Anne of Green Gables and my book

And, some string

When I finished my upcoming book, I had to control+f (search and find in the document) 3 phrases to make sure I didn’t use them too much: Nachos, Beyonce, and Anne of Green Gables.

If you want to know me in a nutshell, it’s those 3 phrases. #cueall90’srap #avonlea #withnachos

I had a few early readers of the book, and they said that yes, indeed, I did mention Beyonce a lot. ha!

Let’s get back to Anne-with-an-e though. She is one of my earliest friends and memories of feeling “seen and understood”. I fell in love with anything Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote at a really young age and had the Anne series, along with all of Avonlea and the Emily series - of which I read over and over again. I had an Anne journal (along with a Little Women journal that my daughter now has) and would go to my favorite spot in the tree in the backyard to climb and write and read all afternoon or all day if it was summertime. Just ask my mom. I loved Anne.

And thousands of you do too! I posted on FB about my daughter having some friends over a few weeks ago and the giggles that day reminded me of when Anne and Diana had an afternoon together - remember that scene? Here’s a screenshot of the FB post:

Turns out that little FB post got 1 million views (that’s a LOT of eyeballs) with 11,000 of you liking/loving/laughing along and over 900 comments. Y’all, I have found my people! (Also, if I would have known this would go viral I would have chosen a non-pixelated picture and proofread better. oh well!) The last time I went viral like that was when I wrote about the J&J vaccine just coming out - I’ll choose comments on the Anne post any day over those J&J comments. =)

I’ve loved Anne for a lot of reasons - she loves books and school. She was a bit of a tomboy and loved the outdoors. She had a huge imagination. She loved nature, Matthew and Marilla, quiet places to write and dream. It sounded so much like me at that age and I could easily write a book on how she gave me courage to just be, well, me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined I was on Prince Edward Island writing a book with a sunhat. Please see the following picture of me 1990-something probably writing a story full of long paragraphs and lovely seascapes.

So, I’ve been hanging onto a little dream for at least 30 years.

I wanted to wrap a draft of my book in twine just like Anne did. Remember the scene when Diana entered Anne’s book to a contest and won?!?

Anne’s book was held together with twine. And you betcha a dream of mine was planted that I wanted to do the same thing. Fast forward a few decades of growing up and a pandemic and I did just that.

I wrapped my final draft of my book in twine that my Dad bought me this past Christmas (did he know I wanted to do this? maybe because he’s fantastic like that).

Then I took it to the little spot in the backyard that I wrote most of the book on the picnic table my husband built me. Here’s the picture of that table on the day months ago when I wrote the final word.

You’ll hear about that table in the book too and why tables in general matter to me. In fact, the book begins and ends with a table!

Back to the little spot in the backyard though - I took my final draft with the Anne-with-an-e-twine and put it on the earth to just say thank you. And to remember that little 10ish year old Emily-with-a-y that wanted to write a book one day that was true to who she really was. And then wrap it with twine.

I did just that.

And of course took a picture. =)

-Emily

PS: I’m just about to show you the cover and share the pre-order link and book launch info and then promptly freak out with excitement and nerves. If I’m being honest, this makes me so nervous because I don’t want to talk too little or too much about the book. And I definitely don’t want to talk about myself all the time. So bear with me as I get my footing on how to do this without annoying you. I’m so proud of this book though and hope-to-pieces that you love it too! If you don’t, I’ll make you raspberry cordial…see what I did there. =)