Exciting things!!
(also, Unreasonable Things: A Reflection)
Good Sunday morning everyone,
I hate to bombard you on a weekend, but I just had to give everyone a special sneak peek into some exciting things that are happening this week!
Thing 1: RULES FOR SECOND CHANCES is having its first Goodreads giveaway starting TOMORROW!!
I’m really excited about this one — 100 paperback copies are available to win for readers in the US and Canada! *faints dead away Victorian novel style* If you’d like to possess a limited edition Advanced Reader Copy of the book, complete with the two typos my brother-in-law very kindly pointed out, I’d be so excited if you’d skip on over there and enter! If you’re not a contest person, maybe you’d still like to add it to your “Want to Read” shelf? Yayyyyyyy!
Thing 2: RULES FOR SECOND CHANCES is having a flash Read Now on Netgalley tomorrow, December 11!
I’m also proud to have RULES featured in the Women’s Fiction Category Spotlight on NG, since it’s a bit of a genre-bender — is it a romance with strong elements of women’s fiction? Is it women’s fiction with a strong romantic plot? I don’t know, I just hope people like it, lol.
And now on to the random ramblings I dearly hope to become known for…
Reflections
Little-known Maggie North Fact™: I used to run a course on written reflection for medical students. Honestly, learning how to write my own reflections and critique other people’s reflections was foundational to becoming an author, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I still like to reflect on things, often for months or years, turning them over in my brain until they become an idea strong enough to hold up a whole book.
One thing I think about often, because it has a lot to do with writing, and because it’s winter (bear with me) is: when does a reasonable thing become unreasonable? In a novel, this is the point where the story starts — where the character’s flawed but bearable life suddenly becomes unbearable, and the character is forced into action.
Where does winter come into this, you ask?
Well, I used to live in a hundred-year-old semi-detached house in Downtown Canada. The driveway we shared with our next-door neighbors was incredibly narrow, because a horse-drawn carriage is not as wide as a Hummer, apparently. Our house was a block and a half from the hospital, which was great when I was walking to work, and not so great when people would try to avoid the (admittedly astronomical) cost of hospital parking by illegally ditching their cars in the surrounding streets. On the curb in front of my house there was room for exactly two and a half cars, which meant frustrated drivers would often let the nose of their Buick hang halfway into our driveway in order to cram a third car into that 2.5-car space.
This drove my neighbor BANANAS. Half a Buick was basically the equivalent of a concrete pylon in the middle of a driveway where you already had to fold your mirrors in if you wanted to keep them.
One bitterly cold winter day, I happened to look out the living room window. There was my neighbor, in his house slippers, marching out to the Buick of the day to hawk a loogie directly onto the driver’s side of the windshield, right at eye level, where it would soon freeze to an icy lump the driver would have to chip at for ten minutes before they could see.
I thought about a reasonable thing — one person, in one Buick, on one day, anxious to see their loved one in hospital, cheating a little bit by parking across someone’s driveway. And I thought about an unreasonable thing — 365 people, in 365 Buicks, every day of the year, multiplied by as many years as someone lived in that house.
The neighbors moved away not long after that, and a year later, we did too. But not because of the Buicks — we left because we now had both a baby with a strongly held objection to sleeping and a new neighbor who liked to practice John Lennon’s Imagine, and only John Lennon’s Imagine, on the piano they’d thoughtfully positioned right next to our shared wall. Friends, he was neither a good nor a thoughtful piano player, as I bluntly informed him at 10:30 PM one night, my infant screaming in my arms for emphasis. We left before it got to the point of hauling his piano outside in winter and spitting on it…which is sort of a shame, because I think it’s the spit that makes the story. Don’t you?
Wishing you every reasonable thing,