Finding Inspiration: Courtney Turcotte Bond
Courtney Turcotte Bond is an English teacher at Washburn Rural High School, owner of Bondbons cake ball business, an assistant coach on her daughter’s cheer squad and, as of last year, a published author. Bond’s novel, Breathtaking, made Amazon’s Top 100 Coming-of-Age Novels list in its opening week and has sold thousands of copies since its release in September 2020. And it all started with her student loan debt.
WHEN STUDENT LOANS PAY OFF
When Bond and her husband set out to pay their $82,000 debt in a handful of years, she shared their journey on her blog. Her posts caught the attention of a publisher, who approached Bond about writing a finance book. Bond asked if she could first write a novel. After reading Bond’s outline and a few chapters, the publisher agreed. Cue the writer’s block. Bond struggled with fleshing out the rest of her story and her progress stalled. Inspiration struck when Bond met Madison Taliaferro. Bond was Taliaferro’s homebound teacher in 2015 when Taliaferro’s battle with cystic fibrosis kept her out of school for months. Bond spent over six hours a week with Taliaferro and was moved by the teenager’s motivation to pack as much as she could into her short life.
“Anyone I met with cystic fibrosis knows they’re going to die and tends to have way more zest for life,” Bond said.
Two years into working with Taliaferro, Bond found a new idea that would become Breathtaking. While the novel isn’t Taliaferro’s story, it is inspired by her and her organ donor Alex Lott, whose lungs gave Taliaferro another six years of life.
A Different Kind of Writing
While Bond teaches creative writing for a living, writing a book was a different beast.
“I can write a blog or an essay half asleep, but writing fiction is so hard,” said Bond. “Everything has to be connected.”
Another challenge? Finding time.
By the time Bond was done grading papers, filling cake pop orders and taking care of her kids, it was often 11 at night when Bond could sit down to write. Bond initially gave herself a goal of writing a chapter a day, but that soon proved to be too much. When she lowered her quota to 500 words a day, she found her flow.
“I told myself, ‘Some days those words may be horrible, but you can always go back and change it,’” she said. Bond faced an emotional blow when Taliaferro passed away in 2018. In her grief, she was tempted to stop writing. But the desire to honor Taliaferro kept her from giving up.
“Before, it was about my dream to become an author,” she said. “When Madison passed away, my focus shifted to using the novel to spread awareness of cystic fibrosis and organ donation.”
REFINING THE DRAFT
After two years, Bond finished the first draft of Breathtaking. But the writing wasn’t finished. The post-writing phase meant getting feedback and making rounds of revisions, a process that took an emotional toll on Bond .Bond’s husband was the first to read the book, followed by several other beta readers, including Jay Asher, author of13Reasons Why, a friend of Bond’s. But the first few times she went to hand her draft over, she experienced impostor syndrome.
“I thought, ‘Nope, I’m not going to do this. It’s not good enough,’” she said. “It’s something I put my heart in for two years, and I just thought, ‘What if someone hates it?’”
Once again, her connection to Taliaferro gave her the push to keep going.
“Whenever I would think about not doing it, I remembered it wasn’t about me anymore,” she said. “It was about honoring Madison.”
SPREADING THE WORD
Breathtaking was released Sept. 1, 2020,under Bond’s own publishing company, All of the Everythings, which shares the same title as her blog. While book sales are always a plus, in Bond’s case they were particularly meaningful. Part of the proceeds fund the Madison Taliaferro Memorial Scholarship as well as the Alex Lott Memorial Scholarship, which his parents created after Lott died tragically at age 16 from a touch football accident. Last May, both scholarships were fully funded from Bond’s book sales. Bond’s next project is a biography of Taliaferro and Lott and the connections between the two teenagers. After that, she hopes to eventually write that financial book. But another novel may not bein the cards.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever write a fictional piece again because it was just so hard,” she said. Knowing the challenge for new writers hoping to publish, Bond has taught workshops that walk hopeful authors through the writing and marketing process.
“There are all sorts of behind-the-scenes things that you wouldn’t think about,” she said. “It’s like running a business.”
But perhaps the biggest piece she has for budding authors is to just get started.
“Go for it,” Bond said. “If you have something that you think is worth having other eyes look at, pursue it and find out what you need to do to make it happen.”
