Real people. Real stories. Real Angels.
People ask me all the time: why did you write Amy and the Angels?
And the honest answer is... I'm not entirely sure I did.
Not entirely.
This episode is a little different from the ones before it. There is no guest today. It is just me, sitting here with you, sharing something I have wanted to share for a long time: the full story of how this book came to exist. Where it started. How many times it almost didn't survive. And the series of moments, nudges, signs, and middle-of-the-night conversations that turned a page of complaints into an award-winning novel.
I think of it as the origin story. And every good story has one.
So get comfortable. Pour yourself something. Here we go.
The Year Everything Fell Apart
The story starts when I was 33 years old.
In numerology, 33 is a powerful number. A master number. I remember thinking: this is going to be the best year of my life.
It was the worst.
I was a single mom. My two boys were living with their dad. I was staying in the basement suite of some dear friends. It was a beautiful suite, and I am grateful for it, but it was not where I had imagined I would be at 33. I had lost my job. I couldn't afford to have my boys with me. And something happened that I had never experienced before and genuinely did not know how to handle.
My Angels went quiet.
I had been speaking with my Angels for years at that point. I would ask, I would get an answer. That was just how it worked. But suddenly... nothing. I would reach out and hear silence. And I fell into what I can only describe as a deep depression. It got dark. Very dark. And I know some of you reading this right now know exactly what I mean by that, because you have been there too. Or maybe you are there now. And if you are, I just want you to know: there is something on the other side of coming through it whole. I promise you that.
But in the middle of it, all I could hear was a voice. It kept coming back, quiet and persistent: go write. Go write. Go write.
I was already journaling. I had journaled for most of my life. So I thought: I am writing. You don't need to tell me. I am writing.
And eventually I thought: fine. I will sit at my laptop and I will type. Not journal. Type. And I will get all of this misery down properly.
I opened my laptop. I put my fingers on the keys.
And this is what came out:
Amanda Lynn Singer sat quietly at the kitchen table eating her breakfast cereal, her head buried in daydreams about the possible secret adventure she was going on today after school.
I stopped.
I looked at the screen.
What in the world was that?
I didn't know anyone named Amanda Lynn Singer. I had no idea where that sentence came from. It was not what I had sat down to write. I had planned to complain about my life, and instead I had written the opening line of a novel.
So I just... kept going.
Nanny's Visit
I wrote through to about chapter five. And then a phone call came: a job offer. And I told myself something that I now know wasn't true: authors don't make a living. I need a real job.
I took the job. It moved me to Calgary for a while, and then another call came, and this one would take me to Arizona.
I want to tell you about the dream I had before that call.
I was in the dream crying. I was sitting on a white picket fence, looking out over a beautiful piece of property: big house, horses, everything. And I was crying because I felt like such a failure.
And then my nanny was beside me.
My nanny was from Newfoundland. She had the warmest, softest presence of anyone I have ever known. Even as an adult I would press my face into her and feel completely at home. In the dream she called me Lamb (she always called me Lamb) and she sat me in her lap, and she tapped my head gently and said: lamb, you'll be okay. Don't cry.
And then she said: You're going to get a phone call. It's going to take you far away. But when you get that call, you have to take the job. This is the path you're on.
I woke up from that dream crying.
A couple of days later, out of nowhere, someone who had heard of my work called and offered me a job in Arizona.
And Nanny's face came right into my mind.
Goosies from head to toe. Every single time I tell this story. And I want you to know: goosies mean Angels. You heard it here first.
I negotiated a good deal. I flew to Arizona. I took the job.
And I took my laptop with me.
The Print That Saved Everything
The book, still called Ready Boots Start Walking at that point, came with me to Arizona on my laptop. I wasn't actively writing it. But it was there.
And then the voice started again. Quiet at first, then louder and louder every day: print out your book. Print out your book.
I finally gave in. I went into the office, had our secretary Kelly help me hook the laptop up to the printer, and printed out the whole manuscript. Took my laptop home with me.
The next day I came back to the office from lunch.
Kelly was frantic.
The house I was staying in had caught fire. Everything in my room was destroyed.
Including my laptop.
The only copy of those chapters, the only record that any of it had ever existed, was the stack of printed pages sitting in the office.
I want you to really sit with that for a moment. If I had not listened to that voice, if I had dismissed it one more time, the book would have been gone. Completely. As though it had never been written.
So I asked Kelly if she would type it back up for me. She said (and I love this detail): why don't I just put it on a floppy?
I had absolutely no idea what a floppy was. But she put it on one, and I carried that little disk with me like it was made of gold. Over the years it went from floppy to thumb drive to the cloud. And the book sat there, waiting.
For twenty-eight years.
28 Years in a Drawer
I built World Tree Technologies. I ran it for over twenty years. And eventually I hired a CEO, the wonderful Doug Willmore, to help take the company to the next level.
What I didn't fully anticipate was that Doug would do his job so well that about nine months later he looked at me and said: you know you can go now, right? I've got this.
And I thought: go where? What would I do?
It was my son Curtis who said it: Mom, why don't you finish your book? You always said you were going to.
I was nervous about going back. Twenty-eight years is a long time. What if it didn't feel like mine anymore? What if I had to start over? I had been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic and she writes that if you put a story away and abandon it, it will find someone else to tell it through. I was terrified that had already happened.
Curtis put the manuscript back in the cloud for me. I opened it. I read those first five chapters.
Nothing had changed. It was all still there, waiting for me, just as I had left it.
I decided I would go to Paris to write the rest of it.
And then COVID happened.
So instead of Paris, I sat at my window overlooking the ocean with my little dog Cece, and I wrote. Monday to Thursday, every week, I typed. And every Friday I went back and read what I had written.
Here is the strange part: I did not recognize it.
Every single Friday, I read pages I had no memory of writing. It was like reading a book for the first time. I would sit there genuinely shocked at where Amy's story was going, what was happening, how it unfolded. I have heard people talk about being in the zone, about getting a download. I don't know exactly what to call it. But I know it didn't feel like me writing.
It felt like something coming through me.
They Dictated It to Me
I wrote steadily all the way to about chapter fifteen. And then... nothing.
Two full weeks of sitting at the computer and getting absolutely nowhere. Writer's block in the most complete sense. I started to wonder if maybe it was only ever meant to be a short story, if I had simply run out of road.
The reason, I think, is that up until Amy turns fifteen, a lot of what she experiences mirrors my own life. That's where I had been drawing from. And at fifteen, I didn't know where to take her next.
And then one night, at about three in the morning, I woke up.
To talking.
Tilly and George, the two Angels in Amy and the Angels, were having a full conversation. Back and forth, back and forth. I lay there in the dark listening for nearly half an hour. And finally I said out loud: you guys, stop. Just hang on. I have to write this down.
I got up at 3:30 in the morning. I sat at the computer. And I typed everything they had given me.
It was the most extraordinary experience I have ever had in my life as a writer. To have your characters dictate to you. To feel like the story is not yours to tell but is simply passing through you on its way out into the world.
And while all of that was happening... something else started.
Feathers Everywhere
You will notice, if you read Amy and the Angels, that there are little feathers scattered through the chapters. They are part of the story. And while I was writing it, they started appearing in my life too.
Inside the house. Outside on the street. Everywhere I walked.
At one point I would come to a corner and look both ways and choose my direction based on where I could see a feather further along the path. I would just... follow them. And it lifted something in me, especially during COVID, especially during the months of sitting alone at that window. It felt like company. Like confirmation.
And then came the night I read to my grandsons.
Kaiden and Carter were staying for the weekend. I tucked them in and asked if they wanted Nanny to read them a story. I got out my pages of Ready Boots Start Walking and started reading.
Kaiden listened for a while and then stopped me.
Nanny, he said. Let me get this straight. You wrote this story?
Yes.
All of these words?
All of them.
Nanny, he said. This is a New York Times bestseller.
I didn't even know he knew what that meant. I said: your mouth to my Angels' ears.
And then Carter, not about to be outdone by his older brother, said: Nanny, could I make a suggestion?
I said of course.
He said: I don't think Ready Boots suits the title.
He was six years old.
I said: you don't think so?
No, he said. I'm pretty clear. This needs to be called Amy and the Angels.
Goosies. Head to toe. Instant.
That was the day the book got its name.
The Button and the Feather
Eventually we got there. The whole manuscript, finished. Edited with the extraordinary Pamela Lynch at Source Code Publishing. The cover designed by Curtis: misty and perfect, with the red rubber boots and a little Angel in place of a yield sign in the background. Exactly what I had asked my Angels to help him create.
We sent it to Amazon. I did all my marketing. I told everyone: this is the day. This is the date you can buy the book.
A girlfriend, Cindy, was visiting. She is not someone who grew up believing in Angels. But she had noticed the feathers appearing everywhere around my house and my studio. She found it a little woo. A little wiggy, she called it. But she was warming up.
We were about to leave for a trip to California. But first, we were going to hit publish.
I pressed the button.
The screen came up.
Your book will be ready for purchase in the next ten days.
I stared at it.
Ten days? I thought hitting publish meant the book was live. Right then. I had told everyone it was today. I had to go back online and apologize and explain the delay. I was devastated. Cindy took one look at me and quietly said she was going to give me a few minutes.
And I did what I always do when things don't happen the way I planned.
I reminded myself: things don't happen to us. They happen for us.
And I asked my Angels for a sign.
I closed my eyes and got very still. I said: okay. What's the lesson in this? Help me be at peace with the ten days. Show me this is going to be okay.
And the voice said: open your eyes.
I opened my eyes. I was looking out the window at the ocean.
And a little white feather came slowly down... down... down... past the window.
A calm came over me so completely that I almost laughed.
Okay, I said. Okay.
Cindy came back up the stairs a little while later. She said she felt better and asked how I was doing. And then she stopped.
She said: there's a feather on the stairs. Did you put that there just to freak me out?
I told her I had not moved from that chair.
She said: okay. I think I might need one more sign and then I'll believe.
We packed up the car and drove downtown to catch the Black Ball Ferry, the first leg of our trip to California. I went inside to get us checked in. Cindy waited in the car, her hand out the window.
While I was in the queue, my phone buzzed. A photo from Cindy.
A feather had just landed in her hand.
I think now I'm a believer, her message said.
I am not making any of this up. These are real things that happened. Real feathers, real moments, real signs. The book took ten days to go live instead of one. And in those ten days I drove the entire coast of California, watching the reviews come in one by one, feeling like everything was exactly as it was meant to be.
Because it was.
Your Turn
Amy and the Angels began in a basement suite during the worst year of my life. It survived a house fire. It waited twenty-eight years in a drawer. Its title was given to it by a six-year-old. And in the moment it almost broke me (the ten-day delay), a feather floated down past my window and told me everything was going to be okay.
If you have not read the book yet, I hope this story makes you want to. And if you are not a big reader, I have wonderful news: the audiobook is out now, narrated by me. You can listen in the car, on a walk, wherever you go.
And please, if you have already read it, go leave a review. As an author, those reviews mean everything. They help other people find the book who might really need it.
For those of you with your own stories sitting in a drawer... let this be your nudge. Elizabeth Gilbert writes that if you abandon a story, it will find someone else to tell it. Don't let that happen. Your story belongs to you.
Your Angels are waiting to help you tell it.
Real people. Real stories. Real Angels.
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