Gwenda Bond

Welcome...

...to my cyber-home. My first novel, Blackwood, will be released in September by Strange Chemistry, the brand new YA imprint of Angry Robot Books. Navigating around the site, you can find out more about me or about Blackwood, see my recent reading recommendations, view my travel and events schedule, or track down the other spots I frequent online (psst: twitter and tumblr).

New blog entries appear below this post.

Excuse-Making!

Yes, this is one of those posts where I make the Whoops, I Disappeared admission and then admit that I'm probably going to be mostly MIA this week too. And that I'm still behind on email. Deep into this first draft, and juggling all the other things as well.

Also, I really need to get extra words written, because deadline swiftly approacheth and we decided to tack a couple of days of New York and BEA onto next weekend's quick research trip to D.C. for the aforementioned draft-in-progress, because, hey, why not? My editor is coming over from England, so it just makes sense, given that we're driving anyway. Epic road trip ahoy.

Anyway, the plan is to be in NYC the first part of the week, coming back home to rescue the dogs from Dog Jail on Thursday. So if you're BEA-bound, hope to bump into you there.

And I'll try to manage some actual posts here next week. In the meantime, have a lovely holiday weekend.

Tuesday Hangovers

• A nice piece in the Courier-Press about Ursula Nordstrom and Maurice Sendak's editorial relationship.
• A book a year is slacking? (*cries quietly*)
• A great post by Coe Booth over at the VCFA faculty blog, about the "fragile stage" when a project is new. (Via Cynthia Leitich Smith on twitter.)
• New study suggests readers engage in "experience-taking": "Kaufman and his co-author Lisa Libby of Ohio State University suspected that when people read a fictional story they vicariously experience their favorite character’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs in a process that’s been dubbed “experience-taking.” Now they're researching how long and profound that effect may be.
• Could I love Tim Gunn anymore? No. But this post from Janet Reid just confirmed that again.
• Robin LaFevers on the process of going deeper as a writer.
• Gavin sends out an alert that the very funny UK TV show, The Book Group (which we actually only saw originally because he and Kelly showed it to us, bless them) is now on hulu. Go watch.
• A great feature on Lexington's plethora of great used bookstores. 
• Baby rhino.

(*crawls slowly back into writer cave* Behind on email, but hoping to catch up soon!)

You Gotta Have Faith

I was honored to be polled by io9 on the following:

Everbody loves a good dark, horrible fantasy. A misanthopic adventure, in which everybody is morally compromised, and we all live and die in the dirt. But every now and then, it's nice to read a fantasy novel in which people are, you know... good.

So we decided to contact some of our favorite fantasy writers and editors, to get some recommendations for fantasy novels that are not just optimistic — but optimistic about human nature. This is just the first installment — we might have some more recommendations for you next week.

Go forth and read the first set of picks. (Spoiler: Mine was Bitterblue, and I say why over there.)

Friday Hangovers

Let's close some tabs, shall we?

• Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret: "Don't break the chain." (This seems psychologically akin to keeping a word count diary to me--something I actually do find useful, particularly when I'm struggling with a project. Much less easy to goof off and not work for no good reason--other than that it's not going well, or is at a harder stage than usual, which are not good reasons--when I have to write down on that day "goofed off and didn't work for no good reason.")
• At NPR, the fascination with white horses: "But as rare as white horses are — fewer than 8 percent — it is amazing how they have fascinated virtually every culture. White horses are chosen to stand for good and for bad. One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rides a pale horse, but the unicorn — which is invariably depicted as white — stands for purity. Only virgins can capture unicorns. But contrariwise, in some cultures white horses represent fertility."
• At the Horn Book an interesting (and typically contrarian) look at trends in YA, looking at numbers of books published in various categories and etc. pre- and post-Harry Potter.
• One of my favorite contrarians, Laurel Snyder, on her love of picture books and their (at least sometime) rejection of classic story structure.
• How about that Vampire Diaries finale? A spoiler-riddled interview with Exec Producer Julie Plec at EW.
• Publishers Weekly: The Deals You Don't See at The Intern.
• "Happiness without a good work ethic is pretty impossible." Hugh MacLeod interviewed at the Happiness Project.
• Stephanie Perkins pulls some fabulous advice out of John Waters' Rookie interview.
• I absolutely love this gallery of supermoon photos. Inspirational planetscapes. Here's one at the Temple of Poseidon in Athens (taken by AP photographer Dimitri Messinis):

Happy weekend, everybody.

R.I.P.

The great, cranky genius Maurice Sendak has died at age 83.

Excerpt from a letter by Sendak's editor Ursula Nordstrom to a writer at the New Yorker on Where the Wild Things Are in 1964:

You asked me how "revolutionary" Where the Wild Things Are is. There have been a good many fine picture books in the past. (Some by Margaret Wise Brown, and illustrated by one of two or three or four talented artists.) But I think Wild Things is the first complete work of art in the picture book field, conceived, written, illustrated, executed in entirety by one person of authentic genius. Most books are written from the outside in. But Wild Things comes from the inside out, if you know what I mean. And I think Maurice's book is the first picture book to recognize the fact that children have powerful emotions, anger and love and hate and only after all that passion, the wanting to be "where someone loved him best of all."

And another from her letter responding to a librarian angry about The Night Kitchen's nudity in 1972:

I am indeed distressed to hear that in the year 1972 you burned a copy of a book. We are truly distressed that you think it is not a book for elementary school children. I assume it is the little boy's nudity which bothers you. But truly, it does not disturb children! Mr. Sendak is a creative artist, a true genius, and he is able to speak to children directly. For children—at least up to the age of 12 or 13—are usually tremendously creative themselves. Should not those of us who stand between the creative artist and the child be very careful not to sift our reactions to such books through our own adult prejudices and neuroses? To me as editor and publisher of books for children, that is one of my greatest and most difficult duties. Believe me, we do not take our responsibilities lightly! I think young children will always react with delight to such a book as In the Night Kitchen, and that they will react creatively and wholesomely. It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak's work.

And, finally, some words from Sendak himself in a 2011 NPR interview:

"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

May we all be so lucky.

Organization Fu

Sometimes I need a weekend that's about putting things back into their boxes, about cleaning and prepping and, yes, organization. I think organization may be my superpower these days, or at least the only difference between feeling like things are under control and manageable or are off the rails and spinning into chaos. (Of course, my brand of organization likes to leave a little room for chaos. Things tend to get stale fast without it.)

This is a summer of writing, both for me and Christopher. I don't know about you, but whenever I'm entering a big push on a project or starting a new phase on one, I go on a cleaning jag. This weekend involved major league office tidying, as well as starting new scrivener files so I wouldn't have visual "clutter" in the ones I'm working in, and some major shelving of TBR stacks. Christopher kindly spent all day yesterday assembling two new bookshelves (the leftmost one below, and another just like it) and we managed to get almost everything off the piano in the front room, the office shelf that's supposed to be for research only, and the guest room floor. Oh, the guest room floor piles, aka my hostess shame.

But now the guest room is looking good. No more piles, see? Come, friends.

And despite all this busywork, I managed to get a good chunk of writing done on the projects I'm working on, one drafting and the other revising. I am hoping this pattern can hold for the next month or two. And I ran all the errands ever. Today started my getting back to early morning wake-up writing, at 6 a.m., which blessedly isn't pitch black at this time of year. Oh, sun, never leave.

Here's hoping you had a nice weekend, too.*

*We did not, however, manage to see The Avengers. And I still haven't seen The Hunger Games movie. Woe. WOE. Maybe next weekend.