Guest Post by Lenore Appelhans for Level 2 Blog Tour

22 January, 2013 Blog Tours, Guest Spotlight 6 comments

Lenore ApplehansGuest Post by Lenore Appelhans

The Three Seasons

When I was in high school, I set out to write a novel with my best friend “inspired” by true events. It was called “The Three Seasons” and revolved around three friends – Sommer, Autumn and Winter – all in love with the same boy.

In my debut novel Level 2, I have Felicia and her best friend Autumn writing the same book (how very meta of me!), and I thought it would be fun to take a look at this “masterpiece” today on Cuddlebuggery.

Let’s dive in with the first paragraph of chapter one.

3-Seasons_excerpt_1

Is anyone interested in reading on after this yawn of an opening? If I were writing this today, I’d excise all of the first eight chapters because they are all backstory.

True, some of it is important backstory, but it could be inserted in small nuggets throughout the story.

In any case, my favorite part of this excerpt is how scandalized Autumn is by the girl’s choice of outfit “on the first day of school!”

The scene goes on and Autumn bonds with both the cutoff jeans girl (Sommer) and a shy girl in a fancy blue dress (Winter). They decide to play together at recess where Autumn has this hilarious confrontation with her friend Adena:

3-Seasons_excerpt_2

The sad part is that many of my playground interactions in fourth grade actually went down this way. I love how melodramatic it is – and that it foreshadows the extreme amount of melodrama to come.

At the end of this chapter, the three girls pledge to be “the three seasons – best friends forever.”

Fast forward to chapter nine – eleventh grade – and Sommer is secreting dating Charles, a boy both Autumn and Winter (Jessica) have a crush on.

In chapter seventeen, Winter and Autumn finally find out about this betrayal (about time!) and in chapter eighteen, we have another hilarious confrontation, this time between Winter and Sommer:

3-Seasons_excerpt_3

Notice the repetition of the word “look”? Yeah. This section could use some line editing. Also, that last sentence scores very high on the DRAMA LLAMA scale.

But it gets worse. Oh yeah it does. Because chapter twenty happens and Winter (Jessica) goes to Charles’ place to declare her love – which is met with the following:

3-Seasons_excerpt_4

How convenient! How morbid! How embarrassing that I wrote this!

Still, I bet you want to know how it ends right? Though I never finished writing more than three chapters, fortunately for you, I did create an extensive outline. So here
goes:

Charles doesn’t die, but Winter commits suicide because she thinks she killed
him.
At Winter’s funeral, Autumn meets Charles’ hot cousin (why is he going to Winter’s funeral? Who knows?) and she likes him but feels guilty about pursuing happiness while grieving for Winter.
Fortunately, Winter’s mother reveals that Winter was about to die from a brain tumor anyway, and convinces Autumn to be happy. So she agrees to go out with Charles’ cousin. The story ends on a double date with the two happy couples toasting Winter.

I assure you, Level 2 is much, much, much better than this high school effort. I promise!


Level2_blogtourbannerLevel 2 by Lenore Appelhans

Three levels. Two loves. One choice. Debut novelist, Lenore Appelhans has written a thrilling otherworldly young adult novel about a place that exists between our world (Level 1) and what comes after life (Level 2).

‘I pause to look around the hive – all the podlike chambers are lit up as the drones shoot up on memories … I’ve wanted to get out of here before, but now the tight quarters start to choke me. There has to be more to death than this.’

Felicia Ward is dead. Trapped in a stark white afterlife limbo, she spends endless days replaying memories, of her family, friends, boyfriend … and of the guy who broke her heart. The guy who has just broken into Level 2 to find her.

Felicia learns that a rebellion is brewing, and it seems she is the key. Suspended between heaven and earth, she must make a choice. Between two worlds, two lives and two loves.

Read the first 50 pages for free!

GoodReads|Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Direct Order


 About Lenore Appelhans

Thanks to my father’s job in the US military, I became addicted to travel early.  To date, I’ve visited nearly 60 countries and have stepped on every contintent except Antartica. My travels inspire my writing – in fact, the original spark of the idea for LEVEL 2 grew out of an discussion with my grandmother about whether it was better to spend my money on Precious Moments figurines (her view) or plane tickets (my view).

 

I currently live in Frankfurt, Germany and the last foreign country I visited was Krygyzstan (Sept 2012).

 

Fun facts:

  • I’ve lived in 7 US states (North Dakota, Colorado, Utah, California, Ohio, Kansas, Oklahoma) and 5 foreign countries (Greece, Ecuador, Spain, Japan, Germany)
  • I have 3 fancy Sacred Birman cats. You can see pictures of them in cute and crazy poses on my blog.
  • I wrote my first book, Timothy the Bug, in the car on a family vacation when I was in the 5th grade. In 8th grade, I made it to the state semi-finals in Ohio’s Power of the Pen competition (I placed 5th at the regional level).
  • I’ve swam with sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, walked with lions in Zimbabwe, fed anteaters in Tikal, Guatemala, braved fire ants in Australia, chased a puffin across a black sand beach in Iceland and narrowly avoided stepping on a snake in Burma.

Blog|Website|Goodreads|Twitter|

Kat Kennedy

Kat Kennedy

Co-blogger at Cuddlebuggery
Kat Kennedy is a book reviewer and aspiring author in the Young Adult genre. She reviews critically but humorously and get super excited about great books. Find her on GoodReads.
Kat Kennedy

6 Responses to “Guest Post by Lenore Appelhans for Level 2 Blog Tour”

  1. heykelley

    Hahaha, this is awesome! Reading the scenes in the beginning reminded me a lot of the kinds of encounters and friendship I had in 4th grade, too.
    In any case, I really want to read Level 2. And man, oh man, thanks a lot for linking to the first 50 pages for FREE. Now I’m *really* going to be hooked!

  2. carow

    hilarious! one of the best guest posts I’ve read. I’m certain  my writing in high school was exactly the same… definitely going to look into Level 2 now….

  3. Addai A
    Twitter:

    This had me cracking up, so much that I felt the need to post a comment after never having done so before 🙂 Great guest post and love the blog by the way 🙂

  4. MccartBrenda

    i want to thank Dr ALuta for bringing back my ex husband, we broke up for more than 4 month and he told me that he will never want to see me in his life again. i love him so much to the extend that i could not do any thing again, i was confused and depress due to the love i had for him.i did everything i could do to have him come back to me but all went in vain. so i decided to contact a spell caster, i did not believe in spell casting i just want to try it may be it would work out for me. i contacted  dr Aruvi for help, he told me that he have to cast a love spell on him, i told him to it. after 5 days my called me and started to apologize for leaving me and also he told me that he still love me. i was very happy and i thank dr Aruvi for helping get back my ex husband back to my hands. his spell is the the greatest all over the world, it was the  love spell he cast on my ex that make him come back to me. all you ladies who want back the ex husband back i want you to contact Dr Aruvi at the following email address and get all your problem solve..No problem is too big for him to solve..Contact him direct at freemercifultemple@yahoo.com and get your problems solve like me

  5. Author Interview: Lenore Appelhans

    […] The Three Seasons was a novel I wanted to co-write with a friend in high school.  I created the characters and wrote an outline and then assigned her one of the three points of view.  She never wrote any of her chapters though, so the book died a quick death.  While I was going through my old papers, I found the outline and a few chapters I had written.  It is so marvelously melodramatic (read an excerpts). […]

Leave a Reply

CommentLuv badge