Scary Baby

lessons about letting go from a haunted doll

Friends, it is FIVE WEEKS to FOSSIL FEUD day on July 28th! HOLY @#$%&*! From now until launch, it is going to be straight panic at North, Inc. Although speaking of launch, I hope I’ll see you at a book event this summer? The FOSSIL FEUD launch event with the brilliant and hilarious Stephanie Archer will be in Toronto on July 30th, and I’ll be in Ottawa on August 5th and Vancouver on August 27th, so come say hiiiiiii! And if I can get my act together I’ll put together a virtual event for some of my non-Canadian besties, maybe?

Don’t forget you can get signed copies, Clever Girl stickers, and stunning Ripley and James character art prints at my indie bookstore partners, but ONLY IF YOU PREORDER at Perfect Match Bookshop in Vancouver, Evermore Books in Ottawa and Lovebound Books in the US. Click on the bookstore names to order there, or preorder wherever books are sold with the linky button below, yay!

STORY TIME: SCARY BABY RIDES AGAIN

My favorite moment in the life of a book is six months before publication. With six months to go, your book baby is both beautiful and entirely yours. The book holds every possibility within it, all at once.

That feeling stops around three months pre-pub. This is when you begin to understand that soon the places and people and events you built using pieces of your very soul . . . they will belong to readers, not to you.

And so begins the process of letting go.

Which is something I haven’t historically been very good at.

Back in the late Holocene, my family made much of having held on to our precious heirlooms. These included china that didn’t go in the dishwasher, wedding dresses so tiny they could not be buttoned up by anyone who’d hit puberty, and antique dolls too fragile to be played with.

I can draw a straight line from this historical hoarding behaviour to an exchange in the family chat a few weeks ago:

My sister J: Cleaning out the basement, found this old doll. Anybody want her?

Me: Omfg what an eerie beast. I’ll take her.

I’m not sure why J pretended she didn’t know whose doll this was. I was the only ginger sister, and all of the redheaded dolls were mine. Maybe J was embarrassed that she’d borrowed the doll to give to her daughter (who’s a few years older than mine) and then forgotten to return it until both of the kids were old enough to vote? Honestly, that’s probably it.

Anyway, J dropped the doll off at my house a few days later, and if there was ever a physical manifestation of the need to let go, Annette—whom I named for the desperately glam next-door neighbour—is it.

I used to love that doll, and I mean I LOVED her. She was the main character of all my flights of fancy; she held every possibility within her, all at once. She was often a grown-up, sometimes a teenager, only rarely a kid. She had store-bought clothes and a lot of great one-liners stolen from TV shows. She had a MULLET, for god’s sake. Damn, this chick was cool.

The last story I ever made up about Annette was this: “One day, my maybe-ginger daughter will love her as much as I did.” This object I’d poured so much imagination and time and feeling into—I yearned for it to resonate with someone else someday. So I laid her in a box and carried her with me. For decades.

But something happens when you hold on too long, whether you’re clutching at a doll or a story or an idea about the future. What happens is that the world moves on, and usually not in the direction you thought it would.

That last story I spun about Annette didn’t come true. Like, at ALL. My kid turned out to be neither ginger nor interested in dolls. And even if she had been, do we really think she would’ve played with this doll?

By modern standards, Annette is — let’s face it — a hell of an eerie beast. The Victorian-orphan facial features with eyebrows a single hair wide! The radioactive peach skin! The eyes: a bit too Twilight-vampire red, if we’re honest!

After an unfortunate jump scare involving a glassy-eyed stare from across a dark foyer, my husband changed her name from Annette to “Scary Baby.” He suggested I sell her, but it turns out the going rate for a mint-condition Scary Baby is $35. Undeterred, he arranged a photo where it looks like she’s trying to murder me. He keeps asking when I’m going to make a trip to our local thrift shop, presumably with the doll locked in the trunk of the car for safety.

LOOK HOW PEACH THIS DOLL IS, HOW MANY CARROTS HAS SHE EATEN

Still, I wanted to see Annette one more time before I let her go. In a Velveteen Rabbit sort of way, she reminds me of a particularly pure-hearted version of myself — a Maggie not unlike the one who pours her imagination and feelings into a manuscript about love.

I brushed the tangles from her hair, unknotted and retied the closures on her dress, and showed my husband how you can make her “walk” by holding her outstretched hands and tilting her body back and forth so each leg can swing forward in turn. The last thing I’ll do for Annette is what I should’ve done for her years ago, and what I have to do for FOSSIL FEUD in just a few weeks:

Let go, and hope.

I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved writing it. I hope you’ll think that this story that came from the purest part of me is precious. I hope you’ll preorder it, or pick it up at a bookstore, or ask your local library to buy a copy so you can borrow it. I hope you’ll tell a friend about a romance with dinosaur fossils and locked museums and yearning.

Thank you, my loves. I can tell you’re the pure-hearted kind of people too.

I’M READING

Annabel Monaghan is both an excellent human and a reliable purveyor of emotional truths that will absolutely level you. I read whatever she writes. When I got to the end of Dolly, All the Time I turned right back to the beginning and started reading it again, it’s that good. I was talking with a romance author friend and we agreed that Annabel a) has executed an incredibly fresh take on the fake dating trope, and b) manages to get a lot done without the book feeling like it’s busy or overcrowded or anything but absolutely seamless. This book is STUPID good.

Naina Kumar has been one of my favourite, favourite authors for years. We wrote books involving canoes at the same time (The Ripple Effect for me, Flirting With Disaster for her) and had so many conversations about the art and craft of paddling! I’m not sure if I should recommend this book because this man is SO. DANGEROUSLY. HOT. PLEASE I cannot breathe. Naina’s got a preorder campaign going on with a bonus dust jacket that I kind of have trouble looking at directly without bursting into flame. All I’ll say is that he wears a kilt and can be bossy in *ahem* certain situations.

That’s all, my loves! Wishing you every good thing,

Maggie