(bigger picture on website—brianyansky.wordpress.com)

 Here is my cover (I’m really happy with the way it came out) for the second novel in the The Poe Detective Agency series. The novel will be out in December. 

 

This new novel takes up about six months after the first and it jumps right into a case Detective Romeo Moon is assigned. In this one The Fates, Greek goddesses who determine or transcribe the future, are kidnapped. This is the idea I had and what I started writing. I thought it would be a novella, somewhere between 70 and 90 pages about the kidnapping of the goddesses by another well-known character, Lucifer. I thought it would play with ideas about free will and fate. 

 

But something happened.

 

The biggest thing I didn’t see was how important the relationship between Romeo (Poe detective) and Julia (villain) was going to be to the story. At the end of the first novel the two fell in love—that big love with a capital L. They became boyfriend and girlfriend. 

 

When the second novel begins, they’re in a relationship and have moved in together. I wanted to explore how two people genuinely in love whose lives and occupations were diametrically opposed (one wants to uphold the law and one wants to break it) could survive (or not) in such an environment. The struggle was what interested me. That part of the novel kept growing. I connected that story to the first story and those 70 pages swelled to around 250. The novella grew into a novel.

 

The title of the novel became The Detective and the Villain in Love because the emotional plot of the novel comes from their relationship and the struggle to save it. It’s the heart of the story. Meanwhile, the case of the kidnapping and Romeo’s and the devil’s battle (the devil wants to change the future and kidnapped the Fates to do so) creates much of the external conflict and action. The two stories eventually intersect.

 

So first the story started off as a novella. Then the plot divided into two plots that seemed to fit together even though they didn’t, on the surface, seem like they should fit together. This has happened to me before-- two stories work their way into a narrative and the friction  and dynamic between two very different stories merges in an interesting way that drives and deepens the narrative.

 

I love it when it all comes together. It’s the greatest feeling.