I Hate Winnipeg

It’s been exactly 6.5 years since we went on a vacation (and even that was actually a work trip for Barclay on which Sully and I tagged along). There are a lot of good reasons for this, though having a good reason for something that makes you sad doesn’t make it make you less sad. Not that I’ve been over here feeling sorry for myself—I know vacation is neither a right nor a need—I’ve just missed being out of town, with my family, with nothing to do but look around and drink coffee.

So, you say, where’d you go on your first vacation in almost seven years? Costa Rica? Rome? New York? 

No! Winnipeg, Manitoba!

I didn’t expect this to be something I would have to justify to so many people. I had a lot of conversations in the weeks leading up to our trip with people who tried to talk me into a “better vacation.” Somewhere warmer but also cooler, somewhere farther away, somewhere people go on purpose. 

Yeah, well. 

We went to Winnipeg on purpose, and we had a lovely time. And, because this is my blog where I document my life, even the parts of my life which I spend in Winnipeg, I will now proceed to document this trip as though it were a once-in-a-lifetime luxury vacation to, I don’t know, Paris.

(It was kind of like Paris, actually, in that I heard someone speaking French in a coffee shop in an area of Winnipeg called St. Boniface while, unbeknownst to them, I ate a croissant! Ooh la la. C’est chic.)

It takes almost six hours to get to Winnipeg by car, and the drive is well-suited to car games, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to distract you (except for, on our way home, one building burning completely to the ground while firemen stood around looking bored). Our car game of choice was Song Title Dominos, wherein one person picks a song title (say, for example, One Great City! by The Weakerthans) and then everyone in the car has to quickly think of a different song title with one of the words from the first song title (say, Midnight City by M83). Only rule: you have to be able to think of the song and artist without using technology. Happy to report that my family can enthusiastically and competitively play this game for actual hours. 

The high point of this drive was a stop in Brandon, where my sister lives with her husband and two kids, and also where there is a coffee shop called H Coffee where I got myself a baseline latte, against which to compare all of the many vacation lattes to come (if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my favourite vacation pastime is drinking as many lattes as possible and ranking them, as though I’m going to have to give a latte report to someone at the end of the trip. No one has ever asked this of me but maybe someday it’ll happen and I will be ready).

(H Coffee set the bar very high. It ranked #1 overall.)

When we arrived in Winnipeg, we dropped our stuff off at the AirBnb and headed straight for the LEGO store. 

Here is where I admit that this whole entire trip was instigated by Sullivan, who just wanted to go somewhere that had a LEGO store. He asked one day, “Where’s the nearest LEGO store?” And I said, “Winnipeg.” And he said, “Can we go to Winnipeg on our school break?” And I said, “Probably not, buddy.” And then I said, “Actually, it’s been a really long time since we went anywhere together. I’ll talk to Dad about it.” And then Instagram immediately started showing me ads for things in Winnipeg, because the Internet is, clearly, on Sully’s side. 

So we went there, and that was very exciting for Sully, and then we went back to the AirBnb where he built his new LEGO thing and we had charcuterie and went to bed.

You are already just so enthralled with our trip; I can tell. AirBnbs! Malls! Deli meat! 

You are looking up flights to Winnipeg, you are throwing clothes into duffel bags. I knew you’d come around.

The next morning, we woke feeling like we hadn’t slept at all, and this is because we hadn’t slept at all. One of the kids fell out of their very high bed, and the other just wasn’t used to sleeping somewhere new so they woke up at 2 am and didn’t. Go back. To sleep.

C’est chic.

We went to the Exchange District in desperate search of caffeine and something to eat. We found a tunnel draped with twinkly lights and we went through it and found a donut shop that smelled like fresh pineapple called Bronuts. We went around the corner and found a coffee shop full of whatever the modern-day version of hipsters is called Parlour (Latte Ranking: #3). We went around the corner again and found an enormous toy store with an emerald green door called Toad Hall Toys. We wandered around it for a million years; it was vast and interesting and had an older gentleman sitting in the back corner building model trains. We went around the corner again and we didn’t end up where we began—and I think this might just be a failure of my memory because that’s impossible—and there we found a record store called Into The Music that felt just like the one in High Fidelity and I asked my family if we could spend a million years there the way we had at Toad Hall Toys and they said no, but we did spend a hundred years there and purchased three albums—Alexi Murdoch’s Time Without Consequence, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz!, and one of the very few Rush albums we don’t already own, Counterparts.

At some point in our wandering, we saw a sandwich board for a sandwich shop called King + Bannatyne advertising—you guessed it—sandwiches. We went back to it at lunchtime and had the most lovely sandwich shopping experience. Highly recommend. The person working gave us free cookies for the kids which, they said, were made out of the bread heels(??). These strange bread heel cookies tasted amazing, and we were kind of surprised about that. Go to Winnipeg just for King + Bannatyne; it’ll be worth it. Tell them I sent you. (They will be like, “Who?”)

At this point, Scarlett started getting antsy. It was almost time for her most anticipated event of the trip and she could no longer contain her excitement.

Because the other reason we went to Winnipeg on purpose, besides the LEGO store, was because Scarlett wanted to see a certain statue. 

I don’t remember how or why this started, but every night before bed, instead of reading to Scarlett from, I don’t know, a book, I read to her from a Wikipedia article. The article is about the real Winnie the Pooh, who was purchased at a train station in Ontario for $20 by a man named Harry who hailed from Winnipeg and, thus, named the bear Winnie. Scarlett loves this article; she finds the story of the real Winnie the Pooh joyful and beautiful and heartbreaking and compelling. Some nights it makes her cry when Harry has to loan Winnie to the London Zoo to go off to war (she is concerned for his safety and worried that Winnie will be lonely without him). Some nights she focuses on the fact that a little boy named Christopher Robin really existed and that his dad, A.A. Milne, liked to take him to the zoo where he was allowed to literally RIDE A BEAR. She loves hearing about how tame and cuddly the real Winnie was. Some nights she asks me to [demands that I] insert completely made-up paragraphs about how safe Harry was in the war and how safe wars are and how much he and Winnie missed each other while he was away at the very safe war and how he came back after that war to see her and how they still live together to this day, ALIVE and NOT DEAD in a tree in the actual Hundred Acre Woods which really totally exists. Some nights she asks me point blank if the real Winnie the Pooh is dead and I have learned that she knows the real answer, and that she wants me to lie to her. 

Anyway.

The article I read to her states that there are two statues of Winnie the Pooh in existence—one at the London Zoo and one at a park in Winnipeg, and the one in Winnipeg is of Winnie AND Harry. It immediately became Scarlett’s most important goal in life to take her stuffed Winnie the Pooh to see the statue Harry and Winnie the Pooh IRL.

Do you want to see her face when she saw this statue?

She was so excited. We went to see the statue twice, once on Thursday and again on Saturday and she was equally excited both times. Of note: Sully was very excited to see Scarlett see the statue, which I thought was cute.

And, because the Winnie statue was located in Assiniboine Park, we also took her over to the Journey to Churchill exhibit to see REAL bears (polar ones), which she promptly decided were also Winnie the Pooh even though they looked nothing like Winnie the Pooh and there were two of them. She really is just so amazing at choosing her own reality—wars are safe, Christopher Robin is immortal, all bears are Winnie the Pooh.

We walked around the rest of the zoo for a couple of hours and then our feet hurt so we headed to our hotel for a quick swim (for Barclay and Scarlett) and a game of ping-pong (me and Sully).

(Side note: why don’t all hotels have ping-pong tables? Our hotel had one, and a foosball table, and also a rad play place called Pirates Cove, which swallowed the kids up so Barclay and I could drink our fancy Winnipeg coffee in peace. Why don’t all hotels have all of these things? Tell me, do your fancy Parisian hotels have all of these things? No? Then what good is Paris?)

We had supper at Za and then lattes at Thom Bargen (Latte Ranking: #5–it might have been higher but the barista seemed determined to glare at me the entire time we were in the shop and it was uncomfortable and then unnerving and then just downright irritating and I think it affected my taste buds). 

Then we went back to the hotel and everyone except me fell asleep IMMEDIATELY. I was tired but determined to not waste these precious moments of silence and solitude; I drank my Thom Bargen latte in bed along with some Lindt chocolates I’d discreetly bought for myself earlier that day for this very reason. 

I’m a PLANNER. 

That night was better, in that we slept. Novel. C’est magnifique. 

We had breakfast at our hotel, and the thing we enjoyed most about that was the fact that every time the waitress came out of the kitchen, she carried with her a carafe of coffee, and every time she checked on a table, she set the carafe down behind her, on a different table or counter top. By the time we left, there were carafes everywhere. A sea of carafes, two or three on every surface.

Is this a funny story? I’m thinking now that maybe you had to be there. Maybe if the breakfast had been better we wouldn’t found the carafe army so hilarious.

*Shrug.*

Anyway, then we went to The Forks, because everyone is always like, “Oh yeah Winnipeg, yeah, that’s…fun…there’s, uh…well, there’s an IKEA and there’s The Forks.”

So we went to The Forks, which, for my non-Canadian readers, is where the Assiniboine River flows into the Red. There’s, like, a market and a children’s museum and some other things. Bridges. Trails. It’s nice to walk around, so we walked around it. I don’t know why this is the Definitive Winnipeg Thing, along with IKEA, but it’s nice.

For lunch, we went to the Hargrave St. Market, which is like a mall food court for those modern-day hipsters. Like, instead of Arby’s and Taco Time and whatever, there’s $25 pizza and fancy ramen and, yes, lattes (Fools & Horses, which ranked #4). It was fine. I felt intimidated by everyone there. 

We took our coffees and went back to the hotel so the kids could play and we could sit for a bit. Again, this is one of those things that I knew in theory would happen, but could not fully appreciate until the time came: how much kids ruin one’s ability to truly sit down on vacation (without being prepared to immediately spring up again), and how much I would appreciate a three-floor play place in my hotel. 

One we felt adequately sat, we packed the kids up again and headed to The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which is free (and very, very quiet) on Friday evenings, apparently, and which is just such an incredible experience. Truly. We spent two hours there, probably could’ve spent an entire day if not for the four shorter legs we brought along with us. Don’t get me wrong: the kids loved it too, it’s just a lot of walking, up and up and up these sloping alabaster ramps that wind back and forth between the core galleries. The subject matter is heavy, and there’s so much of it, and the building itself feels like it was perfectly designed to match the information it houses—even the fact that as you progress through the building, you are constantly able to see both where you have come from and where you are going, constantly someone is saying, “Oh, we were just there!” Or, “Wow, we still have quite a long way to go.”

At the top of the museum is a tiny spiral staircase that takes you to THE ACTUAL top of the museum; it winds up and up and the glass does not feel like enough to keep you from plunging to your certain death. It has a sign at the bottom that says you can continue at your own risk, and Sully opted out there, so just Scarlett and I made the trek. 

Apparently, I have recently developed…not a fear of heights, but a nervousness of heights that makes me giggle a lot. There’s a glass elevator at the top that takes you—a tiny bit too quickly—all the way to the bottom, where you can, once again, look up and see all of the places you’ve travelled to. 

Anyway. You should check that out. 

For supper, we went to Yafa Cafe for Arabic street food. It was on the way from our hotel to literally everywhere we went, and every time we drove past it I looked at it and wanted to go in. 

So we went in.

The kids’ taste buds are very, very chill. They don’t like to be startled or challenged with spice or heat or flavour. They like foods with notes of “butter” and “plain” and “if this has too much pepper on it I’m sending it back.” But weirdly enough, they love Arabic street food, which is the antithesis to everything they generally demand food-wise. Pleasant surprise! Makes no sense! Oh well, we’ll take it!

As a family, we give Yafa Cafe 5/5, two thumbs up, and bonus points for the decor.

Uneventful night after that. Slept again, that was nice. 

Our last day in Winnipeg was spent in St. Boniface, the aforementioned French neighborhood. We got coffee and croissants at Postal (latte ranking: #2) and then hit up a book store and a cheese shop, where Sully excitedly purchased cheese curds so he could make his own poutine. 

We made one last stop at the LEGO store, one last stop at the Winnie the Pooh statue, and got one last latte (Folio, latte ranking: #6–hey, someone has to be last) and then hit the road.

All in all, a lovely trip! We would go to Winnipeg on purpose again.

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!