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So after Creators 4 Comics finished, my beloved ride-or-dies Kami Garcia and Sam Humphries and I decided we should come up with a way to keep scheming and working together. We finally got to announce it last week! Get ready for THE YOUNGBLOODS, an Audible original series coming next year!

Also! You can enter to snag a print ARC of THE DATE FROM HELL over at Goodreads? Go do the thing!

Hello! I recently gabbed a little with Publishers Weekly for an interview previewing Not Your Average Hot Guy (they also recently reviewed it, pronouncing it “fun, light, and funny” yay!). The interview is out now online and in this week’s print issue (which I’d love to see a snap of, if anyone gets it). Preordering is caring!

ANNNND that’s not all, advance reader copies of The Date from Hell arrived. Have you signed up for the newsletter? As soon as finished copies of Not Your Average Hot Guy arrive, I’ll be giving away a set or three exclusively to newsletter subscribers. The sign-up is findable beneath this post.

Now back to writing rom-com #3, Mr. & Mrs. Witch!

Hello, friends!

I hope the summer has been good to you, and that the stresses we’re all seeing in the news and real life every day have still left some time for R&R. I’ve mostly been working (gasp! shock! amaze!), because I have a book due in October and, like most books, it’s being a tricksy beast. But a fun one (most days). The Lexington Writer’s Room is doing fabulously (we’re at 39 fully vaxxed members, I believe!), and we just got our very first grant from the Kentucky Humanities Council.

And, hahaha, obviously my upcoming book release nerves for NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY have kicked in. We’re less than two months out! October 5!

You may have heard me say that my superhero identity is Anxiety Lass. It is TRUE. Last year (thank god) I didn’t have a new book out. My last book release was the Stranger Things book all the way back in that time of yore, 2019, and early 2019 at that. Add to, I’m moving to a new genre — though if you enjoyed my YA books, yes, this is still for you, it’s definitely cross-over-y — and yes, I’m big nervous.

It seems pretty clear that the Delta Variant (get vaccinated if you can!) is going to make the possibility of doing in-person events scarce. I’m working on some bookplates and things like that, so please preorder, keep your receipt, and more details to come. I’m hoping to do some virtual events, and actually have one coming up this month as part of Bookstore Romance Day (which has an AMAZING schedule) — it’s free, but requires registration. 

4:00 pm, August 21 – Ghouls, Golems, & Giggles with authors Gwenda Bond (Not Your Average Hot Guy), Gail Carriger (Reticence), Angela Quarles (Some Like it Plaid), and Sarah Kuhn (Hollywood Heroine) Moderated by Annie Carl of The Neverending Bookshop. Registration required here.  

 I’ll be attending as much of this day as I can, because it just has an incredible line-up and I know for a fact having been on panels with Sarah and seen panels with Gail that we will have a blast. So y’all stay at home but come!

I also had my website overhauled. Please go check it out, particularly the pet page and the book recommendation of other people’s books page, which I’m particularly excited about. If you’re an author who needs a site, I can’t recommend Clockpunk Studios highly enough. You’ll see this newsletter posted there on the blog, but also Other Posts. That’s right! I’m updating my blog again. Though you’ll continue to get the most crucial stuff at the newsletter, so sign up if you haven’t!  

I also went on a teeny tiny two night getaway with some of my absolute favorite people, who I haven’t seen since before the late unpleasantness began. What a recharge this was. Here are some pretty photos of the mountain, which, before you get too jealous…let me start with the photo just after I backed the car into a ditch after a five-hour drive scant miles from our destination cabin. 

Luckily, this view is just tiny letter’s photo insert being a weirdo, or this would not have had a happy ending. The car was fine, but I couldn’t get it out on its own steam. I pulled out my Triple AAA card and tried to figure out how to communicate where in the wide world I was, but! People are good sometimes! This nice guy with a big truck who’d been mowing nearby stopped and pulled me out with a chain. At one point, we had this exchange:

“Looks like you dropped a card in the ditch there.” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s, uh, haha, my Triple AAA card.”

And this is why I say I escaped from a screwball comedy.

But! We all made it to the lovely place on the mountain. Here are some photos to prove it — I took the Nikon with me, which I’ve been neglecting of late, and got some truly nice shots. 

(the gang: me, Wendi and Alan Gratz, Megan Shepherd, Carrie Ryan, and Megan Miranda <3s for days)

I’m super proud of that hummingbird shot, which I drove everyone absolutely nuts constantly attempting. So many shots of the side of Carrie’s head on my digital roll. 

And that’s a wrap, except the Cirque American novels are on sale this month for Kindle and St. Martin’s is running a great Summer Sweepstakes giveaway for several of their fall romances, including mine! And instead of just the pretty cover, I’m leaving you with a teaser quote from Luke’s POV in Not Your Average Hot Guy — preorder links here or hit up your favorite indie bookstore. 

Until next time, 

Gwenda

The lovely people at St. Martin’s are running a sweepstakes that can get you a super-cute bag AND ARCs for their fall romances, including NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY! It runs until 8/15, so you can post once or many times up until then!

Go here for all the details and to enter.

The two novels in the Cirque American series are on e-sale for Kindle all month!

If you haven’t read them…

Girl on a Wire is the high wire walker book of my dreams and one of my favorites of my own stuff (*feels other books getting mad at me*). It has multigenerational circus families, a billionaire who wants to reinvent the greatest show on Earth, curses, literally high stakes, and Jules and Remy falling in love despite their families’ best efforts.

Girl in the Shadows is the stage magic/escape artist book of my dreams. It has a daredevil magician named Moira who grew up in Vegas and runs off to join the Cirque, a boy named Dez with a lot of secrets and an excellent hand at knife-throwing, a missing mother, and a clan of con artists with a very bad guy at the top. Plus, kissing.

Happy reading!

I know, I know, I said blog every week, newsletter every month — but this felt like more of a letter topic than a blog topic, so I’m cheating and using it as both. I want to talk a little about mindfulness. Don’t worry. Remember I co-host a podcast about cults, so set aside any innate need to cringe at a word that is, by definition (truly), so sincere.

There’s been a piece circulating about burnout, tying it specifically to millennials, and yet every freelancer of any generation I know has nodded along to it saying it resonates with them too. In a time when we’re reminded constantly about the importance of balance and given endless hacks on how to achieve it and yet so few of us feel it on any kind of regular basis, of course we’re stressed out. So stressed out that when we’re in those rare moments when we might have achieved it (worked, been to the gym, done stuff with friends/family!), we probably start immediately worrying about when it will end and why we can’t make it last. I’ve been using the “a writer on the high wire of life” description for myself for more than a decade now, and only just realized that it’s a true and useful way of describing myself — I appreciate more the process of balancing while moving forward, that’s when I feel most content. Not when I’m trying to achieve some mysterious state known as “balance.” The process is just life, modern life especially, balancing this and that and the other and realizing how lucky I am to mostly get to choose what I’m walking the wire to get to at any given moment.

Anyway, the age-old segue, I managed to get Christopher to come with me to a coven meeting. I kid, it was a workshop on Living Mindfully being held by my friend Mandy at Sora Aerial Arts as part of a “kick the new year off right” series. He likes to say he placed first among men (he was the only guy there). I high-fived him.

I can suffer from a lack of mindfulness, sure, but often for me that manifests as *overthinking*. Too much thinking, not enough doing. Just enough thinking to get in my own way. But there’s also certainly a type of mindlessness being overcorrected, feeling the need to check the various services and read all the news without any particular goal in mind. Overthinking? Go be mindless for awhile. This is not a good solution, really. So I’m trying to do better on both scores, but it’s hard in a world (and profession, and with a mind) determined to encourage both tendencies.

We did a meditation exercise — for just two minutes — at the beginning of the session, where we all lay back in a circle staring at the beams and rigging of the silks studio and then closing our eyes and focusing on the words Green Grass and then on the space between the words, as Mandy talked us through it. Later, when we talked about having trouble sleeping, I revealed that I’d spent the night before bed googling and reading endlessly only phone about how to increase deep sleep, prodded by my fitbit’s revelation I haven’t been getting much (and I quote, “I knew it was wrong, but it felt so right”). Sometime during the workshop, I realized that obviously we were just talking about being present. The word mindfulness is intimidating or perhaps goofy or perhaps serious, depending upon the day of the week or how much sleep you got last night, but being present is really all it means. Stopping to remember you are in this moment and you are doing this thing and appreciating that and letting it be, not letting the anxiety of what came before or what might come later overtake it. And this is a space I need to be in with my writing. I’ve been hovering a little outside my page when I’m working lately and it’s become harder as a result to make progress. DUH. This week I’ll work on being present at the page — walking on that high wire — and letting the rest of it go until after. Green Grass. Be in it, between the words, in a hidden pocket where presence and progress happens.

Whenever I’m thinking deeply about something, I have a tendency to seek out poems–which only makes sense, I suppose. There’s a particular kind of being present that a good poem demands. I ended up finding these two lovely, sharp poems from searching the word “mind” at Poets.org that add up to a nice pairing so I’m sharing them with you.

Should you want to easily find them later, here are links to both: How the mind works still to be sure and I See You in the Field of My Mind Baby Moo Cow.

 

And now we’ve all been present experiencing the same poems together. Magic.

Other notable things this week:

– I checked out the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Central Library; if you’re local, make sure you go before it’s gone!
– I’ve been watching Dix Pour Cent, a delicious French show retitled Call My Agent! here. It’s subtitled, but absolutely addictive — about a French entertainment agency, and on Netflix.
– Books: I inhaled Christina Lauren’s My Favorite Half-Night Stand, Sam Maggs’ Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships That Changed History is wonderful, and I’m j’adoring Jeff Ford’s latest novel, the odd and delightful Ahab’s Return.

I’ve also been working on spinning:

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

I feel less dizzy! Progress. #aerialwriter

A post shared by Gwenda Bond (@gwendabond) on Jan 11, 2019 at 8:22am PST

More soon!

Hey, hi! One of my goals this year is to newsletter monthly and blog weekly. The newsletter just went out, so this will be a shortish post. But the important thing is I’m here.

We’re a month out from the release of Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds. Preordering (or putting on hold at your library!) is caring.

What’s old is new, so I’m sharing a few links. These are a few pieces that resonated with me recently, plucked from my reading list tab and which are worth your time:

• You know that amazing nonfiction book, The Big Con? Well, it’s great. And now the also-great Sarah Weinman has a fascinating look at the author, David Maurer, and why the book’s still relevant.
• The classic Ricky Jay profile Mark Singer wrote for the New Yorker long ago, circulating widely again since the master magician’s death.
• Every Taffy Brodesser-Akner piece is essential reading, but her retrospective of Margot Kidder may be one of the most beautiful things you read this year. (I wrote about what Kidder’s Lois Lane meant to me for Salon shortly after her death.)
• Sara Benincasa made a reading list on witches. Need I say more?

Now go spend your weekend catching up on our new Cult Faves ep — a look at our favorite cult stories of 2018 — or dancing like a Congresswoman!