Tag: novella

Beds Are For Flowers Author Note

~ Author R.K. Gold ~ Leave a comment

Beds Are For FlowersBeds Are For Flowers by R.K. Gold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So, yeah, I know it’s not always kosher to rate your own book but so far the Goodreads community hasn’t minded. For those unfamiliar with my ratings, I like to give a kind of letter from the author in the review section so people can gain a bit of personal insight into what my work means to me.

Beds Are For Flowers was originally going to be a middle-grade book. The main character was going to be nine and his father was going to turn into a tree in the end. I had this beautiful idea in my mind that becoming one with nature was the highest level of enlightenment a person could achieve and Clarence would be able to climb his father’s tree every day and feel connected to him.

I didn’t go in this direction. Since the book deals with reapers, monsters, and death I thought it might be better to make Clarence thirteen. I put a lot of thought into what makes life so beautiful, and I know even a book couldn’t come close to an answer, but when I think of beauty I obviously jump at low hanging fruit like color and sound. So, when the world lost its life in this story, color and sound were among the first casualties. I imagined a gray, twisted, shell of the world we all know, sort of inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi “you paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

Balance is one of the main themes in this book. Paradise and the mortal realm are two sides of the same coin and when one gets sick the other suffers. This is going to make me sound like such a hippy but I guess I wrote this as an ode to the innocence of nature. It doesn’t try to be beautiful, it just is, and we turn our backs on it too often for our own convenience, preferring a road to a forest.

I hope this insight makes some sense. I’m worried it sounds like a ramble.

Anyway, I hope you like the book and I’m always interested in more ARC readers.

Thanks for your interest.

-R.K. Gold

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Another Rough Draft Down

~ Author R.K. Gold ~ Leave a comment

Well, it still needs a title but I just finished the rough draft of the project I started 10 days ago. It’s not long, in those 10 days I wrote close to 32,000 words, which translates to between 120-140 pages. It was a lot of fun to write though. I really love the story, I think the plot is pretty solid, the characters all have good motivations and overall I think it’s gonna be a fun read. I also have an idea in mind for a second book, which I think would be cool cause if it’s the same length I can package them together and have a full length 200-300 page book in two parts.

As for what I need to work on, well the ending is a little rushed. I know I can fix that in the edits but with the rough draft, I just wanted to get an ending on the page and worry about making it pretty later. It reached the point where it felt like the sooner I reach the end, the sooner I can start focusing on making it good instead of just prolonging it, cause no matter what it would need to go through multiple edits so might as well reach that stage a day earlier than planned.

I’m really excited to start editing it because I really feel like this story has a lot of opportunities. It’s a YA reaper tale. The main character and his best friend are 13 and his older sister is 15.

I think as far as characters are concerned his sister and best friend are the flattest. I need to give them more depth and development in the edits. I think their main guide is the richest character I wrote, the neighbor and the main villain are tied for second most in-depth and the MC is third most.

His parents probably should be improved in the edits too. At the moment they don’t even have names. At first, I did that purposefully cause I was thinking like Charlie Brown adults but I think it might just make the story weaker since they are a big part of the MC’s motivation to take the quest.

Anyway, I’m excited because my goals for the summer were to publish two novellas and one full-length novel. So far I’ve published one novella, I just finished the rough draft of my second novella, and the novel is written it just needs to go through severe edits. Since it’s only June 2nd I think I’m doing alright with my schedule.