Born in Palo Alto, California, Savannah Burton could have had the world. With both her parents knee-deep in the computer empires rooted in Silicon Valley, they were rich enough to give her creature comforts and to give her all kinds of opportunities, but not so rich as to cause her to be a trust-fund baby. She grew up, not really knowing about how much her parents really made, mostly because they didn't want to influence her career choices later in life. While they might have hoped Savannah would follow in their footsteps or beyond them, she grew up with a lot of struggles, emotionally and identity-wise, which left her really undecided throughout her life. It wasn't until college that she really began to figure things out.
During a particularly difficult time, Savannah found her way to the school's psychologist. It was then that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that allowed Savannah some understanding as to her emotional life and her struggles in life. The diagnosis was profound enough an impact to make her rethink her degree in communication and reassess who she was and what she was doing with her life. She continued with school, though she dropped out of her communication classes and threw in a few that sounded interesting. When she took creative writing, though, she Savannah discovered she had an outlet. And she really enjoyed writing. She immediately changed her major to creative writing, worked on her writing as best as she could, and researched her newly discovered identity as someone with a mental disorder.
When she graduated, she groveled to her parents for money. While she'd had a few jobs, they hadn't taken her love for writing too seriously and had encouraged her to go the business route: administrative jobs were easy for someone smart and talented, and they made decent money. She begged them for assistance, and they were gracious, setting her up with an apartment and funding her while she made her attempts at writing. While her first few attempts got her nowhere, a small publisher in San Francisco picked up the third book she'd written. While it was a modest success, the publisher never took too much time on marketing her. Savannah, who had been dedicating her entire life to her work, began to get annoyed. While she stayed with the publisher for a while, writing another two books, she found that the company still didn't have enough faith in her to even take a chance extending their marketing nationwide. Determined to find her success elsewhere, she began to research publishing companies on her own for a trilogy of books she was writing… ones she was certain would be her best yet.
While she was writing, Savannah found another thing she was passionate about—politics. While she wasn't one for all the left-wing-right-wing-political-agenda-winning-states side of politics, she was passionate about advocacy and the ideas behind what politicians were fighting for. With the many stances on terrorism, Registry, and the Evolved, she began to write about a trio of college students one of which finds himself Evolved, in an alternate universe. By setting it elsewhere, she allowed herself the opportunity to speak her mind and to really say powerful things about both pro and anti-Evolved extremists, the Registry, and terrorist acts in the name of different factions. Ignoring her other work or even much of her social life, she spent night and day pouring herself into the trilogy. As she wrote, she sought out a publisher who would understand her passion, her dedication, and the power the books would have on people.
The first book of the trilogy, she had written in the wake of the bomb. While the public revelations hadn't occurred, she used the bomb for inspiration setting the first book in an alternate universe that was more post-apocalyptic. Two of her good friends from college turned out to be Evolved, a secret which she kept but had used as inspiration for her books. With the first one written, it could have been just another random superhero book. But as she finished it, the public revelation of the Evolved happened. That was when her first book of the trilogy was already on the desk in a publishing agency in New York, where the publishing industry was bigger—she had hoped to use a bigger company to at least get her foot in the door, even if her books didn't make it big.
It was the timing and Savannah's subsequent manuscripts, quickly using current events and Evolved-related issues as inspiration to spawn a series that was not only interesting to the young adult and even adult audience, but on a grander scale as a politically charged novel. It made people think. Following the first book, which was rushed into publication shortly after the revelation, the second came about a year after and the third was released on the third anniversary of the revelation of the Evolved: Feb. 17th, 2010. It was no coincidence and carefully planned for marketing. While a recent interview mid-summer of 2010 had no conclusive facts if Savannah was writing a sequel to the series… she did admit she had a project in the works.
