We’re delighted to have Gwendolyn Clare join us to chat about her debut novel, INK, IRON, AND GLASS.
I’d definitely recommend it to fans of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series or the Girl Genius comics by Phil and Kaja Foglio. If you’re hungry for more historical fantasy after Ink, Iron, and Glass, I’d suggest Beth Cato’s Breath of Earth, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my debut twin, Deborah Schaumberg, whose YA novel The Tombs also came out this week!
What’s your writing ritual like? Do you listen to music? Work at home or at a coffee shop or the library, etc?
When I was writing full time, I would park myself in a local cafe first thing in the morning and write for a solid five hours, then take a break in the afternoon, and do brainstorming in the evening for the next morning’s writing session. Now that I’m back to teaching full time, my writing schedule is more like trying to squeeze in a few panicked minutes here and there! Mostly I work on weekends now.
How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?
I started out writing short fiction for several years before I even tried my hand at writing novels. Then I wrote and queried three previous (still unpublished) novels before Ink, Iron, and Glass landed me an agent and later a publisher. It’s easy to see other authors’ successes from the outside and assume they somehow jumped on the publication highway, but we all have trunk stories and piles of rejection letters! That’s just part of the journey.
What advice would you most like to pass along to other writers?
The best advice I can give is to take all advice with a grain of salt. There’s no such thing as an unbreakable writing rule. If a piece of advice helps you to be productive and hone your craft, then great! But if it doesn’t work for you, throw it out. The only part of the process that seems consistent for basically all writers is that you need to be reading a lot and writing a lot — and thinking critically about what you read and write, so you’re actually learning from it. That’s the only must, as far as I’m concerned.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ink, Iron, and Glass
by Gwendolyn Clare
Hardcover
Imprint
Released 2/20/2018
Can she write a world gone wrong?
A certain pen, a certain book, and a certain person can craft entirely new worlds through a branch of science called scriptology. Elsa comes from one such world that was written into creation by her mother―a noted scriptologist.
But when her home is attacked and her mother kidnapped, Elsa is forced to cross into the real world and use her own scriptology gifts to find her. In an alternative Victorian Italy, Elsa finds a secret society of pazzerellones―young people with a gift for mechanics, alchemy, or scriptology―and meets Leo, a gorgeous mechanist with a smart mouth and tragic past. She recruits the help of these fellow geniuses just as an assassin arrives on their doorstep.
In this thrilling debut, worlds collide as Elsa unveils a deep political conspiracy seeking to unlock the most dangerous weapon ever created―and only she can stop it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gwendolyn Clare’s debut novel — INK, IRON, AND GLASS — is the first in a steampunk duology about a young mad scientist with the ability to write new worlds into existence, forthcoming from Imprint in 2018. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others, and her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling Award. She holds a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, a PhD in Mycology, and swears she’s done collecting acronyms. She lives in North Carolina with too many cats, too many ducks, and never enough books.
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Have you had a chance to read INK, IRON, AND GLASS yet? Do you have any trunk stories? Are you learning from what you read and write? Share your thoughts about the interview in the comments!
Happy Reading,
Jocelyn, Halli, Martina, Anisaa, Charlotte, Erin, Susan, Shelly, Kelly, Laura, Emily, and Lori Ann
