... uh, work that you got to...

Yeah.

So I went to the Guelph University archives and got my hands on all of L.M. Montgomery's original journals, and her original letter of offer for Anne of Green Gables and her royalty, her royalty notes that she, that she wrote down.

And, um, uh, w- the bit that really got to me more than anything else was where she was so grateful that Anne had been published and, you know, she'd become, become this very successful writer, but she'd been trying to write the second book, and any author will tell you the second book is the hardest [laughs] because, particularly if the first was successful, then you've got this pressure to live up to that.

And, um- I just found it so encouraging to know that this author who had inspired millions of people and millions of, of, um, readers, writers, um, lovers of romance all over the world, um, was sitting there saying, "I don't think this book is as good as Anne.

I don't think I can do this a second time." And, and, and, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but it was this struggle that was in her man- in her journal was so real to me and gave me so much hope that if she felt that way, and Jane Austen felt that way, and every other author we admire has been through this and continues to go through it, then, you know, it's just a matter of getting used to it as part of the work we do.

Oh

... too far into a different genre.

What did rejection feel like before you had the language to talk about it the way you do now?

was terrible at being rejected it would physically hurt every time I had a rejection and I thought I'm just not cut out for this career because any writer will tell you there's just countless rejections and that continues on no matter how many books you have and it's not just rejections it's also criticism and reviews and you know it's terrifying really to be a writer in a lot of ways um And what I've learned over the years is that it's just part of the job.

In fact, I'm just out of a call that I had earlier this morning with another writer who just wanted some advice on how to tolerate the constant rejections.

And it made me realize just how far I've come in being able to contend with it.

And I read an article a few years ago by Kim Liao, who is another author who decided that she was going to chase 100 rejections every year.

And so not just be, she was going to actively seek to be rejected 100 times because she realized that to get over this terrible feeling of things not working out.

She just had to put herself out there and do a lot more and then that would sort of become a numbers game and it was more likely that she would either receive enough feedback to improve her work or just by putting it out there more times that the odds of somebody picking it up would be higher.

What is the rejection that was hardest to use?

Definitely.

I started with writing about grief and loss and...

I feel like I wrote the book I needed to read and that I couldn't find at the time with the last love note.

And also we start at the end, my latest one.

And I think I had so many messages from people who were either widowed or had lost somebody else very close to them.

or people who'd been through relationship breakdown, anything involving grief, who would get in touch and say, I had one woman stands out who said she had lost her husband three weeks before reading The Last Love Note and had been carrying the book around in her handbag ever since because she felt like it was the only person in the world who understood her.

So that kind of...

I have to say, if you're beating out the gram, Emma, I'm telling you, like, if you're beating out Snapchat, well, gone are all your streams.

Mm

... not drinking, it's just we have a culture, um, where reaching for a glass of wine after a, a hard day or after any normal day really is quite normal.

And it had s- I, I no- just noticed it a lot more how many times people would say it and almost...

I felt almost a bit of peer group pressure for the first time since high school, um, to drink at times, you know? And it, it was just very enlightening.

Um, but I th- I think too in, in the last few months I've been diagnosed with ADHD, along with most writers that I know.

[laughs] Anyway, I sometimes wonder if now I'm looking back, if that, you know, that hyper-focus, um, and addictive personality sort of that, that can be part of ADHD, whether that was sort of on my mind at the time that it...

You know, I do throw myself into, um, anything that's interesting to me, um, whether it's photography or writing or, you know, Korean dramas on TV that I'll just, you know, and I can't seem to stop watching them.

Yeah.

Tell me about that first Christmas after Geoff died.

Oh, one of the most beautiful stories of my life.

You know, I had this five-year-old son who was grieving but also was still a little kid and expecting magic at Christmas, and for a new widow, that was just an incredibly painful, uh, challenge.

And I, um, I was invited over to my sister's house with the kids for pizza one Sunday night, and that was also a bit unusual.

We didn't tend to have family dinners on Sunday nights.

But I found out later why that was, because as we drove back into the house, uh, our house had been covered in Christmas lights.

There was a Santa stop here sign at the letterbox.

Mm-hmm.