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 University of Idaho broadcast major Mitch Bonds recently got his book, “Hero, Second Class,” published. Keegan Flanegan/Argonaut
Not a lot of people can say they published a book before they could legally buy the champagne to celebrate it.
But as of last week, University of Idaho broadcasting major Mitchell Bonds can.
Oct. 1 marked the launch of Bonds’ first novel titled “Hero, Second Class.”
“Hero, Second Class” (Marcher Lord Press) is a fantasy-fiction satire about a young protagonist named Cyrus who is an aspiring hero on a quest and encounters all the villains, dragons, princesses and magic one usually finds in a fantasy novel — but with a twist.
In his book, Bonds features heroes who narrate their combat while they’re fighting, villains who are doomed to fail and dragons that can hear spelling and punctuation errors.
“It should be fairly amusing even if you haven’t read anything fantasy-fiction,” Bonds said.
A lover of the fantasy genre, Bonds said he chose to write a fantasy satire because, “it’s terribly full of clichés to the point where you know that the main character is going to be some outcast, not recognized by either side of his family, who lives alone and falls in love with the elfin princess and fights a dragon’ hero.”
He thinks his book is funny and although the book has been out for barely a week, the initial reviews were pretty good, he said.
He’s not afraid the satire will offend anyone.
“I’m afraid I might actually offend people more with my vague Christian content,” Bonds said. “The problem is that when people hear, in combination, the words Christian and fantasy fiction, they drop that sucker like a rock because 97.8 percent of Christian fiction is garbage. It’s awful, it’s preachy, it’s dry – it’s boring. And what I am trying to do is break that mold.”
Growing up in Priest River, Bonds had 20 acres of woods to play in. He made up an adventure game he called “Quest” filled with creatures he and his friends would battle. In fact, the main villain in the book is based on a character he made up as an 8-year-old.
“I always played the bad guys and monsters, and I would make up the dialogue as I went and we just had a grand old time,” Bonds said. “I jotted some of those funniest ideas down and initially wanted to make a game out of them. However as it turned out, I suck at computer programming.”
On his way to Michigan to attend Hillsdale College, he started writing a short story about a hero who wandered into the woods in search of a dragon. After the hero finds the dragon, they fight but the hero keeps losing because he’s narrating his combat as he fights and thus, the dragon knows the hero’s every move. The short story developed into a more than 600 page novel and the original short story is now the book’s third chapter.
“I refined a lot of the ideas I had then,” Bonds said. “I have almost 12 years of that game I made up that I combined in an actual work of fiction.”
At Hillsdale, he only took 15 credits per semester, which allowed him to write. Once written, two of his friends edited his work twice and after much searching for a publisher and many rejections, Marcher Lord Press picked it up. Six months of editing and a school transfer later, Bonds has a published novel.
The publishing process proved to be a bigger challenge than actually writing it, he said.
“I just start writing and I’ll write the first paragraph, and then I’ll tweak the paragraph and then I stop tweaking and I’ll type and type and then I’ll have a chapter,” he said. “Before I know it, it’s 3 a.m. and I need to go to bed.”
Lecturer Jeffrey Jones said although he has known Bonds since the beginning of the semester, he noticed that Bonds has “a lot of drive to write.”
At UI, Bonds decided to add English as a minor.
“He’s really excited about fiction and speaks up a lot in class,” Jones said.
“It seems kind of redundant that I am already published and I’m taking a fiction writing class. Well, I am not so good that I can’t get better,” Bonds said. “Description is my biggest weak point. Unless I am paying attention, everything happens in a grey, flat backdrop.”
Jones said that in his literary fiction course “we’re making the setting come alive for the reader.”
Bonds hopes that “Hero, Second Class” will at least make more than $5,000.
“That way I will recoup the cost of publishing and actually start getting some money off the thing I published. And what I would like to see, is for it to become one of those unexpected cult classic kind of thing that gets a weird following of weird people.”
Besides taking classes and enjoying Moscow, Bonds is busy undertaking two writing projects. The first is taking “Hero, Second Class” and turning it into a Gilbert-Sullivan style musical like “Pirates of Penzance.” At the same time, he said he is writing a sequel to the book.
“It might be two books, maybe three books, I don’t know- I haven’t run out of ideas yet,” he said.
Locally, Bonds is selling some copies of the book himself and is hoping for area stores to pick it up
as well.
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