Today I am welcoming author Gillian Felix to StoreyBook Reviews.  She has a trilogy called the Family Portrait Series and each book focuses on one member of the family.  Today Gillian is filling us in on how she came up with this series.

Welcome Gillian!

The Birth of Family Portrait Novels

As a child I used to hate doing the dishes (I still do), to get out of doing them, I used to bribe my younger sister with a story if she’d do them for me. While she did them, I would pull up a chair, and tell her stories of cool American kids who lived in Los Angeles. Why LA? I don’t know, I didn’t know anywhere else, plus we used to get television shows filmed in Hollywood and everything seemed so sparkly and nice. And so the Banovic, the DaCostas and the Malone family was born.

Over the years the story has evolved, the Banovic, DaCosta and Malone kids have grown up and started families of their own. With all the family history between them I figured it would be fantastic to capture that in a story. I’d written the story from so many angles over the years and in 2010, I decided to focus on their off springs, living in the present time.

When I queried the first book to agents, I had written the main character, Adriana Banovic as a young, hot, up and coming actress making a name for herself on the Hollywood circuit. Several rejection letters later, I decided to turn it into a television series.

Made for TV

In the TV version I wrote Adriana as a 15 year-old, washed up soap star, forced to fit in at a prestigious high school. I pitched it to a couple of production companies and got interest but they wanted it to be more of a half-hour comedy format.

I had already written 2 seasons worth of material with it as a dramedy, and changing it to their format would completely change where I felt the story could go. I had envisioned a Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Beverly Hills 90210 type show. At that time I entered the pilot script into a British TV writing competition and it place in the top 10 out of 4000!

Fast forward to 2013, frustrated with Hollywood and traditional publishing, I decided to self-publish.

Birth of the novel series

I changed the pilot script into the first novel, Changes. Readers enjoyed it and expressed interest in reading more so I released The Banovic Siblings and shortly after Bastard’s Brew. The forth novel The Perfect Escape will be released later this year.

While the novel series has its funny moments, it is much darker than the script. I made Adriana an angst ridden teenage trouble maker, and bumped up her eldest brother Kevin’s character into a drug dealing bad boy, who gets himself tangled up with the wrong woman. There is still a lot of drama to come with the Banovic, DaCosta and Malone kids all leading up to the final book, where Adriana is a 21 year-old up and coming actress, who has made a name for herself in Hollywood.

I hope readers will enjoy Adriana’s journey to adulthood and stardom.