Hello, hello! If you are here reading along, then first and foremost, thanks for checking out my blog! I’m Chanel the author of Black Orchids Cry Gold
Personally, I’m a tad awkward with writing blogs, I have written blogs before, but I like to keep things personal and casual, and I feel like blogs sometimes aren’t that whatsoever. You don’t want to ramble on, but you want to be personable I guess. lol. What you’re suppose to do is keep things polished and book oriented here, I suppose. But I really like watching and reading “behind the scenes” works, so I think I’m going to go that route with this.
This is supposed to help promote my book, which I’m excited I finally got the gull to launch it. I have been writing Black Orchids Cry Gold for a while now. And I just decided I was done reading it a million times, and I was going to push it out to the universe and get over myself and my insecurities and fears.
I have a pretty bad fear of being perceived. At times, it can be debilitating. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically an intense fear of being watched, judged, or scrutinized by others, like strangers or personal friends or family members. It goes way beyond normal shyness and it causes significant distress to me, basically causing me to partake in extreme social avoidance. But I had to tell myself to get over it, and if I pass out from humiliation, we will all will know why. (lol)
So I’m detaching myself from this fear and moving on and forward with this passion project of mine. I’m excited to finally push it out there and finally manifest my goals that have cultivated into a massive dream of mine. I’m a self published author. I realized that was really the way to go. I had a few rejection letters but a couple feedback letters suggested self publishing due to my genre bending structure. And I agree, if it becomes something, then cool, and if not, then I can at least say I did it.
People ask me “what kind of book did you write?”
And uh…I don’t know what I wrote lol.
I wasn’t saying the whole time, “I’m going to write a dark romance,” I just wrote down what I felt was right for the book and this is what came out.
I edited with AI. I know its a taboo topic/political topic. And at the end of the day, I should have just listened, because I tried to edit with AI, and it is a nightmare, just FYI. I highly don’t recommend this. I recommend a real person to edit your work, and just pay them the money, because it’s so much easier than to argue with a freaking software about why you want things to be the way they are in your descriptions and in your character creations. AI will change everything you have worked so hard on. And it’s just not worth your time arguing with an inanimate object about why you chose to write something the way you did. I did only basic edits with it, but next book I’m just going to do the old fashioned editor route.
With that being said for my basics edits Chat GPT was the most helpful, but also the most infuriating. Grammarly was okay. If you’re writing a college paper, I recommend Grammarly. It has MLA and APA formatting, otherwise, the only reason why I used Grammarly, is because you can run a plagiarism report on your work with them. Which I did, and I passed. I highly recommend anyone who is writing a book to do this especially if you are self publishing. It’s better to be safer than sorry later. It runs your manuscript against everything on the internet and everything that has been published. And if it catches something, it will help you fix it to not match whatever it found in the first place. And then Microsoft Copilot I used once or twice because it just there, but it was very generic, but I feel like you can get the same edits from Grammarly.
While I was there in Chat GPT, I asked AI what genre my book was and it gave me a few genres. It said I was a gothic dark romance literary writer with psychological thriller and noir vibes, it also said I was a Dark Contemporary Romance Literary Writer, it said I was a Psychological Dark Romance with a political structure. It says so many things, so I went with the Romance Suspense/Dark Contemporary Romance genre because the point of the book is about the love interests in the book, and what makes it dark is the trauma in the book. I don’t think it’s a gothic book. I think the aesthetics of the book is gothic, and there are some area’s in the book where it leans toward gothic literary I guess, but I still don’t think its a gothic book.
I think I did lean into noir a bit. There are some old fashion noir dialogue and descriptions in the book that I did unintentionally lean into and I feel like it works rather well in the book.
I really tried not to lean into any crazy tropes which was hard. But the tropes that I do recognize in the book are:
Tropes & Themes:
• Slow burn, sort of, the time frame is only like two months, but it feels like a slow burn. And you will feel it in book 2 as well. (Black Orchids Bleed Velvet comes out later in 2026)
• Old enemies briefly to forced allies to lovers
• Age gap (23 / 29) not really an age gap to me, but some would consider this an age gap
• Multi-POV (emotional, political, and romantic perspectives)
• Billionaire dark romance, but it really isn’t like the typical billionaire dark romance lol the theme is there though.
• Found-family corruption inside secret society.
• Trauma, survival, and identity collapse
• Seduction as power
• Legacy families and dynastic politics
• Psychological sexual tension
• “Dangerous” men with soft centers
So this is what I pulled out along with morally gray characters. Like everyone has the potential to be a good person/bad person and maybe you feel against or in agreement about what is being said in the book about the character.
So there is a lot of manipulative dramatic games in the book as well.
The main female character in this book is emotion led which I feel like works, but she’s a bottler at times, which builds a bunch of tension throughout the book.
There’s also about three plot lines happening at once. and it will be that way throughout the whole series. There are 5-6 books planned for The Velvet Legacy Series.
Please feel free to read along with my blog, if you have any questions feel free to ask.
-Chanel
Chanel Pacheco 