Power Play was not the story I meant to write.
The plan for the Supervillain Rescue Project series has always been four books. The overarching story for the series is Jake's growth as he grows from a villain to a hero, but I intended for individual stories in the series to belong to each of the three kids, so book one Jake, book two Laleh, book three (coming next year!) Marco ... then book four returning to Jake again.
So I always knew book two would be Laleh's chance to take center stage and show the most growth, but my original plan was for book 2 to be a survival competition story. The kids would have another group of teens join them and they'd be competing in a wilderness race ... but I couldn't get into it. After staring at the half-finished outline for about a week, I told my friend/fellow writer Janeen I just couldn't get into it then was like, "I should write something different like, I don't know .... (first idea that popped into my head) ... what if they got sucked into a game."
Images attached, inspiration in real time:
As soon as the idea presented itself, I was excited about it. To the point where I completely trashed what outlining I'd done and whipped up a new outline with the new gaming premise.
I think part of my excitement was that I started playing Dungeons & Dragons this year. There are a bunch of inside jokes in this book that you would only catch if you were a part of my D&D group (an admittedly small circle) though the references to the genre overall were pretty fun.
So ... yeah ... that's where this book came from. It releases December 3rd (tomorrow as of when I'm writing this), so if you want a copy, click here!