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.)

Trying to Make My Brain Shut Up For a Second

At supper last night, I made my family place bets on when the snow will be gone for good. Sully, the optimist, took April 14. I tried to be optimistic too, but I could not be that optimistic, and I chose April 19. Barclay, the realist and also the one in our house whose job depends so heavily on the weather that he kind of has to be obsessed with it, chose April 24, and Scarlett, who is obsessed with Barclay, chose April 24 also.

Looking out the window right now, none of these bets seem remotely plausible. We have a pile of snow on our front lawn the size of a car. The roads are covered in deep, sharp ice ruts. I don’t remember what grass looks like. Dirt? Flowers? Never heard of them. Warmth? Sunlight? Joy?

It’s fine. 

I’m in a strange, liminal place this week. I sent off the first draft of my latest book to my agent on Friday night (sorry, did you just hear that? Sounds like angels singing…). I’ve been working on that thing since November of 2021, and I shelved an entire book before that (maybe I’ll blog about that later; I don’t think people even know how many whole books get written and set aside in the course of an author’s writing life), so the reality is that I’ve been working towards this goal, the goal of having something done enough to share with my team, for actual years. In that time, I have not for one single minute felt like I could relax my brain and just not think about writing for a little bit. I have, for a few seconds here and there, thought about not writing anything ever again, but that thought made me very sad and I dismissed it every time it floated through my head. It is, it turns out, harder to consider quitting than it is to continue struggling. 

Anyway.

I sent my manuscript off, is the point, and now I’m following that old writing rule I’ve heard over and over and over: once you’ve finished your first draft, step back, close the Word document, and pretend it doesn’t exist for at least two weeks. 

This is hard. 

It’s like the characters are real people who live in another dimension, one I can see very vaguely in my mind’s eye. When I’m writing a book, it feels less like making stuff up and more like waiting for the people in the other dimension to do something or have something happen to them so I can write it down. It’s very hard to suddenly just ignore these other-dimension people, especially when I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out how to tune into their frequency. 

I got to the end of yesterday and felt guilty for not working on the book even though I knew that it was out of my hands at the moment and that I shouldn’t be working on it. Still, I kept having things come to me all day—dialogue, plot hole fixes, things to cut, things to explain. I’ll probably feel that way at the end of today too. That’s actually kind of why I’m sitting here writing this.

(You’re…welcome?)

Anyway. All of this is to say I’ll probably be killing time in this space a bit more in the next couple of weeks. It’s a frozen arctic tundra outside and will be until at least April 19, and my brain needs some serious distracting so it doesn’t keep wandering back to that alternate universe. 

Join me. Distract me. Wish me luck. 

Little Loops and a Big Loop

I went to visit my grandma this weekend. When I got there I knocked on the door and called, “Hello, Grandma?” And she called back, “Oh! That sounds wonderful!” 

She’s in a senior’s home and she’s living life in neat little loops of time; you have a short conversation with her and she’s there and she’s telling a story and laughing at yours and then she starts the same conversation over again because she doesn’t remember having had it, but she never would’ve brought it up in the first place if it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have. So you just have it again, and it’s nice every time. You tell the same joke you told the first time because it made her laugh so hard and you like her laugh so much. You show her a video of your kids and she's so excited about it that you wait a little while and show it to her again and there is just as much delight and amazement on the second viewing (for both of you, honestly). The same questions. “Oh, how old are they now? Aren’t they just so lovely? Tsk. Is there a way to get this video on my phone?”

(I just took a break from this and sent that video to her because I told her I would and forgot. But she definitely forgot too and hasn’t been waiting on pins and needles.)

The thing that’s so interesting about an older person whose immediate memory is faltering is how clear their memories of the very distant past become. My grandma told me stories about growing up, her kids as children, her son who passed away, her father who owned a store, describing her house the way it was before they renovated it, before I came along, the upstairs bathroom in the wrong spot. Like she’s living in little loops but also simultaneously in one big loop, starting over from the beginning, somehow, more present in the past. 

It makes me wonder if that’ll be me someday, if this time that I’m living right now, the kids at this age, the house we’ve made our home, the friends I have, will someday be more real, more visceral to me than wherever I happen to be then and whatever’s in front of me. 

I find this disconcerting, but also weirdly comforting. 

Leaving was hard, because she kept forgetting I was leaving and starting up a conversation about chess. I left maybe twenty times. 

We hugged goodbye twenty times, which was not a bad thing. 

The ABCs of 2022

Did another year just happen? I mean, it would seem so. I have flipped the calendar pages myself. I’ve watched the days go by, one by one, and I didn’t notice us skipping any of them so I’m not going to go so far as to say I don’t believe another year has passed but...can you believe something and not believe it at the same time? I think so? 

That’s where I’m at with 2022. I believe it happened, I just don’t believe it happened.

If, however, it turns out that it did happen, then I guess these are some of the notable things that happened in it:

A - Alistair! My sister had a baby and he’s great. Sully is his number one fan, which actually surprised all of us—when Elise had her first baby, Adelaide, Sully would not go near her. He would stare at her curiously from across the room. I’d say, Sully, come sit with me and hold her, and he’d shake his head, his eyes huge. Don’t get me wrong; he loved her, he was just terrified of her. I think he was afraid of how absolutely tiny she was—which is fair! Babies are super small, and they do come across, whether they mean to or not, as kind of fragile and intimidating. He wanted to look at her but from a safe distance. And he was like that, at first, with Alistair too, until the weekend Elise came to stay with us. Alistair was a little over a month old and he had these very wise, searching eyes that would just lock on you, like he was really trying to connect with you, and one evening he looked at Sully like that, and he got him. Sully came over and sat beside me and put his hand on the back of Alistair’s sweet round head, like he’d been put under a spell, and we sat like that for over an hour. Sully marvelled at him. He was astonished at every feature, delighted by all the usual baby things, the gassy smiles, the startle reflex. And even months later, the shine has not worn off. I think it’s cute.

B - Book 3: My agent submitted my third book to my publisher at the very, very end of 2022. Fingers crossed for good news on this front in the new year. Briefly, some book FAQs: Yes, this book has a tentative name and no, I’m not saying what it is because it’s probably going to get changed. No, it’s not finished finished—we submitted it as a proposal (not something generally done in fiction but that’s how my publisher works with their existing authors). Also, people keep asking me what this book’s about and I’m just forever doing that fish thing where my eyes get big and I open and close my mouth a lot. So here: It’s, like, a book about the end of the world, but it’s also kind of a rural Canadian slice-of-life family thing. So, Stuart McLean but sci-fi. It’s really weird but kind of also not very weird. And okay, that’s it, I’m done talking about it now.

C - Covid. We finally got it. It was weird! What a weird, weird thing. 

D - Dined on a lot of patios. Hit Fat Badger, Vic’s Tavern, Bar Willow, Skye, Hampton Hub, probably others I’m forgetting. 

E - Sully turned eight. This is another thing my brain refuses to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence (not the least of which is that I haven’t given birth in eight years). He’s in grade 3, he loves building complicated motorized machines with his LEGOs and reading comic books and playing games and he’s very funny and smart. 

F - Fall Ball: Sully had his first organized sports experience and it was the best. I loved—loved—watching him go out and meet people and work so hard and have so much fun. 

G - Got a plaque from my publisher to commemorate selling 100,000 copies of Sorry I Missed You. The milestone itself happened in 2021 but the plaque came in 2022 and I don’t have anything else for G so I’m using it!

H - Had to clear a lot of snow. Barclay officially added me to his payroll this year so now I’m his employee? And as soon as he did that the skies just opened up and started dumping stupid amounts of snow on our town. (I mean. We also hired another guy this year who clears way more snow than me and I’m pretty much second string now but I reserve the right to complain anyway.)

I - I said goodbye to my wonderful Grandpa Martin. Losing a grandparent is always such a strange thing—they’ve always been there so you never think they won’t be. His funeral was really beautiful though, and it was so good to see family I hadn’t seen in a long time. 

J - Just  year of big changes. This is very vague! That’s okay! The internet doesn’t need to know all my business. 

K - Killed a spider with a shampoo bottle, have not yet moved the shampoo bottle. No one else in my family has moved the shampoo bottle either. Maybe we are okay with that shampoo bottle sitting in that corner of the bathroom? Maybe I am the only one who has noticed it? Does this gross you out, that I have not cleaned under that shampoo bottle in a long time? Why do you even care? It’s not your house. Stop caring about other people’s houses so much. How long do you think it takes a spider to decompose and stop existing after you kill it?

L - Live music: another year of much less of this than I would like. Like, much less. I went to Folk Fest and I went to the Cathedral Village Arts Fest and I went to see our neighbor’s band play their first gig. Those nights were lovely and I just want so many more of them!

M - Made headway on the basement renovation. We now have a functional TV room and even hung a picture on the wall the other day. Progress is so slow because there’s so much else going on around here, but it’s HAPPENING.

N - New York Times: Sorry I Missed You was an answer in a puzzle in The New York Times, which meant that my name appeared in the answer key, which felt like a very big deal for me. I would never have known this if not for a friend who lives in the States who regularly does the puzzles in the paper on Sunday mornings and saw it and sent me a picture of it. Thanks, Sarah!

O - Okay, you guys, as of the last week of the year, I have officially hit 107 *consecutive* weeks on my workout app. I’m not ripped or anything but I’m ~*~consistent~*~ and I feel proud of myself. 

P - Panel: I spoke on a panel of authors at the Sask Writer’s Guild annual conference in October. It was my first in-person author event since before the pandemic and it was really sweet to get to do that again. Lisa Bird-Wilson was also on the panel and I embarrassed myself by, upon meeting her, calling her by the name of the main character in her book, which I was reading at the time. Maybe an author rite of passage? 

Q - Quite a few falcons moved into our neighborhood this summer and we were so excited about it. Barclay’s favorite bird is a peregrine falcon, which is why he named his business after them, and yes we are nerds and we don’t even care. I got our family a birdwatching class for Christmas. Come at me, as they say, bro. 

R - Read way fewer books than usual. Started a lot more than I finished—and it’s not even that I don’t intend on finishing all of the ones I started, I just kept getting distracted. 

S - Scarlett turned six. She’s a New Year’s Eve baby so I’m writing this before she technically turns six and it’s messing with my head. But it will be true by the time I hit publish! She is working so hard at school and goes around living with so much gusto. Her heart is bigger than anybody’s. 

T - Thirteen: Barclay and I celebrated 13 years of marriage! That is a lot of years and also not very many.

U - Up in the night a lot. I always thought that when your kids turn one you would get to sleep through the night again. This has not been the case for us; both kids, now 6 and 8, wake up every night at least one time, usually more. We are tired.  

W - Weighted blanket. I bought one! I love love love it. I want another one. Maybe three more! Ugh I wish I was under it right now! (I am not; I am at the library and didn’t think to bring it with me.)

X - XXXV: I turned 35 this year. You may remember me absolutely FREAKING OUT when I turned 30 because 30 felt ancient to me, but 35 feels young. I am fancy-single-New-York lady-in-rom-com age. I am not actually a fancy single New York lady, but being the same age as one is soooo glamourous. 

Y - Yes! The return of coffee shops to my writing life! I had been writing from home because of Covid being everywhere, and I still mostly write from home because Covid is still everywhere but…sometimes you need an hour or two in a coffee shop to jump start the ol’ creativity. 

Z - Zero big trips, but lots of little ones, to visit family and friends. Brandon, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Dafoe, Frontier.

That’s it, I think. It was a big year, in a quiet way. I liked it. It was a good, big, quiet year. 

That is, if it actually even happened. 

The Nude Cafe

I’m at The Naked Bean this morning, working on my book. If you’ve been around here for a while, you know about the Bean, about how I used to always forget what its actual name was and refer to it as The Nude Cafe instead, which makes it sound like a very different business than it is, and about how I used to come here every single Wednesday morning at 6:30 AM to write. 

Sully was a baby when I started doing this. He was a baby who didn’t sleep unless you were holding him, and he didn’t much like being awake unless you were holding him either. So, like, I got a lot of snuggles in that era, but typing? Words? On a laptop? 

No. 

At some point in that hazy season, a friend invited me out for a 6:30 AM coffee date before she went to work one day, and when I got to the coffee shop and saw that it was quiet and dimly lit and, most importantly, that my sweet loud baby was not there, I saw that it could be a good place to clear my head and get some words down. My father-in-law started coming for breakfast on Wednesday mornings; he held Sully and visited with Barclay and I began to faithfully sneak out of my house to write at the Bean. I’d listen to The Zolas in my Skull Candy earbuds and eat my ProBar and drink my small medium roast coffee. There was a couple, who I affectionately referred to as the Loud Talkers, who consistently showed up at the same time as I did and sat at the table directly beside me (somehow I never found them distracting; they were the brand of outrageous that I found to be a constant source of inspiration). I became a Regular, something I had never been before. The barista knew what I was going to order before I ordered it, even though she didn’t know my name. It was all perfect.

I wrote pretty much all of Valencia and Valentine in that season. I remember sitting down on that first morning and opening my laptop, not a baby in sight, and looking out the window in front of me. There was an empty lot across the street, just a plain old square of grass and dirt. It felt significant and magical and meaningful that as I opened the document and began my story, they broke ground across the street and began a building. 

I started writing from scratch, because if you don’t start a book from scratch it’s plagiarism and I don’t do that, and they started building from scratch too, and so it was that I watched my book go up at the same time as the building went up. They put up the framework, I put up the framework. They added bricks, I added adjectives. They put windows in the holes where windows were meant to go and I put plot in the holes where things didn’t add up yet. We put our finishing touches on our respective projects at the same time and my book was published around the time the first few businesses set up shop in that building. 

Cute, right?

And then, because we had such a good thing going, I wrote most of my second book there too. Sully grew up a bit but then Scarlett joined the family and Wednesday mornings at the Bean went from a necessity to a luxury and back to a necessity again. More businesses moved into the building across the street and the coffee shop got busier, but nothing else really changed.

When the pandemic hit and things shut down, the Naked Bean was one of the places I missed the most. I missed the barista who poured the coffee, I missed the Loud Talkers, I missed the building across the street, which now felt weirdly connected to my writing process. It all felt connected to my writing process, actually. And then it was just gone, very suddenly, closed to the public for our own good. I had to write in my bedroom with the door closed, and for some reason the sound of my kids fighting in the kitchen was not conducive to creativity in quite the same way that the Loud Talkers at the next table had always been.

(I remember one day early on in the pandemic, probably April 2020, driving down Albert Street and seeing the Loud Talkers standing at a bus stop. He was wearing that green fleece jacket that had become so familiar to me and her hair was in her usual low ponytail. They were smoking and I felt surprised, because I had never seen them smoke before—and then I was like, Suzy, you don’t know these people from a hole in the ground, you only ever see them in a coffee shop, of course you have never seen them smoke. But it was weird! It was like seeing long-lost relatives and I felt like I should at the very least roll down my window and call out to them (I didn’t). I was like, how and when did THEY become important to me? I would like, please, a scientific study on the invisible ties created between people who are in regular proximity to one another but who never officially meet. I think this would be interesting. But I digress.)

I don’t even know where I was. 

Right: everything shut down. What a strange, surreal thing that was, hey? To just suddenly, on such a grand scale, lose a whole bunch of places and people that you had always thought of as kind of peripheral and realize that, nope, they were important and special. 

But I guess—I guess it’s not so strange. It’s a normal life thing, losing things and then realizing what those things meant to you. It’s such a normal thing that Joni Mitchell wrote a song about it years before COVID was ever a thing. 

I guess the actual strange, surreal thing is that we were lucky enough to get some of those things back. 

I know—not everything came back. Some things aren't back yet, some aren't coming back period. And a lot of the things came back different than they had been before. But I’m revelling, right now, in this one thing. 

I have my small medium roast coffee and my ProBar. I turned on my Spotify Liked playlist and, of all the possible songs to come on first, Ancient Mars by the Zolas was the one that came on first today. Victoria poured my coffee and the only thing that’s different about that is that we know each other’s names now, which is a Better Different. The Loud Talkers aren’t here right now, but there is a different Loud Talker sitting behind me talking about—not lying—butt cheeks, and this is an acceptable substitute for today. (I have seen the Loud Talkers recently, smoking on Albert Street, so I have no doubt I’ll see them another day.)

What’s the point of all this? If you’ve been here long enough to know about the Naked Bean, you know that I never really blog with a point in mind. But if I had to think of one, maybe it would be that if you lost something in the past few years but then you got it back, now might be a good time to notice it and be happy about it. 

That’s all. :)

That

My mom's favorite thing to say about me writing books is, "I don't know where she gets that from." 

That being the desire to read or write stories, and the unsaid part, which she does say sometimes, is, "because she sure didn't get that from me." She says it with a bewildered look on her face, as though she's still processing the strange turn of events that is my career even though I decided I was going to be an author when I was, like, eight. But maybe she still is legitimately surprised about it after all these years, maybe she thought I'd grow out of it. Maybe she's so drastically disinterested in the reading and writing of stories that she can't comprehend the reality of her offspring participating in this industry.                      

Recently, however, I discovered that my mom's mom did love to write and read, and in fact had dreamed of being published someday. When I found that out, I thought, huh, so I got that from Grandma Enid. I don't know how daydreams get passed down through the generations; it doesn't seem as easy to explain as eye color or twins, genetic traits that skip over people and land in their offspring, but the unseen stuff is just as real as the physical stuff and I don't doubt that my Grandma Enid's daydreams could've jumped into my little baby head and sprouted there. I even think that's kind of fantastic, to think that my daydreams could end up in my grandkid's head someday and be fulfilled.

HOWEVER. 

(Yes, another however.)

More recently than the discovery about my Grandma Enid's publishing dreams, I was home for my Grandpa Martin's funeral. After the service we ended up back at my parents' old farmhouse with all of my aunts and uncles and cousins. We were sitting around the dining room table drinking coffee, my mom at the head of the table next to my Aunt Cindy, and the conversation landed on Kids Who Wake Up in the Night, because some of my cousins (and me, obviously) are now in that stage of life where kids are waking up in the middle of the night all over the place.

It was like watching clouds roll in and knowing it was about to rain (not in a bad or ominous way; I love rain)—as soon we we started talking about kids waking up in the night I knew exactly what story my mom was going to tell. She's told it many times over the years, so many times that I can tell it to you just the way she would.

 It goes like this, (though I’m going to tell it from my POV instead of my mom’s, simply because I am me and not her):

My brother, when he was little, was a Kid Who Woke Up in the Night. My brother, when he was little, could wreak havoc if left unattended, so it was obviously not ideal for him to be wandering around our house while everyone else was unconscious. Luckily, there was a creaky floorboard in the hallway outside my parents' bedroom, right at the top of the stairs, so my mom could always hear him leaving his bedroom. She’d hear the telltale squeak, wake up, stumble into the hallway, and put him back into his bed before he could make his way downstairs and get into trouble. 

So this one night, she heard the floor creak, got out of bed, and went into the hallway expecting to see my brother standing there, a skinny little wide-eyed blonde kid on his way to do who knows what ridiculous mischief at this completely unreasonable hour—only, that wasn't at all what she saw. What she saw was a huge shadowy mass, something much, much bigger than my brother, looming above her in the darkness.

This was always my favorite part of the story. I loved looking around the room at whoever happened to be listening, everyone’s eyes wide, picturing that giant shadow in the hallway. At this point, my mom would pause for effect and, without fail, someone would say, “What was it?!” As though they thought my mom had intended on only telling the very beginning part of the story.

My mom would just smile mysteriously and continue as though she hadn’t heard them.

So what happened next? Well, my mom went back to bed. I think this was her favorite part of the story to tell. She always said it like, “Well, whatever it was I just knew it wasn’t TJ getting into trouble so I turned right back around and crawled back under the covers!”

And you might think that’s ridiculous, unless you’re a mom who is up with her kids a lot in the night and is maybe a little sleep deprived and sometimes possibly has thoughts like, “I don’t care what that noise is but please don’t let it be the baby; I just need fifteen more minutes of sleep…” I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t have done the same thing as my mom that night.

So anyway, she went back to bed. But whatever was in the hallway was, obviously, still in the hallway—that is, until it wasn’t in the hallway anymore, but in my parents’ bedroom. And it was still big, bigger than a person. And my dad woke up and was like, Liz, what’s going on, and my mom was like, I don’t know but it’s not TJ, and the thing just stood there at the foot of their bed for a moment and then—

A BRILLIANT FLASH OF LIGHT!

Mom and I both liked this part too. People were completely befuddled by it. A big dark thing in the hallway could be a lot of things—a robber? A figment of a sleep-deprived mother’s imagination? A tree? But this next part of the story blew every theory out of the water except, possibly, aliens, because the thing was emitting bright, blinding, noiseless flashes of light at my mom and dad, who were both still in their bed, still very thankful their kid wasn’t the one making all the creaking noise in the hallway but possibly maybe also wishing he was.

Again, someone would always ask, “What was it?”

Again, my mom would pause. Then she’d finally make the big reveal: the shadowy mass was not aliens, not a tree, not a figment of anyone’s imagination. It was…a crowd of people!

Taking pictures!

Of my mom and dad in bed in the middle of the night!

(Don’t you love a reasonable explanation?)

I always felt weirdly sad at this part of the story. Because my mom would have everyone believing in aliens and then she’d have them completely befuddled at the idea of a crowd of tourists in her bedroom on a farm in the actual middle of nowhere, in the actual middle of the night, and then she’d have to break it to them, at last, that the crowd of people were her best friends and it wasn’t just any middle of the night but it was the middle of the night of her 30th birthday and this whole thing was nothing more than…

 

…a surprise birthday party.

And they all went downstairs and had cake.

So anyway. That’s the story. I love that story and I love the way my mom tells that story. And thinking about that story always makes me think of other stories my mom tells, and it makes me think of the way she tells them. She doesn’t just go, “Oh, one time my friends woke me up in the middle of the night and threw me a surprise birthday party.” No. She goes about it the right way. The long way. The fun way. 

And as we were sitting around the dining room table with my aunts and uncles and cousins, listening to my mom tell that story again, I realized something. 

The reading and writing of stories is only part of the aforementioned that which my mother is so confounded by. There’s also—and maybe more importantly—the noticing and the describing of details others might miss or gloss over, the process of putting it all together in a way that’s fun to listen to, the enjoyment in the sharing, in seeing if you can recreate the thing in your head for another person in such a way that it becomes as real for them as it is for you. 

Mom! I did get that from you!

Sneaky Busy

It's been a busy week. But, like, sneaky busy, the kind of busy you don't notice until after the dust settles and you realize that you're not busy and that not being busy isn't what you've been doing for the past little while.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee, listening to the new Death Cab CD—which, by the way, is wonderful. It's very Transatlanticism meets Kintsugi with a dash of Plans and a reference to Saskatchewan thrown in there just for me. 

Just. For. Me. 

Anyway.

"What were you so sneaky busy with, Suzy?" you're asking (I hear you). 

Well the mainest main sneaky busy thing was that I sent off a very terrifying email to my literary agent on...Monday? Tuesday? Monday. 

It was Monday.

You're thinking, "You sent an email? You think that makes you a busy lady?" (I heard you again.)

Well, so, okay. The hitting of the send button was obviously a one second ordeal, but there was a lot of work leading up to that moment, and a lot of nerves, and a lot of double checking and second guessing. I'm the kind of writer who needs a fainting couch for those moments after I send emails of any import to any person of any import. I would faint the heck out of that fainting couch. 

Anyway.

I sent the email, the culmination of many many weeks' worth of stress and work, and then I had an hour of melodramatic fainting couch behavior (minus the couch), followed by a sudden, unexpected burst of creative energy like I haven't felt in ages. I looked around the room for somewhere to channel that energy, and my eyes fell upon the ARC piles in the corner of the living room.

If you haven't been in my house in the past couple of years, you probably don't know about the ARC piles. So: A few months before the pub date for Sorry I Missed You, my publisher sent me 72 ARCs, meant to be used for promo. Unfortunately, they sent me the boxes of books only a few short weeks before the world shut down for COVID, and I only ended up using some of them. So most of them still live here, in my living room, and I haven't known what to do with them. They're not polished, final copies, so I can't sell them. Book bloggers have long since moved onto the next shiny batch of books. And I'm not going to chuck them—they're still books, after all. My babies.

But in that burst of creative energy, I remembered a bit of advice I have been given over and over since I first started writing: the best thing you can put energy into as a writer, besides, obviously, writing books, is a newsletter. 

I have often thought about this advice and instantly felt very exhausted and fainting couch-y about it. I already have a blog I can't keep up with; now they want me to write an extra blog and manage an email list and try to compete with all the other people sending out newsletters into inboxes full of newsletters to people who don't even really want newsletters? Ugh. 

But, like I said, in that burst of creative energy I thought, does it have to be email inboxes? Does it have to be a blog post? Could it be...an actual letter? On physical paper? How retro! How vintage! How fun! I thought, could I use the Little Free Libraries around the city as mailboxes? I thought of how fun it would be to open a book and find a letter tucked into it. Who among us doesn't love getting mail?

You? Get out.

It's amazing how, when you actually want to do something, when you feel excited about it, how quick and easy it can be. I wrote up that newsletter so fast. I printed off 20 copies and stuffed them into ARCs and then I took those ARCs and stuffed them into Little Free Libraries around my city. 

Those of you who have newsletters and are trying to use them to build a reliable audience are definitely weeping and gnashing your teeth at this point. You're yelling, "Suzy! The reason you use email newsletters is so that you can see the data! You can reliably reach the same people over and over and keep track of who's reading! There is a method to this madness!" (I heard you.)

But to you I say: It's like exercise. If you only do exercise you hate, you won't do exercise for very long. If you find something you enjoy, it'll be easier to build it into a habit that yields results longterm. You might not become a body builder that way, but you'll be healthy and happy and AS IF that's not worth something.

And that's how I'm viewing this newsletter thing, and book marketing in general. I'm going to do what feels fun. Maybe next time I'll ask people to send mailing addresses and send out twenty newsletters in real mailboxes. Maybe I'll think of something that has never been done in all of author history and I'll do that. Maybe I'll get all fainting couch-y and do nothing again for a while. 

I think that's just fine.

Anyway, that's one of the things I was busy with this week. Since you asked.

And now, I have to go fill a prescription for one of my dear asthmatic children and buy a new clothes horse. Fare. Thee. Well.

Needs

I’m at a coffee shop right now, working away at that stupid third novel, chasing that elusive last word but feeling like it’s a carrot on a stick that never gets any closer no matter what I do. I’m listening to my Spotify library on random and just a few minutes ago a Jens Kuross song came on, from the album Art! At the Expense of Mental Health. I’d never noticed that album title before, but I feel it today.

Amen, Jens Kuross. Hope you’re doin okay.

I had a really hard time this morning deciding which shop to come to. I have become very picky. I wanted a fruity cup of coffee (the kind you get at Everyday Kitchen, Happy Hi, or Cafe Royale), but also someplace where I could have something healthy-ish or at least delicious for breakfast (Naked Bean, French Press, Tangerine), but also someplace quiet, with the right atmosphere (Brewedney, Drip, Core). Perhaps someplace I have a gift card for (Everyday Kitchen, Starbucks, French Press) and someplace I don’t have to pay for parking and someplace I won’t run into anyone I know unless the person I’m running into is someone I know kind of peripherally who won’t pull up a chair and someplace where there are enough people to feel like I’m in public but not so many people that I feel like I’m at a music festival. Someplace where the staff is friendly and the music is good but not too loud because I’m probably going to put my headphones in anyway to drown out the people at the table next to me. Maybe someplace where I can look up now and then to see happy folks visiting in the booth across the room, hugging when they get there and before they leave and looking so overjoyed to see each other; I don’t know, it gives me a little vicarious oxytocin hit which I find to be somewhat helpful for creativity. A place with a good view out the window (so nowhere in the east end or Harbour Landing; nothing is less inspiring than the back of a box store). I like a place where other people are on laptops, possibly writing novels too, because I feel like their creative energy might rub off on me, or like their hopes and dreams are contagious. 

You can’t write a thing if you’re low on hopes and dreams.

I sat in my car for such a long time, and finally I just had to narrow it down by trying to think of which coffee beans I wanted, and Thom Bargen won. They serve that at Everyday Kitchen so that’s where I ended up. See also: free parking, a good muffin for breakfast, a gift card, a couple of vaguely familiar people, a bit of jovial hugging across the room, some creatives on laptops, quiet music, and a nice view of the warehouse district. 

So now: let’s see if it translates to PRODUCTIVITY.

…lol.

Not Working On That Book

I said I was going to start blogging regularly and then I forgot to do it at all for two whole weeks. 

It’s okay, shh, shh, I’m here now, it’s okay.

I’m sitting in a quiet kitchen with a cold cup of coffee. (I feel like this is a common Mom of Little Kids trope, the never getting to drink hot coffee. In reality, though, coffee gets cold for everybody at the exact same rate. Stop acting like you’re special, Moms of Little Kids.) The kids are both at school and it’s weird. Seems like just last week* Sully was playing nonstop drum fills in the living room and Scarlett was hanging out on the roof of our garage with the neighbour kids.** 

It’s weird, but it’s great. And disorienting. I’ve spent the first few days getting my bearings in this wide, blank expanse of schedule-less time, this absolute arctic tundra of minutes. I could eat lunch at 10 am if I wanted. And the lunch could be an entire box of Gushers if I wanted. I could sit on the roof of the garage MYSELF, if I wanted. 

(I don’t want any of these things.)

Hopefully this week, though, I’ll figure out a rhythm involving things I do want—first and foremost, to get into a satisfying, productive writing groove and FINALLY FINISH THIS BOOK. I took the summer off, almost fully. I decided going in that I was going to try to settle into the idea of taking a break—enjoy the kids, read some books, hang out with friends. It was good for me, I think. Sometimes I felt panicky about it, like if I stepped outside of the writing hustle for two seconds it was going to close up after me, like a wormhole, and I’d never be able to find my way back in. But maybe people need breaks? Maybe constant productivity is bad for long-term productivity? Maybe creativity isn’t a wormhole. 

Also, weirdly, it felt kind of nice to have an easy, solid answer when people asked me what I was working on. “Nothing at all” is so much easier for me to say than, “AH WELL I’M WORKING ON THIS REALLY WEIRD BOOK ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD KIND OF STUART MCLEAN BUT SCI-FI? I DON’T KNOW IF THAT MAKES SENSE AND UH AND UH AND UH CAN WE JUST TALK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT THIS…”

Ahem.

All that to say, the break is over and here I am. Sitting at my computer.

NOT working on that book. 

Soon.

*It was just last week, actually.

**I didn’t know that Scarlett had been on the roof of the garage until I overheard one of her little friends say to her, “You can’t tell your mom what we did or I’ll never be allowed to play with you EVER AGAIN.” Kids, man. Fast, sneaky, terrifying.  

Back to This

Blogging about blogging is annoying, so I’m not going to do that—very much. I am only going to say that I used to blog every day and I think it was good for me. It was good for my brain and it sparked creativity and it gave me opportunities and helped me be extroverted in my own weird technically-alone-in-my-kitchen way. It made me think about my life, which might not seem like something anyone has to be made to do (aren’t we all self-centred enough? Do we need help being navel-gazey?) but I mean it helped me appreciate the things that would otherwise go unnoticed and it helped me laugh at the things that might otherwise be frustrating and it helped me remember moments that might otherwise be forgotten if I had never intended on writing them down. 

So I’m going to start doing it again. I’ve said that before but for real this time, for real I swear. The kids start school next week—both of them, full time. I will be at home alone a lot and I see no good reason why I can’t sit my butt down and write something completely useless every single day. I’ll also be trying to write something useful (I mean, it won’t be a thesis or a textbook or a self-help book, so I don’t mean useful useful like how a chair is useful, I mean useful like how a hammock is useful), but I don’t think one will render me unable to do the other. I think they might even compliment each other. 

So, there, I have set my intention. I have also blogged about blogging, and I’m sorry. It will not happen again. Very much.

A Story With a Moral But I Don’t Know What It Is

Last summer, Sully tried to get an old lady to pay him 25 cents so he could push her off a tree stump. He called to her as she walked past our house. 

“Hey! Do you want to come to our carnival?”

If you know Sully at all, you know how utterly astounding this is, even before the part where he wanted to push a brittle stranger off a tree stump. Because you know that Sully doesn’t talk to strangers. He barely talks to people he knows or likes. He’s a thinker, an observer. He’s shy. 

So just imagine my complete, total, straight-up, over-the-top SHOCK when I looked out my living room window and saw him speaking to someone he didn’t know. 

“Oh wow,” she was saying, beaming from ear to ear, “this sounds so fun! What kinds of rides do you have at your carnival?”

And I was thinking, this is cute! This is great! He’s being so brave and outgoing. I’ve never seen this side of him before.

And then he was saying, “You have to give me 25 cents to ride this one. You climb up onto this stump and I’ll try knock you off with this stick—“

And then I was saying, “Nope nope nope nope…” as I raced out the door to put an end to it. 

Sully was miffed, like I’d smashed his piggy bank and stolen the 25 cents from him directly. “She wanted to, Mom!”

That was the beginning of a series of money making schemes that didn’t quite pan out. A garage sale (but he had nothing he was willing to part with). A concert (but tickets were $600 a pop and no one could afford to go). Doing chores (but Mom and Dad are cheap and have this wacky idea that everyone who lives in a house should have to take care of it without being paid). I kept telling him, Sully, money doesn’t come that easy. You can’t just push people off tree stumps and expect them to pay you. It doesn’t work like that. 

And he just kept shrugging his tiny shoulders and brainstorming. I could not stop the brainstorming.

But oh well, right? This is how kids learn that money doesn’t grow on trees. That you have to have a skill or a great product, a marketing plan. You have to work for it, and you have to keep your expectations low. Brainstorm all you want, little buddy. You’re going to be broke forever.

So anyway, He came inside from playing with the neighbour kids a couple of weeks ago and asked if he could have some string. Like, a lot of string, as much string as I could find. And maybe some beads, if I had any.

If I had any. 

I was a 90s preteen. I hoarded that stuff. I used to wear ten necklaces at a time, and ten bracelets and ten anklets, all homemade except the one precious hemp choker my best friend gave me for my birthday with the glow bead and the dangly dolphin charm which I am pretty sure she got at Rings n Things in Swift Current. 

(Rings n Things was where the cool people worked and shopped. I was not cool but when I went in there, 12 years old and heart-wrenchingly geeky, I felt just the tiniest bit less uncool. And when I wore that hemp choker with the glow bead and the dangly dolphin charm, oh man. Top. Of. The. World.)

Anyway.

I presented my son with my Caboodle makeup case, which had never, ever stored makeup (I never did become cool, not in my entire high school career). It contained roughly one hundred thousand beads. He was pumped.

“What are you doing with these?” I asked.

“We’re going to make friendship bracelets,” he said. “Me and my friends. We’re going to sell them to the neighbours.”

“Do you know how to make bracelets?” I asked, frowning, thinking of the complicated knots I used to tie, the hemp hooked around my pinky toe. 

“No,” he said. “Just gonna cut these up and put beads on ‘em.”

“Okay.”

So he took off with all my beads and all my string and spent the next week ‘making bracelets.’ 

On Saturday, he informed me that it was time. They had made a sales table. They had taped all of the bracelets to it. They were going to sit on the lawn until someone came by, and they were going to sell these bracelets for $5 a piece. I bit my tongue, wondering if I should encourage them to lower the price, to remind them that we live on a quiet street, that they might not make any money, that I was so proud of them anyway, even if no one bought their bracelets. I even went down there and spent $5 of my hard-earned cash on a bracelet that Scarlett made, three strands of pink and purple and white, threaded with beads that spelled out, ykshtleknd. 

They stayed out there all morning, and some of the afternoon. By about 1 o’clock, they were wandering away from their sales table, occasionally returning to it to see if anyone was lined up waiting to buy a bracelet. They went back the next day, too, for a couple of hours, but mostly lost interest in standing around.

It felt like a quiet couple of days, and I prepared myself to comfort Sully and Scarlett when they came in at the end of it, lamenting all of that time and effort for such little pay-off. I was so proud of them, I was going to say, for all the hard work they’d put in. Maybe I’d even take them for ice cream. And hey! I knew, for sure, that they’d gotten $5 from my sale. That’s a lot of money to little kids! Maybe that would be enough. I hoped so.

Well. 

They didn’t seem all that upset when they came in. Their faces were flushed, they were talking loud and fast, yelling over each other. 

They had fistfuls, literal fistfuls, I am not kidding, of money. 

These kids made $200 selling string to strangers on my neighbor’s front lawn.

The moral of the story is…

Something. I don’t know. What is it? You tell me.