing it now. And you should find friends who also are writing books and help them and let them help you back.

I have two writing buddies, and I love them and would not have probably written even five to ten pages without them. (Hey guys. My life would suck without you.)

The other night after I'd written the final sentence of the final chapter, I sent my first draft to Writing Buddy Sarah, who lives in New York (where a large chunk of my book takes place, because of course it does don't be ridiculous), and she rode the train into Manhattan at night and sat in a park and read the whole thing from front to back. It was the coolest; it made me so happy. Even if no publisher or literary agency wants me, at least I can say I have written a book and someone has read it right where it takes place. And she 'got it' and liked it, which was such a bonus that it made me cry.

It might seem silly to a lot of people, but it was a big deal to me. (Thanks again, Sarah.)



And, like I said, now: editing. And then we'll see. I'll probably need one or two more people to read it and tell me if it's awful, and then maybe I'll look for a literary agent (know anybody?) which is strange and exciting. I have very low expectations, and am naturally very pessimistic about the whole thing. But I just want to try. Because sometimes trying is the fun part, and having tried is such a great feeling. Much better than having wished but not tried. I said to Sarah, or Mystery Friend, or both of them, that my goal was, ultimately, to write a book I liked. If someone else liked it, even cooler. And if it got published, that's just beyond anything I'd expect or hope for.

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

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

{contributing}

I've been feeling fidgety again lately. And schmaltzy. And nostalgic and antsy and crawly. Lots of reminiscing about things that have happened and lots of wanting those kinds of things to happen some more. 

This morning I just about entered a writing contest to win a trip for two to Oslo, Norway to spend one night in a ski lift. Next Friday. The entry deadline is midnight tonight, Norway time, and I still really want to but it's a no-kids-allowed situation and as much as I want an adventure, I don't know if the first night I spend away from Sullivan should be, you know, across an ocean from him. But I even went so far as to start working out how much exactly it would cost to fly someone else along as a kind of vacation-nanny before having a rush of common sense (do not spend your grocery/mortgage money on this) and quickly x-ing out of the window. And then I felt really torn up about it, as though Oslo had been a sure thing right up until that moment. As though I'd been planning this trip for months and months. Which is ridiculous, since I probably wouldn't have won it anyway, and therefore nothing has changed, right? 

But maybe I was sad because I passed up on an opportunity before it passed on me. I don't usually do that. I always win at Life Chicken. If you know what I mean. 

Anyway. All that to say that I've been itching to be in the middle of something. To find myself somewhere strange - that is, somewhere I am usually not. It doesn't have to be a ski lift bed and breakfast in Oslo - it could be, for example, an ordinary old hotel in New York or Chicago. It could be five days in Scotland or a weekend in Montreal. A music festival in Texas or an art gallery in London or a jazz show in New Orleans. Even a project here in the city, something to take part in or get fired up about. Some good live music or something theatrical or something weird. 

For tonight though, I've got Aqualung in my headphones (turned way, way up) and I'm alternating painting and drawing and guzzling coffee and writing (which is why this is so scattered and disjointed, probably). And for tonight, this is working for me. I'll hit publish and someone (you, I guess) will read this and I'll feel like I've contributed something. 

Sometimes you need a grand experience, but sometimes all you need is to feel like you're contributing something. 

{about blogging}

I updated my About Me page yesterday--it still said that I was 25 and living in the Village and contained strange pictures of me eating myself. So I changed all the writing, and should probably take new pictures too. You know, so that people don't think I'm some kind of freak. Ah, blog maintenance...

Anyway, I was trying to write some sort of "introduction" to my space here, and got thinking about what this is and why I do it and what I like about it and all that. I've been at it for over six years now, and for the majority of that time (up until these past few months when life has been just a tad more hectic than usual), I've had something to say or post every single weekday. That's a ridiculous amount of words to be putting out there. A lot of work for no pay-off.

When I started out it was just for me, a place to get words out into cyberspace but a closely and fiercely guarded secret in real life--I remember the day Barclay was over at my house and opened my laptop to look something up on YouTube and found my blog opened to the drafts page. I was mortified. I had this idea in my head about people who blogged, and was downright ashamed that I was one of them. We'd only known each other a couple of months and I legitimately thought he was going to dump me if he found out. (He didn't.) I swore him to secrecy. With threats. But somehow my parents found out about it a little while later (I don't know how) and I received a phone call from Dad expressing concern over my going on adventures in back alleys with strange people in strange cities. (And so it was that I learned that you can't do anything online without expecting your offline people to find it. A crash course in smart Internetting!)

I wrote about my job, my friends, a move to a new city, a memory from a few years back, my boyfriend, the music I was listening to. Over time, complete strangers started stumbling across my blog, and I started reading theirs too and even making friends. (This was harder to admit to people than the fact that I had a blog in the first place.)

But that, admittedly, quickly became my favourite part of blogging. I saw these people taking amazing pictures of seemingly mundane things and suddenly I began seeing my own real-life surroundings in a different light. I read blogs by brilliant writers and crafty women and amazing cooks and they inspired me to try new stuff and work harder at the things I already loved. I read blogs by people who loved music as much as I did and introduced me to new favourite bands and musicians. The desire to have something to write about had me looking for abnormal things in normal days. I met people from Scotland, England, all over the States, all across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, France...

And the thing about blogging that was different from, say, a magazine or television, was that it was so personal, and so interactive. I wasn't just passively taking in information; I was processing it and commenting on it and adding to it. Like the blog world was this big fat book of stories and pictures and ideas that a bunch of people from all over the real world were working on simultaneously. And somewhere in there was my story. I loved being part of something like that.

It's changing, though. I feel a little bit like I'm a wildlife preservation activist right now, about to talk about endangerment and extinction and how you need to do your part to save the blog as it is before it slowly goes the way of the buffalo. (I'm not going to say anything like that.) Things change and that's okay. People are turning their blogs into full-time jobs, businesses, making money off of sponsors and advertising, keeping a close eye on page views and comments and SEO and all that. That feels too much like work and pressure to me, so I probably won't jump on the bandwagon. But I don't begrudge those that do.

Maybe I'm less like a preservation activist and more like a bearded mountain man (picture it) in a little cabin in the woods. Feel free to live in the city with your billboards and flashy lights and TV commercials; I'll just be out here in my own cozy space, rambling to whoever wants to hear it about what I did today. I have some neighbours out here to visit with and tell stories to. We're content. 

Speaking of rambling, I don't even know where I'm going with this.

Blogging...What this is, why I do it, what I like about it...

Oh yeah. So this is where I ended up:

Hi, My name is Suzy. I've been blogging for a while now, and it's probably one of my favourite hobbies--I like writing and taking pictures and doodling, but I'll never be pro at any of it. This is a place to quietly do those things in a fun little community without taking myself too seriously.

So thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. Thanks to those of you who have your own blogs and inspire me to be more creative and open and intentional. I love it. 

{word famine}

Someone asked me the other day, with big concerned eyes and an unsure squeak in their voice, "So. Is everything ok? You haven't been updating your blog that much lately."

It's true. I'm in the middle of a bit of a word famine. But, just so you know, it doesn't mean that something's wrong. I go through seasons where I want to write every little detail of every life event down and upload every single picture and work through every little thought in this public space because I like the feedback and it feels like writing a letter to a whole bunch of friends, who then reply in comments and emails and text messages.

And then I go through seasons where my memory card stays in my camera, pictures unsorted and mostly forgotten about, and even though things are happening I can't think of anything to say. I go out and do stuff and occasionally think, "I could blog about this." But I don't, because it feels more like a chore than for fun and I have enough chores to do.

And it doesn't feel like a big deal, because I know about how seasons are. And I feel like this one is starting to thaw and maybe there are little green buds on the proverbial word trees in my head.