Carley Fortune
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Carley Fortune’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it brought back a lot of feelings and nostalgia. And so I still go up there to visit my parents. And I also, every year, my husband and my sons and I stay at a cottage on a lake nearby. And it's where I start writing all of my books. I saw that. It's where I started to write One Golden Summer. And it's where I wrote Every Summer After. And I just love being at the lake so much.
It's where I feel like... I feel like I take a deep breath as soon as I like I step inside the cottage and I look at the water and it's like, ah, the air smells different.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I love that.
It had this like slow build and then it made the list and was on for a while.
No, I feel pressure. You feel pressure? I wrote every summer after just for myself. I didn't intend to publish it when I started writing it. Yeah.
When I started, like I was about 14,000 words in and I was like, it's starting to feel like a book and I feel like I'm going to finish it. And, um, Then I sent the first few chapters to my best friend as I was still writing it. And she was like, you are going to be an author. And she was right. And she was so encouraging and just like she was certain. Yeah. And she's a huge reader. Oh, good.
She was a beta reader. She was one of the people that I sent the, when it was done, I sent her, her and three friends, the manuscript. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So what were you doing before you started writing? I was a journalist for 16 years, but I wasn't writing. I was editing. So I, um, was assigning the writers and like coming up with the ideas for packages.
And in my last role, I was overseeing refinery 29 Canada. So I launched that brand in Canada, hired the editorial team, oversaw that team. And it was so wonderful. I was so proud of what we're doing. I loved the team, but it was so stressful. And in 2020, I got off a really stressful work call, furious. And I was at this cottage at the lake. And I remember it so clearly because it has a landline.
And I slammed down the landline, which is like the best feeling. And I was like, I'm going to write a book. I've always wanted to write a book. I'm it's 20, like in 2020, I need to do something for myself. I need to, I've, all my creativity has gone to my employers. I'm going to write a book. I'm going to finish it by the end of the year. And that, and that became every summer after. Yeah.
No, so then I found an agent, and I was very lucky. I ended up signing with my dream agent, Taylor Haggerty, and then we sold the book after that. That's so exciting.
Yeah, I had one boy then. I have two boys. Max is eight and Finn is four. And so Max was, we had Max and then I became pregnant when I was writing Every Summer After. So Finn was born right when we were like finishing the edits on Every Summer After. So, so much was going on. So much. And we moved houses at that time. Oh my gosh. And it was like so wild.
Like I got a book deal, moved homes, finished edits on the book and had a baby within six weeks. Wow. And my husband was in quarantine in our house because it was like the pandemic. So I was like super pregnant and like packing up our house.
I love that for you. And it was, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Yeah.
I'm much better than I used to be. I used to be – before Every Summer After came out, I read every single like early review and I remember –
super negative review came in before the book had come out around it was like Christmas Eve and I was at home in Barry's Bay with my family and I was like and it was it was like and it felt like a very professional sounding review too and it was like this is unimaginative unimaginative and this that the other thing and it was so devastating I was like oh people are going to hate this book.
And I've really struggled with it. I used to sometimes go on... My second book, I had so much imposter syndrome writing. And both births have suffered with postpartum OCD. And so my anxiety is super bad. So I was writing it in this bad mental state. And I felt like I couldn't do it. Like the first book had been a fluke and everything was going to blow up.
And, and like, when I'm in that kind of bad place, I like to try to like prove to myself that things are not going to go well, or, or it's like, if, if I can think of all the bad things that could happen, maybe like, it'll be okay. And I would like purposefully look at bad reviews. Really?
Like I like,
So I feel like that's relatable. But it turned out well for you? It did. And I've stopped doing that. I've stopped doing that. I did not do that with One Golden Summer. I don't seek out
reviews they come they come to you like they're all in your and I let you know right now this is publication day for me and there's so there will be so many like happy like reviews and comments and it and it's and it's wonderful but at the end of the day it doesn't um it's not for you they're like these reviews are for the readers and for the community of readers and it doesn't help you as an author either um to have all these opinions in your mind you have to be so
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