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.

Friday Five

1. This is primarily a Friday Five about why I was MIA all week.

2. Vacations tend to have that effect, don't they? You get home, rested but with all the things you would have done during that time waiting, plus the new stuff of the week at hand. So lots of things. Deadlines swirling, massing, menacing. And I had two episodes of The Vampire Diaries to watch. A girl's got to have priorities.

3. And some of those priorities included line edits! Yay. I do love to edit. Now those are all done and Blackwood is off to be copyedited. I happily clink my glass with yours. And fabulous editor Amanda also sent cover art thoughts this week too, and let me tell you, I am excited. The concept is thematically perfect and I do believe it will be COOLMAZING.

4.  Also this week I've been working hard to nail down all the details of the synopsis for the second book of my contract. Synopses are hard, even if you have a handle on most of the book already (and had a massively helpful brainstorming session with lovely geniuses in Mexico). This book has a pretty seriously involved world, which I want to make sure the story lives up to. So...yes, hard. But it is beginning to fall in line, and once I finish figuring out the exact details of the ending, I think I'll have a good road map for the book. And then I will turn it in and see if we're all agreed. And then--fingers crossed--write like the wind if the wind could write.

5. All of which adds up to: I am taking tonight off. Oh, yes, I am. Couch, Bitterblue, television (Castle two-parter! Fringe!), and a glass of wine. Or two. Here I come.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Monday Hangovers

• A few quick links to close tabs.
• I always love Jennifer Crusie's writing chats with her friends--the latest one is about the difficulty of writing sex scenes in first person.
• Lisa Lutz in the Wall Street Journal on (the breaking of) writing rules: "Readers are a curious lot; they want answers. Give them a really good question and they'll keep turning the page."
• Deborah Biancotti on writing 80,000 words in a month...don't try this at home, unless you want to. If so, she has provided helpful tips.
• A great obituary of John Fairfax in the NYT: "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler."
• Editor Amanda posts about the process of reading manuscripts over at the Strange Chemistry blog: "Because here’s the thing: we have to pick the novels that we are prepared to champion to the hilt. We can’t waver in our belief of them. These are novels that we will be closely working with for the foreseeable future – we will have to read them a number of times, to a great depth of detail, and we will have to shout about them to the whole world. We can’t take on a novel that we have any uncertainty about, because we can’t then do the best job for the author and their book. But another publisher might – what you’re uncertain about, another editor will have read and gone into raptures over. It’s all subjective." Good stuff.
  
• A friend just sent me a pointer to Scape, a YA SFF-focused webzine now on its third issue. It's a truly gorgeous site, and I look forward to checking out the stories. We need more YA short fiction markets.
• And last but most! exciting! of! all! What a great Nebula and Norton ballet this year. Congratulations to all the nominees--so excited to see many people (and works by those people!) that I adore on the ballot.

Sunny Days, Home Again

We're home, and a catch-up on posting is in the offing in the next day or two. In the meantime, I put up some photos on flickr that Christopher and I took on our last full (and sunniest) day, part of my resolution to take more photos this year. Here are my new cowboy boots, aka my book sale present to myself.

They are divinely comfortable, and were purchased on a fun adventure into the wilds of the market of San Miguel led by adventurer-in-chief Theo. My thanks to Robin Wasserman (whose fabulous The Book of Blood and Shadow is out in April and just got a starred PW review) and Sarah Rees Brennan (who has not one but TWO fabulous new books due out later this year) for helping select just the right pair. Said boots have already proved their magic in a mad dash through the Dallas airport, in which we made the flight but our bag did not.

The rest of the photo set is here.

Travel Check-In

So we're down in Mexico on a writing vacation (a vacation for writing, not from it). The weather isn't entirely cooperating; it's been warm-ish and cloudy-ish most days. But the company more than makes up for that. Many writing talks being had, about specific projects and more generally, in that way that kicks the story brain into gear. I just finished my revision pass and sent it in to editor Amanda, managed a couple other nervous-making business-y emails, and tomorrow will start thinking in detail about the plot of the book I'm writing next. I'm hoping to get a synopsis written in the next couple of days, so that I can get into the real work of it once we're home.

There is guacamole with most every meal, and later there will be margaritas. The pool is warm, even if the outdoors isn't quite.

Basically: I can't complain. I wouldn't even dream of it.

The Future Will Be Here Before You Know It

So...here's the thing they tell you: Publishing moves slow. It takes FOREVER.

And this is usually true. Certainly there is a large amount of waiting involved for every writer on earth (and probably on any other planets with publishing industries). But since Strange Chemistry is a brand new imprint and launching later this year, things are moving at lightning speed comparable to the norm. From interest to offer to announcement happened pretty fast, but that's not unusual. (I know these things because I hang around with a lot of writers, so indulge first-time me here.) My contract showed up yesterday and is now winging its way across the ocean, and editor Amanda emailed me ISBNs for the US, UK and e-book editions of Blackwood first thing yesterday morning, and even now their digits are making their way into the machinery that feeds Nielsen and Amazon and such. The book already exists on Goodreads. Coverless, of course, but exists.

Today or tomorrow, I'll get my edits. And also today I'm thinking about blurbs. (That is just as nauseous-making as expected, and there's no time to wait! Or waste! September is coming! Ack! Nothing like a time crunch to induce bravery. Still nauseous-making. Send bourbon.) AND I have a few lines from a Bowerbirds song I really would love to use as an epigraph, and so I need to contact the band and their label and see if there's any possible way that permission can happen, and quickly. (Luckily, I also have a non-copyrighted snippet from a Sir Walter Raleigh letter on epigraph standby.)

On Saturday morning, we leave for a week's writing retreat with a bunch of wise and lovely writers, and the timing couldn't be better. A whole week to concentrate on edits and figuring out the next book. In the sunshine. Bliss. Perhaps they will also talk me down when I lapse into hysterics. The universe was smiling when the timing worked out this way.

Small aside: I have a cold, which I re-gave myself by not switching out my toothbrush head after I was sick a week and a half ago, so perhaps am a bit loopy. Am attempting to think cold into submission; maybe not the best strategy since last time I self-germ warfared. Anyway. All this by way of saying, it hit me yesterday:

September will be here before you know it.

Sure, in the meantime there will be edits to do, and other people will be reading the book (some of them reallly soon--hold me), and other Exciting! Things! and, soon enough, probably within the month, I'll be back at work on another book due later this year, even while Exciting! Things! happen. But I'll blink and it'll be September.

The future is tricksy. It sneaks up.

Tuesday Hangovers, aka A Few Little Links

• Laura Miller and Maud Newton are combining forces at The Chimerist. Color me intrigued.
• The stories behind the animal logos for various publishers. (Love. Via Sarah Weinman.)
• Charles Tan interviews Delia Sherman about The Freedom Maze: "Now I come to think about it, probably one of the main reasons I needed to write this book was because I’ve never been comfortable with talking about politics.  I think the arguments of racism are stupid and short-sighted, that the justifications of the prejudiced are irrational, that oppression of any kind rots the souls of the oppressors, and that people are much stronger when they work together than when they work against each other.  But I don’t often say so, not in so many words.  I don’t actually say any of that in The Freedom Maze.  But I try to show it in every way I could think of."
• Sherman Alexie and Neko Case talking in The Believer. So much fabulous.
• An interesting post from Jordyn at Ten Cent Notes about book appeal, aka what makes her pick something up. I always find such discussions fascinating.
• Writing rules from various luminaries--Henry Miller's are far more charming than I expected.
• A look at Myrna Loy's career.