I’ve written so little about When the Worst Happens, and I so love the book. Today, I correct this issue. Here’s the Darwinian story of how my survival book came to be.

Step 1
I have lunch with Colleen MacMillan of Annick Press. She’s a tangential thinker, possibly even more tangential than me, so our lunch conversations tend to bounce around like boomerangs. But at some point, Colleen mentions that she’s been researching and thinking about polar exploration and a phenomenon called “polar madness.” Basically, when people are stuck for months on end without light, friendship, or vegetables, some of them lose it. But Colleen wonders why only some lose it, while others stay sane.

Step 2
I go home and start sniffing out ice-bound survival stories. They tend to be somewhat similar — ice, cold, hunger — so I expand the topic to include stories of survival from an assortment of extreme environments, including the depths of a mine and the centre of the Amazon. I write a proposal in which the stories are organized by geographical location, with sidebars to explore the psychological aspects of survival.

Step 3
Enter editor Alison Kooistra. Alison is certainly creative, but rather the opposite of tangential. She is the most organized person I have ever worked with. When she reads my proposal, she starts to wonder what a book would look like if organized by psychological survival strategy instead of geography. Then she suggests choosing four main stories and telling them in chunks. Readers will be able to flip through the book to read the stories linearly, or read cover-to-cover and find out bits at a time, along with survival techniques and supporting tales.

Alison doesn’t just suggest this. She sends me a spreadsheet.

That’s right. A spreadsheet. I told you she’s organized. I don’t even know how to create a spreadsheet.

Step 4
I love Alison’s ideas. They remind me of my elementary school Choose Your Own Adventure obsession. Not all my previous ideas work with the new format, so I do some more research, I brainstorm with Alison, and I write a first draft. I attempt to juggle everything into place, and of course am unsuccessful, so Alison re-logics things.

And then we’re done. My daughter chose to read the book straight through, without hopping ahead to different parts of the stories. But I’m excited to see what other readers do. It’s kind of a choose-your-own-survivor book.

Now, let’s hope the project beats its way out of the proverbial Amazon and onto many bookshelves!

Drum roll, please! Here’s my newest non-fiction title, to be released this fall by Annick Press:

When the Worst Happens is about crazy situations, and how some people manage to survive them. It explores the ways our bodies respond to emergencies, the ways our brains function (or fail to function) under duress, and the different ways individuals and groups cope with crises.

Of all the non-fiction books I’ve worked on, this has been my absolute favourite. Maybe because as a generally paranoid person, I had plenty of questions about how best to survive a disaster. When The Worst Happens gave me the perfect excuse to research my deepest fears. (Among other things, I discovered that air travel really is safe. Even when planes crash, almost everyone escapes safely. Working in hundred-year-old mines, on the other hand… not recommended.)

When I created the proposal for this book, I suggested a chapter about Arctic misadventures, a chapter about desert disasters, etc. The information about the psychology of survival was to be included in bits and pieces. But then editor extraordinaire Alison Kooistra stepped in and created a spreadsheet (really) showing how the book could be organized around psychologic themes, with four main stories told in chunks scattered throughout. So, readers could skip pages to follow the stories one at a time, OR read the chapters in order to learn about human reactions. Genius, right? And all I had to do was figure out how to read a spreadsheet.

The book also has fantastic illustrations (in my wholly unbiased opinion) by David Parkins, and my favourite graphic design ever.

I’m a wee bit excited. Feel free to join me in my ongoing happy dance. The book’s due out this fall!