Spoilers, please
Join me May 22 for all the dirt
My favourite kind of book conversation is a carte blanche book conversation. No being coy about spoilers. No tiptoeing around the ending. If I love a book, I want to know everything—about craft and process, ideas and inspiration, characters and themes and twists and endings, where they came from and how the author pulled it off. After I finish a novel that especially moved me, I’ll scour the internet for long-form interviews that include spoilers, but my search terms invariably turn up way more podcasts or radio shows promising NO spoilers. The opposite of what I want.
Therein lie the seeds of TMA TMI (full title: The Mother Act: Too Much Information), the virtual book club chat happening between me and author Sarah Henstra on May 22, three weeks after The Mother Act’s publication. This juicy tell-all will be honest, meaty, and definitely chock-full of spoilers.
It’s personal wish fulfillment for me, really: a conversation hosted by one of the smartest, most interesting readers and writers I know, in which the book under discussion happens to be one I wrote, and participants are invited to bring every last one of their questions—the more spoilery the better.
I’m hoping at least some of you share my spoiler-hungry wish!
A bunch of you are already signed up. But if you’re not and this sounds compelling and fun to you, I wanted to be sure you had the chance to get in on it.
TMA TMI is a preorder bonus, which means:
If you already preordered, you’re already in! Just be sure you’ve let me know about your preorder so you receive the access details:
If you no longer have your order receipt or you ordered in person at an indie bookstore that didn’t give you one, just say so on the form.
If you haven’t already preordered, you have 10 days left to do so!
Hot tip: The Mother Act is 30% off at Indigo right now as part of their Indigo Bestsellers promotion 😯.
= = > > IMPORTANT: After you order, make sure you go here to fill in my form so you get on the TMA TMI list.
Preorders are enormously helpful to books, bookstores, authors, and publishers, as you are probably tired of hearing if you’re friends with an author, follow an author on social media, receive an author’s newsletter, or are an author yourself. Preorders can help determine print runs, build buzz, and influence whether a store carries a book at all. They’re also often a book’s best shot at hitting a bestseller list. (This is because bestseller lists are based on one week’s sales—but with preorders, months’ worth of sales are included in the tally for that first week after publication.)
So by preordering you’re helping a particular book to survive, thrive, and find its readers. But you’re also helping the literary ecosystem, most of which (from publishing houses to bookstores to authors themselves) is operating on slim margins.
But! I also want you to get something fun out of preordering (apart from the anticipation of the novel your future self will receive and the glowy feeling of being in on something from the beginning). So in addition to TMA TMI, I’ve put together two other bonuses, which will land in your inbox right away:
A free ebook, A Real Woman, my creative nonfiction essay that reveals the source of Sadie Jones’s fierce feminism. While I didn’t flee my patriarchal religious upbringing quite as dramatically as Sadie does, her background draws extensively on my own, and this essay delves into that background through the lens of an alarming encounter I had with some powerful old beliefs, years after I thought I’d left them behind. Originally published in Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, edited by Susan Scott.
Strolling Player, a film based on the critically-acclaimed one-man show my husband Richard and I co-created for the stage, a spellbinding account of a life devoted to theatre (and a peek at what inspired The Mother’s Act’s theatrical world). Originally produced in Toronto, Stratford Ontario, Washington DC, and Hastings in the UK.
One more time:
Okay, shutting up about preorders now!
Did you notice I’m sending you an email between the full and new moons? You might be hearing from me a tiny bit more than usual over the next few weeks because there’s a lot going on and a lot to share, but I promise to try very hard to only send you interesting stuff.
Thank you for being here on Team TMA.
Warmly,
Heidi