An interview with Bond… Jason Bond
1) What is your Author name; use your Pen name if you have one.
Jason Bond
2) What is your genre and what drew you to it?
Military Sci-Fi (for now). I grew up reading so many different genre’s, but my favorites were Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I was fascinated by all the possibilities that exist beyond Earth. I think the human psyche has a need to explore, and with much of the planet now known, what lies above is a natural place for exploring minds to train their attention.
3) Do you challenge yourself to writing sprints? If so, how long are they?
I always work in 25-minute Pomodoros. I work for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. If I have enough time and focus, I’ll do that for four sessions and then take a thirty-minute break. I’ve successfully gotten almost 10k words in one day doing this. I try and have at least one 25-minute Pomodoro be a word sprint to keep the new fiction creation flowing.
4) What is the best time of day for you to write?
I can write in the evening if it’s absolutely necessary, but early morning is key to my creativity. It seems to be the time where I have the least on my mind intruding on my storylines from the outside world. During the week I’m typically up at 5AM, then writing by 6.
5) Do you prefer writing dialogue, action or other scenes?
My favorite scenes are the ones that just flow out. I do this weird hybrid plotting pantsing thing where I start with 4x6 cards, and I’ll write scenes on them with detailed notes. I’ll start stacking them up and moving them around, and then, suddenly, I’ll get the sense that one of the scenes is ready, and I’ll word sprint it and just let it out. This leaves me with this weird recycling bin of cards and rough drafted scenes, but I’ve learned that the key is to just sit in the recycling bin long enough and a functional book will eventually shake out of the pile.
6) Do you attend writing conferences? If so, which ones?
To date I had only attended the 20Books to 50k conference. Sadly, that was on it’s last year. This next year, we’ll be going to Author Nation and I hope to get involved in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference, but I have no hard plans yet. This question reminds me I need to follow up on that!
7) Did you receive encouragement from a mentor, family member, teacher, coach…?
Definitely. I will say, I’ve received more discouragement than encouragement, but those who encouraged clearly had louder voices. I had an English teacher in High School named Robert Baldwin (not the famous author) :) who taught me to freewrite. I had so much trauma in my life that freewriting became this volcanic vent to what was going on. I sincerely believe that journaling and freewriting saved my life, as it gave me the ability to take things out of my head and look at them more objectively. My mother has always been a big supporter as well. I recently got joined up with a writers group for the first time as a result of the 20Books conference, and they’ve been transformational. I’m very excited to see what comes next. I will say that having the right encouragement is critical. The people who just love everything you do are great, but they won’t get you to the next level. The same is true for those who hate every breath you exhale. Take each with a grain of salt and find that practical, realistic and yet constructive cheerleader.
8) What is the most important bit of information you would want to tell a person interested in publishing a book?
I hold rank in 8 different fighting systems. I’ve put a white belt on more than that. I often encourage people to consider how writing is like being a competitive fighter. Often, people want to put in 200 hours and then get to marketing, which would be like going to the Octogon. You might win, but odds are you’ll get your nose bloodied. Be ready to put in the work. Writing is an art that takes time to develop, and the only way to develop it is to read and write and read and write. I encourage people to start taking in a few pages of writing books every day for about ten minutes. You’ll be amazed how many you can get through in a year, and you’ll learn so much.
9) What is your favorite character from any book you have ever read?
This is SUCH a good question. Let me think… One that I find very compelling is HAL, the half mad computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey (the novel not the movie). I think that character can inform a lot of the challenges we’ll be facing soon with AI. When we give computers a mission, have we also given them a moral compass by which to achieve that mission? This is, of course, no different for humanity. How characters achieve their goals either through moral or immoral means is so interesting.
10) Which book villain would be the hardest to defeat?
I think that Sauron from the Lord of the Rings would be almost impossible to prevail against. The thing that’s interesting about him is he uses people’s own desires and weaknesses against them, and then those people become his unwitting servants. I love the idea of playing off of people’s weaknesses. Finding the cracks in a personality like a plant’s roots find cracks in concrete is such an intriguing study.
11) What is you preferred method of reading a book? (Audio, paperback, hardcover, or eBook)
I love doing audiobooks with a good narrator when I’ve got other things to do like mow the lawn, weed, or do dishes. However, my very favorite thing to do is be in an environment that offers no distractions, and just disappear into a good, paper book.
12) What is one book that is currently on your To-Be-Read list?
I am all over the map, so forgive me if I don’t just give you one. My wife has told me I have to read Fourth Wing even if it’s not my typical genre (I do read romance now and again to help strengthen that part of my writing) and I have Cloud Atlas on deck. I had a good friend who went deep into David Mitchell’s work, and when I suggested I wanted to read Cloud Atlas, he told me not to and has led me through several other books that aren’t in a series, but are somehow. After I finished Slade House, my friend told me I was finally ready for Cloud Atlas.
13) What is the name of your book/series? Tell me a little bit about them.
I’ve had a lot of luck with my Hammerhead Series. It started as a stand alone action Sci-Fi novel, but then when it unexpectedly reached bestseller status, I had a lot of readers asking for a follow up, so I gave them one! Since then, I’ve published a third have a fourth in the works. The main premise of the first novel begins with freighters in space. When they’re used up, the corporations that own them don’t want to spend money of fuel to get them out of orbit, so they auto pilot them down, crash landing them in the Nevada desert. There, an older guy in a mechanized suit called a Gorilla tears them apart for recycling. At the beginning of Hammerhead, a freighter is brought down, and Jeffrey Holt goes out to tear it open, rips open the bridge, and finds bodies. He gets out of the Gorilla to see what’s going on, and while he’s standing on the bridge trying to figure out what’s going on, one of the bodies grabs his leg because she’s not dead. The race for survival begins there.
14) Do you have a website? If so, what is it?
15) Where can we find and follow you? (Name your social media platforms.)
I have Instagram and Facebook primarily.
16) If there anything important that you would want my readers to know about you?
I’ve been working at writing since I was 11 years old. I earned a Bachelor’s in English Literature from the University of Oregon in pursuit of that goal. I’ve worked really hard to get as good as I possibly can.
