A Brief Story Behind Chasing Casanova
Besides thanking God immensely, I really have to thank my friend whose avatar was also in this book, since she was the one who kept encouraging me to write a novel about my internship period and also the time when I used to hang out together with Carlo at the office, despite working for two different UN agencies. And of course, Seba, who introduced me to him.
I daresay that my internship moment was arguably still the best moment of my life so far. Carlo was one of the reason why. That’s why I wrote it down to a novel. Some of the scenes and dialogues happened for real, but of course the rest were modified to accommodate the plot. Too bad I couldn’t insert all of the moments I had with Carlo at the office. Even though, we didn’t work at the same office and never communicated via phone because I wasn’t confident enough to ask for his number, only a friend on Facebook, but we met each other accidentally quite a lot. Ever since I got acquainted to him, it was as if he was everywhere in my sight, but it didn’t mean we always talked since I was such a shy girl at that time. That’s why sometimes I was kinda shocked but also proud of myself that I even had the courage to tease him haha. In my teenage eyes, he was such an adorable and gorgeus person, so it didn’t take long for my young heart to develop a crush on him.
Years later, I could only laughed when it came to Arina (the main character of the book). Despite being amused, I have to admit I still have a little regret that I lost contact of him and never got the chance to know more about him, until the day that I heard the shocking news of his passing.
But I’m so grateful that he, Marco (one of his best friends), and Seba could be my muse to write a fiction trilogy. And then, my friend knew that I am an avid reader and she was impressed with my exciting moments that happened at the Menara Thamrin building. So, I took her advice and began to write. Voila! Chasing Casanova was born in early 2016. The year I finished it before I was brave enough to submit it to some publishers. If I’m not mistaken I sent it to ten publishers, one accepted it. Alas, it had another projects to work on so roughly speaking, my draft got neglected. Until I finally decided to retrieve it back since the publisher couldn’t tell me the exact time when they could begin to continue with my draft. I tried with other publishers, but unfortunately I got no luck. So, months later in the mid of 2017, I decided to get back to the previous publisher that accepted my draft. Fortunately, they were still willing to accept it and they could proceed with it immediately. I couldn’t be more excited. It took almost another year to finally publish the first installment of Chasing Casanova in an ebook format in Google Playstore. I wrote it in Indonesian because at that time I only thought about reaching the local readers. But I can’t help adding a plenty of English, and a little bit of Italian and French sentences here and there.
OMG let’s not give me a chance to write another book on this section,, Without a further ado, here is the excerpt of chapter 1 – 3 in English. I want to thank you all in advance for reading this debut of mine and God bless you if you are hooked up and really
want to read more. I hope you enjoy it as much as enjoyed writing it. Stay healthy and have a nice day!