Alum Tackles One Week Book Challenge

What type of person would be brave enough to write a 50,000 word manuscript in one week? A 2014 University of Maryland English Alum!

Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), 2014 Alum Ari Goldfarb, who writes under the pen name R.K. Gold, decided to take on this challenge. At around 7,200 words per day, Ari survived “on a diet almost solely of writing for one week.” In the end, he created a novel following an artist’s road trip to Maine after recently hitting rock bottom and losing his father.

Ari said he started blogging about his project and was surprised by how quickly it picked up; “Want to Write a Book in One Week” is a very intriguing headline that got him lots of clicks. This attention led to tweets and emails from other writers not only encouraging Ari, but also telling him his manuscript was an inspiration to pick up their long lost project or pursue a book idea.

Ari’s manuscript isn’t the first piece of literature he’s written, and it’s certainly not the first time he’s used social media and the Internet for promotion. Earlier this year, Ari self-published The Little Black Book through Amazon which has a user-friendly step by step process for publishing. Now, Ari is working on his first book deal with Weasel Press. Just Under the Sky is an unconventional story about an isolated village surrounded by an off-limits legendary forest. After a drunken night, the protagonist wakes up alone deep in the forest only to discover the truth about the forest’s myths.

Twitter and Facebook are “GOLD” when promoting yourself as a writer, according to Ari, and he used those tools to reach out to Weasel Press and eventually land his one-year book deal. After finding Weasel Press, Ari followed them on Twitter, retweeted their accomplishments and submitted a couple pieces to their journals and anthologies. He wrote a query letter, sent them his manuscript and received his offer a month later.

As for the English major, Ari said it taught him the discipline of writing and helped him find his voice as a writer. “When you’re assigned to read for three English classes in one night, those voices and tones all collide in your head and you end up slowly finding out who you are as a writer,” he said. He gives a special thank you to University of Maryland Professors Thomas Earles (ENGL), Adam Nixon (COMM), Barry Pearson (ENGL), and Luka Arsenjuk (FILM).

Ari says he hopes students will “know their passion and go for it. Don’t cheapen it by only thinking about it.”

For more information on Ari and his upcoming works follow him on social media.