by Suzanne Craig-Whytock

Book Cover: What Any Normal Person Would Do
Editions:Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1739042509
Kindle
ISBN: 978-1739042509

Longlisted for the 2024 Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. From the author of the popular online blog Mydangblog comes this compilation of strange stories, wacky adventures, and weird and wonderful thoughts. Topics range from the sublime (bizarre online ads and forklift fantasies) to the ridiculous (worst-case scenarios and more clocks than you can count) to the even more ridiculous (haunted bathrooms and questionable quizzes). Suzanne Craig-Whytock's absurdist sense of humour was borne out of a childhood watching Monty Python combined with a natural tendency towards anxiety and OCD, and it's on full display within these pages. She may not be good at math (among a lot of other things) but she's certainly mastered the art of laughing at herself, and now you can laugh right along with her.

Published:
Publisher: DarkWinter Press
Genres:
Excerpt:

The cover of this book is a visual representation of why my life is so weird, which is to say that I think I was cursed as a very small child by Santa Claus. And what led to this bizarre, albeit obvious, conclusion? A few years ago, my parents came over for my mother’s early birthday dinner. At the end of the evening, right before they left, my mother pulled a card out of her purse and said, “Ooh, I found this the other day, and I thought you might want it!” On the front of the card, it said, “Christmas Fairyland” and on the inside was a picture of me at the age of 2, sitting on the lap of a Santa Claus. “Oh, that’s cute,” I said. “Thanks,” and I put it aside.

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But then the next day, I opened the card and took a closer look. And that’s when I realized that it wasn’t really Santa. I mean, I KNOW it’s not the real Santa Claus, obviously—what I mean is that I think the lap I was precariously perched on belonged to some kind of demonic creature a la Stephen King. (Note: I couldn’t put the accent on the ‘a’ in ‘a la’ because my keyboard is no longer bilingual. And that’s a whole other story. You can complain to my editor, but she’ll just say she doesn’t know how to make her keyboard bilingual. Because it’s me. I’m the editor. Anyway…).

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About the Author

Award-winning writer Suzanne Craig-Whytock found her love of literature and writing at an early age. Her passion for the written word continued into adulthood, leading her to earn an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature. She has worked in education most of her life, and was a high school English teacher in Ontario, Canada for over 20 years. She has authored three novels, as well as a short story collection, and has had numerous pieces of short fiction and poetry appear in literary journals. She regularly publishes humorous essays focused on life’s absurdities, current events, and popular culture on her own website.