Guard Your Soul: Announcing Jivaja by Venessa Giunta

Over here at Speculative Chic, we’ve been blessed by having a lot of our contributors release books this year. There’s so many, we haven’t even had a chance to cover them all! That said, I’m super excited to announced the debut novel from our very own Venessa Giunta, who’s always keeping us in the loop when it comes to conventions. But today, she’s releasing Jivaja, her debut novel that features:

A stolen soul. A civil war. A father’s secret.

A woman hunted.

Intrigued? I am! Let’s learn more about Jivaja, and then hear Venessa talk about how the book came into being!

The Book:

Jivaja (2018)
Written by: Venessa Giunta
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Supernatural Thriller
Series: Soul Cavern (Book 1)
Publisher: Fictionvale Publishing

The Premise:

Mecca is a murderer.

That’s what she thinks when she accidentally kills a man who attacks her in the parking lot of her favorite coffee shop. Self defense, right? Except how is she to explain that she killed him with only a hand on his wrist?

Vampires don’t exist. At least, not in the “traditional” sense. The Visci, a species that subsists on human blood, are not undead. They’re not human. And they never were.

Close kin to humans, the Visci pass within our society easily, and over millennia, have wedged their way into positions of power. Long-lived, they are also very difficult to kill. However, they have an evolutionary flaw. While they do not die easily, they also do not reproduce easily. But they can mate with humans — and have, giving rise to a population of human-Visci hybrids, called half-bloods by those of pure Visci lineage.

For centuries, they lived and worked together, these half-bloods and pure bloods. But tensions have risen and civil war is now raging on the doorstep.

But Mecca Trenow knows none of this when she flees to her father, panicked over her unintended use of the family Gift: the one that allows her to manipulate human energy. She’s always hated her gift and refused to learn anything about it beyond how to control it so she would do no harm. That is, until a rogue pure blood attacks her and she reacts instinctively, draining his life — the life he’s stolen from another — out of him in moments.

And now she’s a murderer.

When word gets back to the Visci of someone who can kill one of their kind with just a touch, the race is on to acquire Mecca as a weapon in the coming battle. As she learns about this shadowy underground group, she also discovers her father’s dark past and the secret he has kept from her all of her life.

Reeling from this discovery and unable to trust the one person she has always counted on, Mecca is isolated from everything she once knew, all the while being hunted by dangerous creatures bent on using her Gift for their own bloody purposes.

Jivaja is the first book in the Soul Cavern series.

Congratulations on the publication of your debut novel! Jivaja has been a long time coming: can you share some of that journey?

Thank you! I wrote Jivaja originally as my thesis for my Masters Degree in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University (which you well know of, since we met there!) about ten years ago. So yes, it’s definitely been a long time coming!

After I completed it, it sat in the drawer for a long time, partially because I started focusing on freelance and contract fiction editing. And the other part, if I’m 100% honest, was fear. Fear of failure or fear of success — take your pick. I’d had some minor interest from traditional publishing, but ultimately did not go that route.

And I’ve written a bunch of other things in between, including a completed novel I’ll be publishing soon in which 12 year old twins discover they are the keepers of Pandora’s Box, which is not what we think it is. I also have the first two books of a zombie-not-zombie series (much like Jivaja is vampire-not-vampire) about 75% complete and plan to launch those late next year. So I never stopped writing. I just wasn’t putting any of it out there.

After ten years of putting my writing — or rather, publishing — on hold in favor of editing, late last year I decided that 2018 was going to be the year I really focused on my own work. I cut back drastically on my editorial roster (I still take select clients occasionally) to concentrate on my writing.

And here we are!

Here we are indeed! So you mentioned you had minor interest from the traditional side of publishing: is that why you decided to strike out on your own?

I think I had minor interest not because there wasn’t much interest, but because I wasn’t very proactive. Every trad publishing person I pitched it to (even informal pitches that sort of happen when you’re chatting in the bar at cons — “What are you working on?”) ended up in a request for the manuscript. But I didn’t always send it, even when asked for. I know, I’m a bad author, bad! 😉

Have you ever had a situation where you procrastinated on a thing for no good reason? I feel like I procrastinated on shopping the manuscript because I was waiting for indie publishing to become more viable. Print on Demand was in its very latent infancy when I finished Jivaja. But now, it’s a full-bodied and independent eco-system on its own.

Don’t get me wrong — I love traditional publishing too. I just wish the Big Five would get with the times. I wish they would have learned from the music industry and shifted faster; the writing was on the wall very early on. They’re still working with a business model that is 100 years old and they’re only coming along kicking and screaming because they have to; not because they understand that it is time to rewrite the entire script.

You mentioned that Jivaja was your thesis novel back at Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction Program. Since I know when you graduated, I have to ask, what kind of changes did the manuscript go through from then to now?

Well, ten years ago, we didn’t have smart phones! Definitely had to bring things into this decade, technologically speaking. Flat screen monitors and Bluetooth connectivity. I also had to change a scene where one of the characters tracks down the location of another character, because there are better ways to do it now than there were ten years ago.

I really think those were probably the biggest changes, the tech differences. Though because I hadn’t worked on the manuscript in several years, I was able to tackle revisions as if I were working with a client and that was an interesting experience. I’d gotten a really good amount of distance from the story, so it was a bit different than the usual revision experience.

Very cool. You talked on your blog when you released the cover about changing the title. What’s the story behind that?

First, let me say, I suck at titles. I get maybe one good title idea a year. Some years that title ends up going to a class I teach (like Manuscript Corsetry, which is about revisions — tightening up your story), so whatever fiction I’ve written that year is just out of luck in the title department.

As I mentioned, the novel’s been complete for quite some time, and I’ve had interest from industry pros along the way. Pretty much very published author and industry pro I know said that the original title, Soul Cavern, just wasn’t catchy enough, wouldn’t work for marketing. And while I certainly didn’t disagree with them, I also didn’t have anything better.

And then my cover artist, Sophia from The Book Brander, was working on what is now the cover, and I was doing last minute read-throughs of chapters. And there it was. Right there, on the page! I’d completely forgotten I’d even used the word. So I dashed an email off to Sophia, apologizing for being That Author who changes stuff last minute and gave her the new name, Jivaja. It turns out that it fit the cover much better, as you can see, and I think it’s much more attention-grabbing too!

Indeed it is! I know I’m super-excited to read Jivaja, and I hope our readers are too! You can read sample chapters at Venessa’s website here, and don’t forget to pick up your copy on Amazon or Barnes & Noble!