Growing up in Jackson County, Gwenda Bond’s imagination grew like a wild vine in summer.
It grew beyond the bounds of her backyard and her small Kentucky town – even beyond this world, into magical, fantastic and sometimes spooky, mysterious places.
“I was obsessed with stories,” said Bond, the daughter of two educators who surrounded her with books from an early age. “I was that obnoxious child who declared I wanted to be a writer before I could read or write.”
As it turns out, that declaration had legs. Today, Bond is a full-time writer living and working in Lexington with more than a dozen books under her belt in genres ranging from fantasy, mystery and science fiction to romantic comedy and young adult (YA). Titles include “Lois Lane,” a trilogy centering on the love life of one of Bond’s favorite fictional heroines, to the 2019 novel “Suspicious Minds,” the official prequel to the popular Netflix series “Stranger Things.”
The earliest important touchstone books in her life, Bond recalls, include fairy tales as a child and science fiction and fantasy books such as “The Hobbit” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” series as she got a bit older. “I also loved poring over anthologies,” she said. She quickly graduated to reading Stephen King and the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” series, and as a teenager, fell into Latin American magical realism through what she describes as “happy bookstore accidents.”
But for many years, Bond’s professional track centered on a very different realm than fantasy and escape. After majoring in journalism at Eastern Kentucky University, she took a job with a state government out of college. While that job had her working in public health communications for the next 17 years, she continued to write articles, book reviews and screenplays in her personal time, trying to find her creative niche.
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Bond has published over a dozen books since 2012, in genres ranging from fantasy and science fiction to mystery and young adult (YA). Photo by Estill Robinson
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Photo by Estill Robinson
“It took me a while to stumble into the kind of writing I wanted to do,” Bond explained. While the popular young adult (YA) authors Francesca Lia Block and Christopher Pike were among her favorites as a teenager, it wasn’t until she was an adult – a time she says YA was in its “new golden era” – that she truly fell in love with that genre, while reading books like Holly Black’s “Tithe.”
“I knew I had found what I wanted to write,” she said.
Deciding she needed to learn more about writing fiction, Bond enrolled in a low-residency Masters of Fine Arts program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and graduated two years later, continuing to work full-time and write along the way.
By the end of graduate school, she had secured an agent and gained some solid writing experience. She and her agent shopped around several of her earlier novels but didn’t find success until her novel “Blackwood” – the fourth novel she had written, and the third her agent had shopped – was picked up by a publishing house in Great Britain.
Bond soon came to understand that she was in a marathon not a sprint.
“A lot of writers believe you must land your first book, but that’s rare,” she said. “Once you sell one book, it becomes easier – because now publishers know you a little better and they take a closer look.”
Many of her early books that were initially passed over have now been published.
“I like to say I was a very long overnight success,” she said, laughing.
With more than a dozen books published in less than a decade, the author has certainly found her stride.
Bond believes spending time with other writers is essential to the writing process, and one writer with whom she’s spent quite a bit of time with is her husband, Christopher Rowe. The two met at a writing conference in 2001 and married in 2004. Together, the couple, who live on Lexington’s north side, have co-penned the “Supernormal Sleuthing Service” series, often talking through the process while walking their dogs.
Gwenda Bond and her husband, Christopher Rowe, live in North Lexington with their two cats and three dogs. The couple has collaborated on a YA series called “Supernatural Sluething Service." Photo by Estill Robinson
“All art is conversation,” she said, adding that it’s helpful that the two have different strengths: He enjoys composition while she loves revision. “It’s always fun to see the magic of what you can create with other people and how it’s different than what you’d come up with on your own.”
To that end, Bond and fellow local writer Lisa Hanenberg collaborated earlier this year to launch the Writers Room, a shared space where writers can come together not only to work but also to find support and inspiration from each other. While the project — launched right before the pandemic took hold — has yet to reach its full potential, its participating writers have been meeting online regularly and look forward to gathering in person in the future.
“Life in the arts is hard,” she said. “It’s important to connect.”
Up next for this busy writer is a romantic comedy set in Lexington, which will be released next fall.
“And I always have a couple of secret projects going on, too,” Bond adds with a laugh – always enjoying injecting a little mystery into the mix.
Her fans can’t wait.
Bond recently took some time from her deadline-heavy schedule to chat with Smiley Pete reporter Celeste Lewis.
Tell me about your writing process. I think most of us, when we talk about our processes, make it sound either neater or messier than it is. We look back on it and make up a story, because that’s what we’re hardwired to do. So the lie I’ll tell you today is that over time I’ve become more of an outliner. I do the best I can to get to know my characters up front, so I can do a decently fleshed-out outline on index cards on my office wall, and then I try to progress through that plan as best I can. I find drafting painful and love revision, so any hack I can use to make drafting feel less like walking a tightrope without a net is welcome.
The true answer is that the pandemic has been a challenge to my writing process, and so I’m working more in fits and starts than usual. However, the great thing about being a writer with deadlines is that eventually you are forced to do the work – no matter how distracted or anxious you are about the world. I’m always thinking how to surprise and delight the reader.
How did you get involved with ‘Stranger Things’? Please share some of your thoughts about that franchise and how it has captured the imagination of such a wide audience. I was lucky enough to be asked by my publisher, Del Rey, if I would be interested in taking on the first ‘Stranger Things’ novel. They had been in discussions with Netflix and the Duffer Brothers about concepts, and so I knew it would be about Terry, Eleven’s mother. But they were also very clear that I’d have quite a bit of freedom to make it my own, and obviously I said yes to the project. I think the Duffers and I share quite a bit of story influence DNA – we grew up reading the same books and watching a lot of the same TV and movies that are clearly present in ‘Stranger Things’ as reference points. I discovered the show almost as soon as it dropped, via a tweet from Stephen King, and fell in love with it. It very successfully blends a nostalgia for the past with the emotional issues and high stakes of young friendships that are evergreen, with the supernatural and an evil government bad guy as big cherries on top. With ‘Suspicious Minds,’ I tried to make sure all those larger ingredients were present, but it’s set in a different year [1969], with a different friend group makeup [college students, a mostly girl gang] and also shows an earlier glimpse at the show’s greatest villain, Dr. Brenner.
What is something that scares you? Right now? The news. I’m terrified for my friends on the West Coast among raging wildfires caused by climate change. I’m worried for all of us because of the patchwork approach of pandemic response, state by state and community by community, and the number of lives that have already been lost. I’m worried for the future fallout if the country doesn’t change these and a number of other policies to be more humane and more forward thinking. I’m afraid we won’t make those changes. I’m afraid people won’t vote [please vote – in every election, always].
Also, mice.
Tell me about your fans and how you engage with them. I have great fans, and I try to be accessible to them on Twitter, somewhat via email and on other platforms. I post a lot of photos of my dogs – Puck, Sally and Izzy – and my cats – Phoebe and Stella – but they assure me they like that.
Being a full-time writer means you’re pretty much always under deadline, and author Gwenda Bond primarily works toward her deadlines from her Lexington home. Photo by Estill Robinson
How do you feel about the role of social media in our lives now? It’s a blessing and a curse. I love that it keeps us connected, but I also think it can be a vicious dopamine cycle that distracts us from deeper engagement and thinking, and that doesn’t always present events in a contextual way. That said, I’ll take the downsides for all the friendships I’ve made and people I’ve learned about important issues from – whose voices I might not have heard otherwise.
What are your thoughts on how we consume media these days with many independent bookstores disappearing from the landscape? How do writers adapt to the changes? How long do we have? Independent bookstores are incredibly important to me, and to all of us, culturally. Earlier this year, feeling paralyzed in the pandemic, my friend Kami Garcia approached me with an idea to do something to help both local comic shops and indie bookstores get through COVID. That led to us co-founding the #Creators4Comics auction with our friend Sam Humphries, and we managed to raise almost half a million dollars in just a week for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation to send to stores and booksellers. More than anything, that experience reminded me there is a larger community that recognizes the importance of print and of booksellers, and it made me feel much more optimistic about the future. That said, I fear there are difficult times ahead because of COVID and the way it’s increasing other trends toward online shopping, and that if we come through the pandemic with fewer bookstores it will be a loss we’ll feel for decades. As writers, the only thing we can truly control is what we write, but we can also help boost and support the outlets that support us, and it’s important that we do so.
What advice do you have for writers starting out? Read everything! Read across genres. Respect the craft. Write what you want, and if you don’t know what that is, start with what you like to read best. Surround yourself with people who want you to do your best work. Be disciplined, but not so much that you forget to live.
If you were not a writer, what is another line of work you might have liked to try? I think I’d make an excellent spy. Or lady of leisure.