Talk About People Behind Their Backs!

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

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

So.

Anyway.

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Soundtrack: Valencia and Valentine (may contain spoilers)

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

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

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

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

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

And it gets even more complicated than that!

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

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

Okay, another one:

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

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

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

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

Time can take its toll on the best of us

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in Another Universe Entirely...

The book publishing world is, in fact, another world—an alternate reality with its own time and rules and atmosphere. You can't get to it by simply hopping on an airplane, you need a transcendental vehicle of some kind, like the wardrobe in the Narnia books.

(Or email.)

And you can only access it using very powerful magic.

(Query letters.)

And you can't just go to this mystical place, you must be summoned by the powers that be.

(Literary agents.)

Last May, this happened to me; I stumbled through my own "wardrobe" into Publishing World by way of an email from a lit agent named Victoria. Since then I've maintained communication with that world through emails and phone calls, little things that briefly pulled me out of this universe and into that one. But aside from these fleeting otherworldly encounters, life hasn't changed all that much. I worked on edits with Victoria for about half a year, and then we took my book on submissions.

The submissions process was no joke. It was like the querying thing all over again, except this time it was my agent sending my sweet baby novel to the editors at big publishing houses. And they were reading my work and passing it around their offices and getting second and third opinions and discussing its saleability and its characters and its potential, and even writing their thoughts on it down for me to read. It was exhilarating! It was an adrenaline high! It made me want to kind of puke a little bit!

It was also incredibly (surprisingly) validating. Editors, as it turns out, are kind and encouraging human beings who want your book to be the next big thing just as much as you do.

So Subs was...an experience. One which I do not necessarily care to repeat any time soon, but also one which I...loved. Kind of. I don't know.


Here's another thing about Publishing World: time there is like water: it freezes, and then it flows. Nothing happens at all, and then huge things happen all at once, like explosions, like a sporadic, ob-nox-iously spaced-out fireworks show in a peaceful night sky. It's because there are so many moving parts in this machine. So many people to read so many words and make so many decisions and send so many emails. And even after something happens, the effects aren't felt in our world for a long time.

Which is why I'm only now allowed to write this blog post. But here it is! As Etta James would say, Aaaaaat laaaaaaast. Boom that song's stuck in your head forever.

In January, we sold my first book—and, at the same time, my second book (which isn't even written yet, because apparently in publishing, things either happen way after you wish they would or way before you thought they were possible).

The first little book baby is due June of 2019 from Lake Union Publishing. I had a really great phone call with my editor there back in January, before I accepted their offer, and was immediately in love with her and Lake Union and all of their wonderful ideas. They seemed so excited about my book, about working together, and I think that remains one of my favourite parts of my adventures in Publishing World to this point: those moments where I feel like I actually belong there, am wanted there, like I didn't just wander in accidentally. You know?

The day of the offer, I went out for supper with Barclay to celebrate and then, while Victoria negotiated my contract, my life went back to normal and I wasn't allowed to say anything and it felt like it had all been a wonderful dream. The same dream I've been having since I was, like, five.

I thought that maybe, when it became Internet Official, when the deal announcement went up on Publishers Marketplace and I wrote this blog post, that it would all feel real, and that Publishing World would feel like a place on this planet. But then today, I received a little package in the mail from my author relations manager, a notebook embossed with my new publisher's name, the name that will be on the spine of my books, and I realized that it probably never will feel completely real. It might always feel like a dream.

And I'm quite okay with that.