In this latest episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with one of my superstar clients, the multi-talented author Sandy Day. If you’re a fan of heartfelt and relatable stories set against rich Canadian backdrops, you’re going to love this conversation.
Sandy returns to the podcast to talk about her re-released novel, Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. This project, which began as a semi-autobiographical novella, has been expanded into a full-length novel. During our discussion, she opens up about the challenges of revisiting and revising older work, the joys of setting her story in the breathtaking landscape of Cape Breton, and the deep emotional resonance of her coming-of-age tale.
We also delve into her unique writing journey, from studying under Canadian literary icons like Michael Ondaatje and BP Nichol to navigating the independent publishing world with skill and grace. Sandy’s insights into crafting authentic characters, embracing her identity as a Canadian author, and balancing humour with seriousness in her writing are fascinating.
Plus, she shares her approach to connecting with readers through personal essays and newsletters, providing a glimpse into her creative process.
Tune in now to hear about Sandy’s remarkable career, her thoughts on embracing specificity to achieve universality, and why Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand is a must-read.
The Writing Coach Episode #211 Show Notes
Where to Find Sandy’s Work
• Grab a copy of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand.
• Visit Sandy’s website: sandyday.ca
• Subscribe to her newsletter: sandydayauthor.substack.com
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The Writing Coach Episode #211 Transcript
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Sandy, welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast.
Thank you, Kevin. It’s really great to be back.
You are back on the show because you have a new book launching Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand, but it feels like you were just here for the launch of Odd Mom Out. Clearly, it’s been a productive year for you.
Yeah, I can’t believe I have two books out in 2024. It’s a big deal because you read all the time about authors’ rapid release and all this stuff. And I just think, “Oh, there’s no way I can do that. I’m a slow writer. There’s no way I can do it.” I mean, I did have a little leg up on this book, but yeah, now I’m starting to feel like I can do this. I can do this.
Was it easy to shift your focus away from promoting Odd Mom Out and getting back to working on Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand?
Odd Mom Out came out on January 1, 2024. The first six months, it was a hot commodity, according to Amazon, so they put a lot of effort in and behind it, and there’s a lot of residual organic sales and page reads that you get from that. But after six months, that definitely slowed down.
And so one of the things I realized, and I’m pretty sure I read this in a book—I can’t remember the guy’s name, how terrible, but he’s the guy that wrote, author unlimited—and he says, you know, you have to have something else for people to read as soon as they’re finished your book so that there’s something else for them to read. So I notice even on Head on Backwards, if I go to the page on Amazon. Now where it shows the Also Boughts, it says people that bought this book also bought an odd mom out is the first book that’s showing so that’s organic, because it’s not like I’m paying Amazon to do that. So when you get when you have a new book, and then they just kind of link into each other. Yeah, I wanted to get head on backwards, up and ready, so that, you know, it’s just part of the whole promotion tool is just to have more books.
Now this is an interesting launch because Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand is not a completely new book.
No.
Tell us about that.
Well, I published it. I mean, I started it’s, it’s semi autobiographical. So I started writing it in 1977really, but I published it in, I think I wrote it during NaNoWriMo in 20, oh, my goodness. I don’t remember what year, maybe 2018 and then I published it 2019, or 2020, and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I knew how to publish books because I’d done that, but I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of the writing of the book. And so then the pandemic hit. I think I released it on Valentine’s Day, if I’m not mistaken, of 2020. I didn’t pay any attention to it. After that, readers didn’t pay any attention to it. I did a blog tour, so I had a lot of reviews from bloggers, but it just sat on the back of the burner, you know, wasn’t doing anything.
When I was thinking about what’s going to follow up. Odd Mom Out, I’m in the middle, as you know, I’m in the middle of writing another book, but it’s more serious than Odd Mom Out, it’s not as light hearted, so, and it’s going to be a while before it’s ready. So I thought, Okay, what if I, what if I gave Head on Backwards, a little, a little refresh with what I know now, and I ended up adding 15,000 words to it. I moved it from being a novella to a novel, so I had to re release it under a new ISBN. Lost my reviews that were on the other book. That’s okay. They weren’t the greatest reviews, because the book wasn’t the greatest, but it is now, so I’m really pleased. I’m really happy with it, and, yeah, didn’t take that long to do.
It’s such an interesting thing to pause in your career for a moment and look back and say, “Hey, I’m going to go back and fix up something that I already published,” as opposed to moving on to our next project.
I thought I could do both things at once, but I couldn’t. It was two separate things, and there’s only so much time in the day, so I really had to just concentrate on the one thing.
Tell us about the story of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand.
I’ll tell you what my biographical situation was when I was 17. I went and spent a month with my aunt in Cape Breton, and she had just moved there. She had recently divorced, and she bought a farm on the coast, and it just sounded awesome to me, and I wanted to go there and visit and there was a guy that I left back in Ontario, and I was hoping he was going to follow me out there. So that is that the premise of the book is definitely true, that that is what happened, but most of the rest of the book is not what happened.
It’s about a girl who’s she’s love sick, and she’s crazy about this guy, and she’s trying to tie him down. She’s only 17, but she doesn’t realize that that’s too young to tie down or anything like that. She’s just desperate for love. She doesn’t have a good relationship with her own father, so she’s hungering for affection, love and, attention, and that’s her coming of age is she’s got to learn that she’s got to find something else besides somebody else to fill that ache and fill that need.
When you’re writing a fiction book that’s so clearly based on an experience that you went through. Where do you draw the line between what actually happened and then what you’re going to put your character through? Is the line blurry?
Hmmm. Well, you know, when you write a novel, you have to have scenes, so I had to have things happening, so I had to make a lot of those things up, and then changing the names of characters and changing just changing different circumstances that really just once you start typing something, and somebody’s got a new name, and everything ideas spring into mind, and I added a lot of stuff in that just struck me as fun and different. And wasn’t stuff that happened to me might have been stuff that happened to me in other parts of my life, but not at that time in my life.
And it’s a period piece, correct?
Yeah, it’s, it’s historical, which kills me. I can’t believe it that my teenage hood is now considered historical. But yeah, it’s, it’s long time ago. It’s coming up, 50 years ago.
So it’s mid-70s, late-70s?
Yeah, late 70s during the women’s revolution, and she’s very much in tune with all that. She’s grown-up reading Ms magazine and being influenced by her feminist mother and feminist aunt, and she’s into it, but she’s so like this is where she’s just torn. And what is so ironic is she says she’s a feminist, but all she wants is a man.
What role does the setting of Cape Breton play in the book?
Well, it’s far away, an it provides a compact period of time because she’s only going to be there for she thinks she’s going to be there for the whole summer. She has to go home to finish her last year of high school. But Cape Breton is just so different. I grew up in Ontario, and the main character grew up in Ontario, you know, from Toronto with a summer cottage, but so she’s not unfamiliar with sort of cottage country and the wilds, but she she’s never been to a coastal place on the ocean. She’s never encountered like I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Cape Breton, but it’s a very distinct place, and people are proudly different, you know. And anybody, anybody knows that tension between City Mouse and Country Mouse, you know, from I spent every summer of my life in cottage country, in a little town that I actually now live in. And there was always that tension that, you know, the locals, they made it known that you’re not really local, so you’re different, you’re from the city, you’re city slicker, you’re different. You’re different than the other people I’ve met from Toronto. I knew about that dynamic, and I wanted to write about that.
It’s clearly a Canadian book in setting. Do you think of yourself as a Canadian author?
I do now, after talking to you. When I first started, odd mom out, I was trying to make it generic, that it could be, you know, anywhere North America. And then, after getting feedback from some our, you know, our creators, before the book was published, somebody noted that there’s all these things that aren’t American, like boxing day, and I don’t know a whole bunch of stuff that I thought, well, yeah, I don’t know what it’s like to be American or live in America, but I know what it’s like to be Canadian, so why not embrace that? Because I have had that from book bloggers, most of whom I’m in contact with are from the UK, they find my settings so exotic because they, you know, I don’t know what they picture in Canada, but all the wilds that we encounter and take for granted are very exotic to them.
It’s interesting; as someone who works with a lot of Canadian authors and a lot of American authors, we have so many similarities, but we also have some very significant differences, and so it would make sense that some aspects of our culture might seem mysterious or unique to readers.
I think my writing does suit the British audience. They have a different appreciation for the chick lit or women’s fiction. They don’t expect there to be any romance in it. They’re perfectly satisfied if there’s no romance in it, and that’s the way I write. Whereas American women’s fiction is more, there’s often a really strong love story in women’s fiction. I’m happy to write in a way that I use Canadian spelling now in my books. I used to use American spelling, but I use Canadian spelling now. And just, yeah, I’m just going to embrace being Canadian. Because I am Canadian.
It goes back to something we often talk about a lot in my programs, which is this idea that specificity leads to universality. When we try to be vague, when we try to appeal to everyone, it ends up appealing to no one. But if we say, I’m writing a book about a character who goes to Cape Breton, suddenly it’s identifiable and relatable and much more appealing than something more vague.
I agree. And it was fun to recall the scenery and all of that, to recall it. I wrote a lot about it at the time that I was there when I was young and painted a lot of pictures, and so I had a lot of material that was my own first-hand material. But then, with the internet, I could just look up places that I know we had been to, reminding myself, what do they look like?
I even joined a Facebook group for I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s something like old photos from Inverness. And you know how when you join a Facebook group, they ask you some questions: why do you want to join? I said I’m a writer, and I was there in 1977, and I want to look at the old pictures they let me in. There are so many ways to research how what you’re going to write about, even if you haven’t been there or you haven’t been there in a long time.
While we’re talking about you as a young author, last time you were on the podcast, we touched really briefly on your experiences in university, learning some from some pretty high-profile Canadian authors. I’d love to hear a little bit more of this interview about what that experience was like for you.
When I was in high school, I read was, I’m pretty sure, I’m not sure if it was a library book, or somebody gave the book to me, or maybe I had to read it for a poetry class or something, but it was The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, and it just blew me away. I loved it so much. I must have read it 1000 times. And you know, there’s his picture on the back of the book, and it says he works at York University. So I said, “Well, that’s where I’m going to go.”
And I did go to Glendon College of York University, which is closer to where I lived in Toronto, then going up to the main campus in York, which was a huge hike for me to go up there. And he was a creative writing professor. I took Canadian literature. He didn’t teach every lecture, but he taught some of them, but he was one of our professors for creative writing.
The other one was BP Nichol. And BP was a poet, one of the four horsemen, I think they called themselves, and they won a Governor General’s award for one of their books. And he was so awesome. He was such a great guy.
I don’t know that I learned that much. They weren’t really teaching writers craft. I don’t think that anybody knew how to do it. When I think of what the writers craft that’s available now that fiction writers have just dragged from screenwriters all of that kind of background. They weren’t doing that back then in when did I? Trying to remember when I graduated in 1986 I think I graduated from university. So even in the creative writing program, if I think they only taught the Creative Writing pro like the fine arts was at the master’s degree, and I did. I was accepted for it, but I didn’t attend it. But they didn’t really teach much in the way of writing craft. It was just sort of workshops, you know, where people would write, and then you’d hand around your pieces, and then your fellow students would give feedback. Teacher would give a little bit of feedback.
But the biggest effect that BP had on me was he wrote my final paper, which was, you know, a stack of poems he wrote on it. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got it. And that kept me going. That’s kept me going forever. I still have that paper, and he died not long after that. I so treasure that. I treasure him saying that to me, because it gave me was like, “Okay, well, I kind of understand that. I don’t know what it is, either, but I got it.” So I feel lucky. I got it.
Of all the authors I have worked with, you are probably one of the most flexible authors in terms of working in multiple genres and writing heavier stuff, and also writing lighter, funny stuff to what do you attribute that flexibility in your writing?
I don’t know. Good question. I don’t know. I just want to write. I guess I’m writing character most of the time, so trying to be honest, and how a character would really feel, how they would really act, what they would really say in a situation, and then knowing what tone I want to go for, depending on what genre I’m writing. I don’t know, it just comes out that way.
When you’re sitting down to write, do you say to yourself, “Oh, I’m putting on my dark and serious writing hat today,” or, “Oh, I’m putting in putting on my light and funny hat?”
No, it’s like, well, what am I working on today? Because I write a weekly newsletter, and those pieces that go out are, for the most part, humorous personal essay. They have irony in them, or they’re self-deprecating, just humorous pieces that people find entertaining, and I love writing them. I find them really fun and funny to write, so I write those, but I also write serious ones, sometimes, depending on what the topic is. But then the book I’m working on right now, in your course, is a serious book. There’s not a whole lot funny in it. So when it’s not like I sit down and I feel depressed writing it, it’s just that the situations they’re in don’t really call for any kind of humor doesn’t go in.
You do all this fiction writing, but you also do all this non-fiction, more memoir, like article writing for your newsletter. Has that been going for a solid year now?
Yeah, I’ve been putting out my newsletter for over a year. But writing personal essay like that, I used to call it flash fiction, but most of it’s not fiction, so I call it, I know now it’s personal essay, but I started doing that when I became a writing. Facilitator for Toronto Writing Collective, which is now called writers collective of Canada. I think they changed their name. I was a volunteer writing facilitator there, and we taught people to write to prompts and went into shelters and church basements and hospital psychiatric units and taught people who don’t usually have access to writing facilitators and help them write.
The method was to give a prompt, give an amount of time to write and then write. And after doing that for a couple of years, I moved away, so I wasn’t facilitating anymore, but I also I just started taking those workshops from the Pat Schneider Amherst Writers Method of writing, I just started taking workshops from them. And fortunately, I met a woman who used to live near me, and she teaches them. I still take one with her, and I love it because, you know, you get a prompt that you don’t have a clue what it’s going to be, and like the other day, it was a dragonfly, a picture of a dragonfly, and then my newsletter that’s going to come out tomorrow, is what I wrote in response to that dragonfly that has nothing to do with dragonflies, but, you know, the prompt brings something up in my mind, and so I have, I mean, my book, An Empty Nest is full of that’s what it is. It’s called a Summer of Stories, and it’s little, those little personal essays, and a lot of them are fictionalized, but that’s basically what that is, personal essay. I really enjoy writing that way.
And is that the book you give away free on your website?
Yep.
If folks want to grab that book and get on your mailing list so that they can get your weekly newsletters. Where should we send them?
www.sandyday.com. In the menu at the top of the page, it says, free book.
Sandy, you’re obviously a prolific author, but I know you’re also a student of independent publishing and the author business side of things. Has there been any interesting discoveries or techniques you’ve been using over the last year on the book marketing side of things?
In terms of marketing, the newsletter is helping to reach people and to have a way of being in touch with people after they’ve read my books. That really helps.
I’m not sure I know that with Amazon, I am an Amazon ad expert, and have been employed doing that. But Amazon ads are pretty tough right now, and I’m not betting the bank on them. That’s for sure. There’s a lot of saturation right now in with marketing, there are free books available everywhere. I imagine we all have hundreds of free books on our Kindles that we’ve never read, and you know, cutting through that noise is not an easy thing.
It’s just a matter of building a readership, and I often ask chat GPT for feedback on pieces that I’ve written, and the prompt I give it is, what will my ideal reader like about this piece? And I like that feedback because then I know what to really hone in on. And sometimes in a piece, I’ll think, “Do I need that line? Is that line one step too far?” And when chat GPT says, especially the line, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I think, okay, it’s staying in.
I think that for me, that’s the main thing, is that people that read my stuff, they seem to appreciate all the different books that I’ve written, and they’ll say to me, this is my favorite, and this is my favorite. And you know, they’re they’re all over the map. I’m happy just keeping on going the way I’m going.
We always say that in the world of book marketing, the best thing you can do is write a high-quality book. The fact that you knew you could take this book to a higher level, and that you went back and did it, that in itself, is a strategic marketing move right there.
Yeah, that is what I was going say earlier and I forgot, is that when I made the decision to write.
Resurrect the book and revise it. I read a lot about other people who had done the same. You know, Joanna Penn has done the same thing, and it’s she says it’s the beauty of self-publishing. We have the luxury of just going back and saying, “Oh, man, that first book kind of sucks. I want to fix that up a little.”
With that in mind, I did it without hesitation.
The book is out there in the world. Now, if people want to pick up a copy of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand, is it at Amazon or other locations as well?
No, just Amazon, unless they want a signed copy, it can order a signed copy from me, but it’s just on Amazon. That’s a marketing strategy that I’m using right now too, is just to go all in on Amazon and not worry. I think I’ve got it on wider distribution for the paperback, so it could be ordered through Barnes and Noble or indigo here in Canada, but for the most part, it’s Amazon.
The book is Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. It’s a wonderful book from a wonderful author, Sandy. It is always a pleasure to work with you and to see you bring these incredible books out into the world. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Writing Coach podcast.
Thanks, Kevin. It’s been wonderful.
