The Weasel of the Year Awards
And a man named Kenneth
The new year is a strange time, friends. Especially 2024, because it’s my debut year!! Damn, this feels weird. June 25th feels simultaneously like tomorrow and never, depending on which of my to-do lists I’m looking at. If anyone has some survival secrets for baby authors, hit me up, because I might be panicking a little bit over here. Meanwhile, stay tuned for fun news about RULES FOR SECOND CHANCES coming later in January and early February! And if you feel like pre-ordering, there’s no need to wait, lol.
And now…
STORY TIME
As wiser people than me have pointed out, New Year’s Day can feel like a beautiful release of everything bad about the old year, followed swiftly by a piling on of overwhelming expectations for the new one. Future Me will be faster! Better! Stronger! More! At least until the third week of January, when painstakingly folding my underwear into pretty Marie Kondo cupcakes loses its appeal and I turn back into the messy, drawers-bursting-open gremlin I always was.
It stands to reason that my most beloved New Year’s tradition was the one I started with my then-fiancé, now-spouse back in the dark days of our medical training. In our late twenties, working somewhere north of eighty hours a week, we felt exhausted at the mere thought of putting on uncomfortable shoes, heading downtown to someplace loud, then getting stuck without a cab at 3 AM and having to walk all the way home in the world’s coldest national capital (I love Canada!).
Instead, on New Year’s Eve, we got dressed up in our best, wrote five short speeches each, and presented the inaugural Weasel of the Year awards, which came to be lovingly known as the WOTYs. Anyone who’d wronged us got a nomination, from the (male) supervisor who physically slapped me for touching an easily wipeable medical device with a used glove* to the icy patch on our front stairs.
*It’s unfortunately true that healthcare is no safer than anywhere else in the working world, especially for women and marginalized people, who suffer high rates of violence at work.
In the years since, the WOTYs have expanded and contracted, gotten fancier and more casual, and definitely gotten earlier every year. Some people think the WOTYs are petty and low, to which I say: yes, they are! But they’re also cathartic — a small but satisfying way to hold evil to account. This year, the nominees included the people who tried to sell us a beautiful house that turned out to be built with crackers and cheese, the mean kid who has somehow been in the same classroom as my kid every year through three different schools, and a man named Kenneth, whose crimes accidentally got erased from the WOTY whiteboard during our move. None of us remembers what he did, but we know it must’ve been weaselly.
What I love about the WOTYs is the idea that evil doesn’t get the privilege of a clean slate every year. We’re allowed to name it, and acknowledge it, and remember it. I brought some of that defiant, evil-busting feeling to Liz, the main character in RULES FOR SECOND CHANCES. Liz grows to understand that while all of us need forgiveness sometimes, the people who ask you to forget their misdeeds are very often the people who plan to take advantage of you some more.
THINGS TO READ IN JANUARY
Sarah Brenton is a ray of filthy sunshine, and so are her books. You’ve never rooted for the villain quite as hard as you will for Ashley Foley in THE VILLAIN EDIT (available January 16th!).
SAY YOU’LL BE MINE by Naina Kumar is getting allll the buzz, and for good reason! Her MMC Karthik is my stern, grumpy boyfriend. I will not be taking questions at this time. Available January 16th!
I don’t even write histrom, and I’m still mad at Lindsay Lovise for thinking of such a bonkers good premise as the one in NEVER BLOW A KISS. It’s the first book in a series I’d describe as Charlie’s Angels meets the aristocracy. Debuting January 23rd!
That’s all for now — as I said above, watch out for fun things to click on in my next newsletter!
Wishing you every good thing in 2024! No time like the present to start keeping a low, petty list of names for this year’s WOTYs, hahah . . .
Maggie
P.S. I’m aware of the recent revelations regarding Substack’s refusal to deplatform voices of hate, and I’m looking into options for migrating my newsletter!
As someone who LIVES for Ask a Manager's "Bad Boss of the Year" polls at the end of each year, I am OBSESSED with WOTY. I also continue to feel very positively about Mr. North, who sounds like anything but a weasel.