letter #5 from me (Gwenda Bond) to you: collaborations, real and imaginary
I promised to keep these letters more personal than promotional, and I fully intend to keep that, my solemn vow to you. I hope you’re finding these weekly missives as useful (or at least as fun) as I am. I’ve had some great conversations and feedback online and off related to them already. You can feel free to send responses to these; they will come to me, I will see them, and I may respond. And now, I’m going to delve into promotion, but in a more personal way.
Disclaimer given, I have a new book out this coming week—Lois Lane: Double Down—on May 1 to be precise, and I feel like I ought to talk some about it. I was writing this book mostly in the lead up to the release of Fallout (terrifying); it was due on May 1 last year, the day that book came out, and I had to ask for a couple of extra weeks because a) things were crazy and I was traveling a lot (::cue twilight zone music:: or what I thought was a lot, but nothing compared to this year), and b) it was a longer, more complex book so it just plain took a few extra weeks to finish. I’d never written a sequel before, and was thrilled to be given the opportunity to carry on Lois Lane and her new friends’ adventures in Metropolis.
But, of course, writing anything new brings its own challenges. This book, Double Down, was mostly a challenge I set myself. I have very specific feeling about what makes a good second book in a series (or, rather, what makes a disappointing one), and I very much wanted to top Fallout. I wanted Double Down to be more complex, to put Lois through her paces in a different way. I wanted to explore what it meant for Lois to learn to be a good friend, and how much more difficult that is than it sounds. I wanted to delve deeper into her relationships, all of them, but especially with the other girls and women in her life. I wanted the super science plot to push things further. I wanted there to be a whole other plot involving SmallvilleGuy that she also had to deal with, getting into their feelings for each other (aw!) and raising new threats to them both. I wanted people to make a happy book noise when they finished and desperately crave another installment. And, yes, I wanted to introduce new possibilities and threads to explore in the event I got to revisit the world and these characters I love so much again.
Early response to this book has been gratifying. Kirkus gave it what’s probably one of the best starred reviews I’ve ever read. Readers have been kind. I always say one of the things that makes writing books so special as an art form is that a novel requires collaboration with the reader in a way nothing else quite does. I write the words, but you conjure them into a fictional reality. And it’s such a gift to get responses that tell you some readers at least are reading the book you really, really hoped you wrote. So thank you, all of you, my collaborators, who’ve already read the book and reached out to tell me that you dug it.
You may notice that all of us writers go a little crazy around release day and wonder why. The lives of books can be sooooo long after all, for all that we pretend they’re fleeting. It’s not like everyone who reads a book reads it right away. As a reader, I know I’m still discovering so many books published decades or years ago, in addition to ones published days ago or next month. As a writer, I know that people are still discovering books I wrote years ago. Logic means it takes time for people to read books and recommend them. I’ve been tremendously lucky to have a publisher who has done a great job getting the word out about the Lois Lane books and supporting me (and similarly lucky with my Cirque American books as well). But I feel like I must be up front about the fact that book three is not a certainty. Unlike last year, I’m not already writing it, though I do already know what I want it to be should I get to. What readers don’t realize—and shouldn’t have to!—is that often with a book by book series like this the decision about whether there will be another is made in the first few weeks after publication. I will be fine either way; I have a lot of irons in the publishing fire. My career is going well, and I’m so very grateful for all the new readers Lois Lane has brought me. But I would also love to reward the loyalty of those readers with a book three, and to make that a reality will also require your collaboration, my readers.
So my plea is to consider purchasing Fallout in its shiny paperback and/or Double Down in its gorgemazing hardcover this week (or in ebook!) and/or requesting/checking them out at your library. Consider recommending the books to friends or online or to your friendly local librarian or bookseller. Leave an Amazon or B&N or Goodreads (or all three!) review after you finish reading. All of that matters. All of it helps. I think sometimes people think of media tie-ins as somehow more simple or that they’re just not the kind of people who read them—I have approached these books from day one as their own series of mine. I think of Lois Lane in some way as the TV show I get to executive produce and write and direct, but it also has all that crunchy Lois interiority that you can only get in a novel. I feel like Double Down’s my best published book so far. (And I hope I always feel that way about every new book.) So if you’ve read and enjoyed Girl on a Wire or any of my other work but hesitated on these (or vice versa!), I truly believe you’ll dig these too.
I know, I know, I’m probably not supposed to talk about these things so directly or use so many parentheticals, but I don’t want to toy with anyone’s emotions who wants a sequel. This is where it stands.
Handy buy links can all be found right here on the book page or just hit up your local bookstore.
I’m writing this on a plane to Los Angeles, en route to YALLWEST, where I hope to see some of you! I even had my new instant camera and film hand-checked by airport security and brought film for polaroids with the first people in my signing line tomorrow. And yes! There will be copies of Double Down for sale. Here’s my schedule; if you’re at YALL, say hi!
Last week I talked about the work vs. the job, and making sure the work gets done first. This week, I did better at that and I'm sure it was the latent accountability of having discussed it that made the difference. I also felt much better after talking about this very subject with several writers I greatly admire at North Texas Teen Book Festival in Dallas (truly incredible) and confirming once again that it's common to many, many of us. There is comfort in numbers. So this week I rambled all over the neighborhood in between writing sessions in the backyard. (For some reason this photo insists on being sideways, so just turn your head sideways. ;-)
And now I’d better log off and write some fiction. (Or let’s be honest, read more of The Raven King to distract myself from how bumpy this flight is. Ack!)
Thanks for indulging my promotional blather. Next week, all personal! I swear!
xo G