How My First Book Slump Became My First Book
I’ve always been a ravenous reader. As a kid, I moved swiftly from The Magic Treehouse series to Harry Potter, and then from Twilight to Hunger Games, like most book-obsessed middle schoolers. After a childhood spent reading all the fantasy I could get my hands on, my teens were filled with the swoony romance of Sarah Dessen and Meg Cabot, and my college years with Colleen Hoover, Jojo Moyes, and Penelope Douglas. I’m proud to say, I’ve never really experienced a book slump.
Or, before 2021, I hadn’t—
Like many fellow readers, I discovered BookTok in 2020 and never looked back. The recommendations always felt—thanks to the wonders of the mystical algorithm—crafted perfectly for me. As mentioned, I’d already been a huge fantasy fan and had read no shortage of romance novels, but I’d not yet seen them fused into Romantasy until BookTok introduced me to Sarah J Maas and Jennifer Armentrout.
In fantasy, I’d only ever read about young—often male—heroes, who braved everything from dragons to dystopian overlords. Or, in romance, soft-spoken small town girls who fell for bad boys with too many tattoos. Both of which I appreciated in equal measure—but upon discovering romantic fantasy fiction, and seeing the two great loves of my life combined—an entirely new world opened up for me. Suddenly, the sweet small town girl was slaying the dragons, or in the case of my book, A Dawn of Onyx, falling in love with the men that shifted into them… but we’ll get to that later.
By mid-2021, it was safe to say I had consumed every piece of fantasy romance that existed and was hungry for more. Each book hangover seemed worse than the last, as I knew I was running out of titles that would scratch my newfound Romantasy itch. It wasn’t until I brought three books on vacation that I experienced my first ever book slump: I just could not get into a single one of them. I’d read three chapters and find my mind drifting off to what I planned to have for lunch, or—the most cardinal of reader sins—I’d find myself skimming, in hopes of reaching the scenes and characters I so craved. My husband finally asked me: “What are these books are missing?”
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Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was that question which jump-started my journey toward my first novel. My biggest qualm with these perfectly lovely books was that they weren’t blending romance and fantasy in the way I’d come to expect. The stories were either so romance-forward, that the characters were becoming intimate within just a handful of chapters and I was missing all that delicious tension, or they were so fantasy-driven, that I was getting bogged down in complex world building when all I really wanted was character-driven angst. Now, neither of those are faults of these books—they just weren’t what I was looking for as a reader. And that conclusion was the exact spark I needed to begin crafting my own story.
So there, on that beach vacation, I fell down the rabbit hole of the Onyx kingdom, building a story about a woman from a small town with secret healing abilities who was taken prisoner by the dark and mysterious Onyx king. I wrote the exact story I’d been looking for: one with a slow burn romance, a captive/Beauty and the Beast conceit, a dark and broody hero, and a naïve heroine who had the opportunity to grow into so much more. When I returned from vacation, I finished the novel and was fortunate enough to find a path to publication, first going the indie route, and eventually being picked up by Berkley. Now, almost two years later, my second novel in the series, A Promise of Peridot, is coming out on April 9th.
While not quite the usual author path—no formal writing education, no previous works to cut my teeth on—I’m grateful my first book was born from my book slump. In some ways, it forced me to follow one of the most fundamental rules of novel writing: Write the book that you would want to read. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to translate my first love of reading into my second—but just as ardent—love of writing. All I can hope is that that my story inspires another future author to stop skimming that book they can’t get into, and write the story they’re craving instead.
Check out Kate Golden’s A Promise of Peridot here:
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