The Golden Band (HSE) update

Hello, everyone!The Golden Band: High School Edition, by Alethea Kontis

Finished reading HERO? Wish there was something else you could sink your teeth into? Well…how about this?

Now that Book Three has been revised, line edited, and is off to the copyeditor, I’m free to do WHATEVER I WANT! (mwahahahahahaha) “Whatever I Want” right now can be defined as continuing the saga that is serializing The Golden Band, my very first novel.

There are so many things going through my mind as I transcribe this from the notebook where it has lived for over 20 years. Namely:

1.) Man, when I taught myself to write neatly, I WROTE NEATLY. Thank you, self.

2.) I *really* wasn’t that bad a fiction writer. I reviewed stuff as a copyeditor that was on par…and sometime even slightly worse…than this. It kind of makes me mad that it took me so long to get serious about writing…but to be honest, I’d been submitting to venues for a long time, so technically I was serous about writing. I just hadn’t quite thrown my heart and soul and sinew into it. And when I did, it was rather remarkable how quickly everything progressed from that. I mean…three years after Orson Scott Card’s Boot Camp I was published by two major houses, and in the fourth year, I hit the New York Times list.

3.) I’m about to teach a bunch of Young Authors how to do this stuff….and I’m still a little clueless on what to say. You think I’d be rolling my eyes at this whole manuscript, but I’m really not. Sure, there’s a bit of Head-Hopping (where a scene shifts to another character’s point of view in the middle), and there’s a massive amount of Stage Directions (what I call “turning” and “looking” and “nodding” and such)…but there’s just not a lot of glaring stuff. I’d love to read my own work in front of these kids to tear it apart…and so far I haven’t found a section that breaks enough rules to do that.

4.) I used to love this. As I type through this, I remember that romantic, overwhelming feeling that happens when a world takes over you. You don’t have looming deadlines, you can just play around in a world for as long as you want. You can take forever on the intro…because really, it’s your director’s cut and no one’s there to critique you if you don’t want it.

There is a definite loss of romance when writing becomes a J-O-B, and I feel like I’m always looking for that again. In many ways, hidden between the awkward sentences, I find that here.

I hope you all share this link…especially with young writers that you know, to encourage them to never stop doing what they’re doing.

So far, each section is only about 1000 words, which should only take you about 5 minutes to read. I’m up to section 8 right now.  I’ll update you again when I’ve made another significant amount of updates.

In the meantime, HAPPY READING! xox

(click the cover or HERE to begin)