Gwenda

As you can tell, I’m really on top of things. But if you’re in the DC, Richmond or Chapel Hill area, come say hi starting tonight!

Details: 

Wednesday, July 27, 7:00pm

One More Page

Arlington VA

 

Thursday, July 28, 6:30pm

Fountain Books

Richmond VA

 

Friday, July 29, 7:00pm

Flyleaf Books

Chapel Hill NC

Hi! I am in the middle of many projects, but wanted to drop by here to share a few things ICYMI in acronym-fu.

If you’re local, I’ll be at Morris Book Shop at 4 p.m. tomorrow for Girl in the Shadows’ launch. They’ll have copies of my other books, I’m sure, and everything in the store is 20% off! Plus, it’s their 8th anniversary shebang, always a fun time. COME OUT.

Other newsy bits:

We saw Hamilton, which did not disappoint and in fact was mindblowingly amazing, and then I met someone outside who was wearing a Superman ring:

 

So, how about this? And @Team_Barrowman had on a Superman ring! #Hamilton pic.twitter.com/1ZyyUHqHKc

— Gwenda Bond (@Gwenda) July 6, 2016

• A super-fun new interview with Jennie Law at Women Write About Comics;
• I did a Between Two Lockers interview with Forever YA, which is one of my favorite things on one of my favorite sites (who also have said very nice things about the Cirque American books *happy feelings* pointed in Mandy Curtis’s general direction);
• I also did an interview with USA Today’s Happy Ever After on Girl in the Shadows’ release day;
• There was a whole blog tour with excerpts and reviews and interviews;
• And, um, on my birthday the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision feature ran this amazing piece about the Cirque American books and comic and !!!
• Last but not least, Kate Leth, Ming Doyle and I were ALL on the Comixology podcast (listen or read the transcript at that link).

And yes, I owe the world a tinyletter! It’s coming this weekend! I promise!

Let fly the pages of magic! Girl in the Shadows (the companion to the little book that could Girl on a Wire) is out today! It’s not overstating to say that dreaming up the Cirque American was a life-changing event, and I hope you enjoy your visits there. You can read these books together or separately.

Early book sales are extremely important to books, so you earn my undying affection when you pick new releases up ASAP. (In this case, it makes the possibility of a Dita book that much more likely!) Plus, you can grab Girl in the Shadows and issue #1 of the comic book standalone story Girl Over Paris in hard copy for less than $15 and in e-book versions for less than $10. Can you beat that? I don’t think you can. Girl in the Shadows is also available in audiobook, if that’s your pleasure.

If your bookstore doesn’t have it in stock, just have them order it for you. I’d consider it an excellent birthday present if you picked it up and, if you feel so inclined and enjoy it, leave a review at Amazon or Goodreads or wherever-you-please.

Buy links for Girl in the Shadows: 

• Amazon
• B&N
• Indiebound

And for Girl Over Paris:

• Get it at your local comic shop, or
• Buy it from Amazon or Comixology (Amazon will ship the print issue to you, if you don’t have a handy LCS)

We are off on my birthday/book release adventures to New York for Hamilton and to see a few friends and meet with our middle grade series editor and then on to Boston for an event there and Readercon!

Here’s my public schedule. Do come out to Porter Square (or Readercon!), if you’re local! And if you need to flag me down to sign something at Readercon, feel free. I’m always findable via the twitter machine, but it’s even easier to find me in person now that I have teal hair. Just look for the teal hair.

• The DIVINE Molly Gloss, one of my favorite writers, and I will be doing a joint event together at Porter Square Books in Cambridge at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 7. Come see us!

And I have but one thing at Readercon on Friday, July 8! But will be around all weekend.

• 1:00 PM    5    Why Women Become Protagonists . Gwenda Bond, LJ Cohen, Rosemary Kirstein, Hillary Monahan, Navah Wolfe. In a 2015 essay about portrayals of female protagonists in crime fiction, Sara Paretsky writes, “Detectives like V.I. came to life in a time of bravado, when my peers and I… wrote out of a kind of cockiness: we’re doing a job because we want it, we like the work, no one can stop us. Today, the female hero often has been brutally assaulted… or suffered some other form of serious trauma. It’s as if the only acceptable reason for a woman to embrace the investigative life is to recover from damage, or get revenge for it—not because she takes pleasure in the work, and comes to it as a free spirit.” Let’s explore the reasons that female protagonists decide to protag, and discuss the many ways to motivate them other than assault and trauma.

So, today is the very last day to get the Girl on a Wire ebook for just $1.99. The audio version is also a “Fantastic Find” on sale at Audible through today for just $3.95. (You can also add the audio for $1.99 if you own the Kindle version, so.)

Comic Book Resources did an exclusive preview for Girl Over Paris #1 — go check it out! Here’s a little taste:

And remember, these are the ways to snag issue 1:

And Girl in the Shadows is out next week! Ack! And I was in the local paper.

If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be at Porter Square Books with Molly Gloss one week from today on Thursday, July 7, at 7 p.m.

Okay, back to work.

News of the week!

• Hey, Girl on a Wire is a Book Bub today and on sale for a few more days for just $1.99!

Deal details here.

• New interviews! About Girl in the Shadows at Young Adult Books Central (which is also doing a giveaway!) and I was interviewed about Lois Lane and more by the fabulous Stefania Rudd at Doomrocket.
• Double Down is on Geek Mom/Geek Dad’s summer reading list. Hooray!
• The comic came in the mail and I almost died it’s so perfect. Speaking of which:

 

Ahhhhh! So beautiful! #GirlOverParis cc @kateleth @mingdoyle pic.twitter.com/ys8aQ1g6O1

— Gwenda Bond (@Gwenda) June 22, 2016

Your first look at Dita, Remy and Jules! 😍😍😍 #girloverparis pic.twitter.com/uVdFbCrPBV

— Gwenda Bond (@Gwenda) June 22, 2016

Too excited not to do a giveaway. RT to enter for Girl Over Paris #1 and an audiobook of Girl in the Shadows! pic.twitter.com/NSzUlh7LqX

— Gwenda Bond (@Gwenda) June 22, 2016

Still running, go enter!

Hey-o, I’ll be sending out this week’s tinyletter later today (from my sick bed; drapes hand across brow in put-upon fashion) (no big deal just a poorly-timed virus, yuck), but wanted to drop some quick things here.

I’ll be doing my first Lexington event since Double Down came out at Barnes & Noble in Hamburg this Sunday at 2 p.m. as part of the national B-Fest. Come out and say hi and get books signed! Here’s the details.

You guys already know that Girl on a Wire is on sale ALL MONTH on Kindle for $1.99 (the paperback is also cheap right now at Amazon, btw). Well, if ebooks are your jam, you can also enter a Goodreads giveaway to win one of 100 (!) ebook copies of Girl in the Shadows that’ll be in your hot little Kindle-hands on release day, I do believe. Or you can just preorder it. *bats eyelashes*

Speaking of things that are out next month for which I DO feel ready…the first issue of Girl Over Paris drops the day after Girl in the Shadows comes out. I’ll have a post next week about the various ways to order: in short, ask your local comic shop to order it for you, get it from Amazon (who, yes, will even ship you the print issue), or on Comixology. A collection of all four issues will be out this fall, but you don’t want to wait. Because BEHOLD the majesty of all four covers by the amazingly genius Ming Doyle…

Issue one:

 

Issue 2:

 

Issue three:

 

And issue four:

 

It’s just been a joy to work with such a great team and our fabulous editor at Jet City on this. I can’t wait for you guys to read it. And that’s it, I think!

Hey, maybe you’ve been thinking to yourself I really should read that GIRL ON A WIRE book before GIRL IN THE SHADOWS and GIRL OVER PARIS next month. Good news! It’s a Kindle Monthly Deal, so you can scoop it up for $1.99 all month. Snag it here.

 

News this week from the Deadline Bunker? (You can get this kind of stuff and way more gabby stuff weekly by signing up for my tinyletter.)

Look what exists!

Girl in the Shadows author copies came! Yay! My magician girl has a whole book of her own. I hope you guys like it!

And how about I give you a sneak peek of the variant cover for issue one of Girl Over Paris by Brittney Williams (eep! I feel so fancy to have a variant cover!) and the cover for the second issue of Girl Over Paris by Ming Doyle? I am just continually even more excited for everyone to read this.

Ahhh, the gorgeousness. You can find order links to all the Cirque American stuff here.

I also had some new interviews about Double Down and various things this week:

• at Fantasy Lit,
• Germ Magazine,
• and with Kendall Ashley at Distracted Blogger.

Hope everyone had a lovely long weekend!

I think all writers–all readers, and most every writer I know is a reader first–has those handful of authors that they have a specific fascination with. Those writers that we encountered at a point where their work became part of us, their voices a promise of what was possible with words. Katherine Dunn was a writer like that for me. I first read her in high school. I can’t remember why I picked up Geek Love. Was it because of my latent love of the circus, already there because of the one-ring circus that spent a week or two outside my elementary school and how immediately Philippe Petit charmed me during an earlyish Letterman appearance? Was I just browsing at the bookstore, sold by the cover? Did Sassy Magazine recommend it? That’s the way I discovered a lot of things.

I tend to think it was probably a serendipitous bookstore pick, though, because I tend to have firmer memories of books being recommended by friends or certain media or placed in my hands from that period. And I would have been susceptible not just to the cover, but to the National Book Award nominated tag. However it made its way into my hands, it was this edition.

To say I loved (LOVE) this book is an understatement of the highest order. Katherine Dunn became an immediate obsession of mine. I read her first two books–Truck and Attic–and was comforted even as a young writer by how they were interesting, but not the works of genius that Geek Love had ascended to. And then, at my first day job, where I sat at a desk at least some of the time (in the Governor’s Office, natch) I took up searching for her name and discovered that a great deal of her regular writing–columns on boxing and movies–were ending up online. I followed her byline like a religion for years afterward. I was one of the gleeful when she popped up in the news for having beaten off an attacker in a Whole Foods parking lot several years back, because of course she’d taken up boxing as an adult. I ended up talking with a former sales rep for Knopf at a party in Decatur and the book came up and I learned the first edition had an added leg on the famous borzoi logo (confirmed last night, so it’s wonderful and true). I felt the same excitement everyone did when the Paris Review editor coaxed that excerpt of The Cut Man from her; we might finally get a new Katherine Dunn novel. I didn’t care what it was about.

We may still yet get it–but no matter what, it’s a truly sad thing that Katherine Dunn is no longer here with us. The world was a better, stranger place with her in it. I say that purely as a fan; I know people who knew her, and I offer all of her friends and family my greatest sympathies. A former Clarion student of hers, Jessica Reisman, described her personality to me like this on twitter last night: “Charming and profane in equal measure, dry, and so so smart.” Which is exactly how I’d always imagined her.

One perfect, rich, odd book that spoke to the freak in so many of us is a big legacy to leave behind. My first thought last night (after sorrow) was that it’s been far too long since I’ve read Geek Love and that we really should have some sort of group reading In Memoriam. So let’s get our books in the next couple of weeks and read or reread it together during June, okay? I can host posts here and we can use twitter OR I’m happy to set up a Goodreads group; if anyone has strong feelings either way, drop them in the comments.

RIP.

So… I missed posting here for release day, traveling and then recovering from yet another round of my late trapped-in-airport curse. But the sequel to Fallout is now available wherever fine books are sold; if you visit a store that doesn’t have it, just ask them to order it for you!

The details:

Lois Lane has settled in to her new school. She has friends, for maybe the first time in her life. She has a job that challenges her. And her friendship is growing with SmallvilleGuy, her online maybe-more-than-a-friend. But when her friend Maddy’s twin collapses in a part of town she never should’ve been in, Lois finds herself embroiled in a dangerous mystery that brings her closer to the dirty underbelly of Metropolis.

Buy links here. Please drop a review somewhere once you’ve read it, if you’re so inclined.

Kirkus gave Double Down a star and said: “That’s a lot of balls to juggle, but Bond never drops a single one. She fills this adventure with the Golden Age sci-fi weirdness that permeated the comic books of the 1930s and ’40s. The three mysteries dovetail together nicely in the end, with a few bread crumbs leading toward the next installment. Best of all, the novel ends as Lois crosses a line she will never be able to turn back from, a line that will mean big changes moving forward. In a sea of series that keep the characters status quo and rehash the same mysteries with different names and doodads, this is a godsend.”

And here’s Tim Hanley: “For me, Gwenda Bond writes the best Lois Lane out there right now. The best Lois of the 21st century, really, at least. When I wrote Investigating Lois Lane, I read/saw/listened to pretty much everything Lois has been in, and Bond’s Lois is one of my very favourites. She encompasses everything I love about past incarnations of the character while also being fresh, modern, and unique in her own way. Here’s a spoiler for my own book: Fallout and Double Down are the last things I talk about in Investigating Lois Lane, and there’s a reason for that. In an era where Lois has been criminally underused, Bond has crafted a Lois that shows why she’s a relevant, fantastic character who deserves the spotlight.”

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported this series; I adore you all. Last week’s tinyletter talks about where book three stands (aka in the hands of the fate), so keep spreading the word.

Happy #BookBirthday @Gwenda @SwitchPressPub – DOUBLE DOWN, the sequel to FALLOUT, is finally here! #LoisLane #yalit pic.twitter.com/lEBgRbIRkm

— Capstone (@CapstonePub) May 2, 2016

And now some YALLWEST pics (it was fabulous)…

Blue ladies, me, Shannon Hale and Holly Black

Me and Holly again

Me and Alaya Dawn Johnson in the green room

Tiger Beat doing a gorgeous Prince tribute number

I finally got to hang out with Kate Leth! Team Girl Over Paris!

Speaking of which… some hijinks ensued. Kate, Marguerite Bennett photobomb by Jeremy Lambert.

Me, Marguerite, and Kate

Last but not least, I took my new instant camera and yesterday made a little board with all the (not)Polaroids I took with it. Good times!