Novel Beginnings is a series that is all about the novel way my books begin! To celebrate the release of the final novel in The Chaos Theory Duet, I'm talking about book one, Into the Darkest Night today!
What inspired the novel?
When I wrote the original novel, it was called City on Fire and it was when the first boom of comic comebacks was starting to circulate on TV. There were a lot of male-based comics, as of course, there are, and I really wanted a story centered on a strong female. So, I started thinking about popular book themes that I could tie into a story centered around a female vigilante. I landed on billionaire bad-boys, so that's how Levi was born, but I needed to really connect Levi and Ana's experiences -- that's where Ana also being an Elite and the island kicked in. From there, it just really took on a life of it's own. I've always loved archery, so I made Ana an archer. My husband collects knives, so the Nightwatchman became a knife-wielding vigilante. I also did a lot of research for the novel on Shinobi -- or as well call them, ninjas. It was really fun to learn about this ancient culture which is as far as we know, dead. That was one of the main inspirations for the novel -- what if this culture isn't dead? And how would it be influenced by modern culture and greed?
Also, if you like the TV show Arrow, most likely you'll like this, but the themes of the book are not based on Arrow but on a combination of popular book tropes.
What's the plot?
The crux of the plot is rather dystopian. Sun City is run by the Elite and it is divided into districts. Basically, you have the rich, the middle-class and the poor. There's also the element of the Trinity, which is kind of like the mob of Sun City. The head of the Trinity is none other than Ana's father -- and he's really evil. He has her kidnapped and tortured when he finds out she knows too much. Then there's Levi Bennett, the billionaire lady-boy I was referring to. Where Ana lands on the island because she's kidnapped, Levi lands there accidentally when his plane crashes in the ocean. Without getting too far into it, they both end up back in Sun City but are quite damaged from what happened on 'the island.' While Ana wants to correct her father's wrongs, Levi is all about partying that pain away. And that's all I'm saying!
What was my path to publication?
This is an interesting story. I actually wrote the book back in 2014, when I was in college. I don't know how I managed to do it, but I wrote 120k words in less than two months. I was experimenting and did this all on Wattpad. I didn't keep track of word count and just wrote, wrote, wrote. And what a mess it was. I took it off Wattpad pretty quickly and began tearing into it. I cut it down to 110k words with the help of betas and critique partners and then decided I wanted to query. I changed a lot of the plot -- originally Ana gets knocked up, and they all work for Sam at the tech company he runs. I hadn't queried for like 7 books, so that was a big deal for me. I spent a lot of time researching agents and came up with about 50 to send to. Not one request. Then I tried submitting to small pubs, and finally I just decided to self-publish it, but it was really too long for romantic suspense, so I decided to make it into a duet. Thus, The Chaos Theory Duet was born. There were still more plot changes to come, though! My critique partner, Moriah, suggested I pretty much change the whole theme to add an additional trope -- cops. So Ana became a cop, and that really ended up gluing the whole storyline together. And here we are.
Why should you read it?
Kick-butt heroine
Billionaire bad-boy
Suspense
Star-crossed lovers
Lots of fight scenes
Ninjas!
And if you want to hear me read an excerpt of the book, you can head over to my Instagram TV (@cgiovanniauthor.) Oh, yeah, and it's FREE for a limited time*!
*Amazon has not price matched yet, but is $0.99!