Inside: Baby Girl

Where the stories begin long before the books exist.

Before Baby Girl was a book, it was a conversation.

It started in 2023 while I was working at a local salon. Between clients, we talked about books we loved, stories that stayed with us, and characters that felt real long after the last page. One day, almost casually, I said, “What if I wrote one?”

She offered to be my alpha reader.
The one who would read raw chapters.
The one who would tell me what landed and what didn’t.

That was it.
That was the beginning.

I wrote Baby Girl chapter by chapter while working. I’d tweak scenes between appointments. We’d talk about the story out loud as it unfolded. Clients overheard pieces of it. It became this quiet, living thing happening in real time.

At first, it was supposed to be simple.
A story.
A series.
Five books.

But stories don’t always follow plans.

By the time the draft was finished, something had shifted. The characters were louder. More complex. The emotional weight was heavier than I expected. I realized I didn’t want a long series that diluted the impact. I wanted something tighter. Three books. Enough space to say what needed to be said — and stop before the truth got lost.

Then life happened.

In 2024, I left the salon. My ESA, Onyx, passed away just before my oldest son’s sixteenth birthday. Grief reshaped everything. I went back into survival mode — personally and professionally.

That version of Baby Girl sat quietly for a while.

When I picked it back up later that year, I edited with different eyes. I brought in beta readers. Some noticed details I hadn’t consciously placed — including Onyx, woven into the story as a way of letting him live on.

In 2025, I went deeper.
Public beta readers.
Real feedback.
Hard edits.

That’s when the world cracked open.

I started thinking about characters the way I think about people — as interconnected, shaped by bloodlines, chance meetings, proximity, trauma, love. I began mapping relationships like family trees. Not just who they are — but why they are the way they are.

That was the moment the Daughters of Violence Universe became real.

Baby Girl stopped being “book one.”
It became the entry point.

Meg’s story carries pieces of me — but it isn’t my story. Each character holds a fragment of lived experience, refracted into something new and distinct. Writing them became a way to explore different outcomes, different paths, different forms of survival.

I wrote Baby Girl during a time when my own world felt like it was collapsing. I didn’t know then that it would become a form of rebirth — for me and, eventually, for readers.

The mission of the DOVU isn’t to sensationalize trauma.
It’s to hold space for it.

For those who lost their voices.
For those who don’t want to explain what they survived.
For those who want to move forward without performing their pain.

This universe exists so stories can carry what people shouldn’t have to.

My first short story in seventh grade was about a girl who saw her bruises as galaxies — until she returned to the stars, free of pain. It alarmed a teacher. A counselor stepped in. They later learned I had just been removed from an abusive home.

That twelve-year-old girl learned how to speak through stories.

Baby Girl is her voice — grown, steadier, no longer silent.

This is why the universe expands.
Because one story never exists alone.

🖤
✍🏻 Anya Marie Whitmore writes within the Daughters of Violence Universe—where survival meets story.