Hi!

I’m K.N.R, and The Last Flower is my first book, but hopefully not my last.

Obviously, I like to write… but I also love to be outside. I live somewhere with four beautiful seasons (except winter).

The story behind the writing of The Last Flower is actually very interesting. As all books do, the Last Flower started as an idea. About two years ago, an idea began to form, and the main focus was on science- particularly cryogenics, the science of very low temperatures. Over time, there have been tons of crazy incidents involving freezing cells, people getting stuck in snowbanks, and the cold.

This led me to start thinking about mountains and the people who climb them. How many climbers were forever stuck on mountains, frozen under layers and layers of snow? And really, some of these climbers had simply frozen to death. There were no other complications, just the fact that it got too cold for them to survive. So there were basically perfectly preserved climbers, buried under piles of ice and snow. Realistically, it’s not possible to bring people back from the dead, but it seemed like it could make a really good story. On top of that, this topic hadn’t been touched a lot in books, especially books written in more of a realistic style.

My first draft of The Last Flower was very different, just a couple of pages. That first draft is completely different from the final book today, but it’s interesting to see how much has changed, which is almost everything. And for two years, that document went untouched- but I never stopped thinking about that idea and how much I liked it. Over time, after reading books about mountain climbing and articles about cryogenics, my idea started to take shape.

I had just gotten back from a long trip- I had jet lag and I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time, but this idea, out of nowhere, just perfectly took place inside my head. After years of thinking and thinking, the pieces fell into place. I knew where I wanted the book to take place, I knew how I wanted the characters to act, and how I wanted the plot to develop. It wasn’t a final idea, but I would say that 90% of that idea is worked into my book today.

I was so sure of this idea that I stopped what I was doing and opened up a blank Pages document on my MacBook and just started writing. I wrote down a summary of the plot on one page, and then I just started my intro from scratch. That same intro is still in my book. I polished it up a little and had some friends give me advice on it, but other than that, the intro still remains the same.

For three months, my only focus was my book. I never stopped writing the book ever since I had typed that first sentence, and it occupied my mind. All. The. Time. Before school, I wrote a couple paragraphs. When I got home from school, I wrote a few pages. On the weekends, I wrote whole chapters, developed side plots, and added to the story. For those months, the only thing I thought about was my book. When I was in class, lying in bed, playing sports. It never escaped my mind. And I loved writing it. Some chapters are harder than others, yes, but every chapter was exciting.

Someone once told me that they loved writing because, “In writing, everything is just right there, out in front of you, waiting. All you have to do is find a way to string it together. There are so many possibilities. With other things, like art, you have to start purely from scratch. The picture in your head never matches what you create. It can be so frustrating. But with writing, you can almost always get exactly what you want.” And that really resonated with me. It made so much sense. Everything was exactly how I wanted it to be, and it’s such a sweet feeling.

Interestingly enough, I finished the story in the same place I had visited just before I started my story. It felt right- like that’s where it was supposed to be finished. Obviously, that wasn’t the end of the mess I had gotten myself into, there was editing and proofreading and all those details, but that’s not important.

So it doesn’t have to be a big professional process, writing a book. It can just be a crazy idea and a blank Pages document. That’s all.

So start writing!