June Featured Author – Amy Lane

I taught English for 18 years, I have four kids–two of them grown and out of the house but two of them still in activity whirlwind, and I am writing in my head almost constantly!

Books were always my happy place– and Robin McKinley, Anne McCaffrey and Patricia McKillip helped me overcome the bumps of adolescence, while Harlequin Temptation and Amanda Quick and Julie Garwood helped me find my footing as a new mother and young wife. I sort of threw all of that together to write urban fantasy and gay romance.

Well, my seminal series is the Little Goddess series– book one (which will be on sale this week, actually) is Vulnerable–and I pulled heavily from my own past and from the kids I was teaching at the time. At the beginning of the series, Cory, our heroine is defensive, prickly, and pissed off. Being different isn’t easy in a small town setting, and she took her differences and made them her armor. Into this festering bubble of hostility walks the sweetest, most vulnerable vampire that literature has ever seen–and Cory allows herself to fall in love. But falling in love with a vampire opens up a whole new world to her–because that’s just the beginning of book one. By the time we get to book five (the second half of which is out on June 13th) Cory has endured joy and heartbreak, pain and wonder–and she’s about to embark on her greatest adventure yet–but I’ll let you read the series to see what that is.

Because I didn’t see any heroines like Cory at the time. Not rich, not educated, but smart– she represented myself as I worked through college, and my school kids as I tried to tell them they could be anything they wanted–as long as they worked hard. But it’s hard to see the world with a chip on your shoulder–and I wanted to show that too.

Because it’s different. The series started out derivative–elves and vampires were new and spiffy then, and I loved jumping on that train–but I have long been accused of not fitting into any mold (even people at the post office tell me “You really do hear your own drummer, don’t you?”) and my writing isn’t any different. As soon as I found my groove in Cory’s world, I realized that writing for me was a way of telling basic truths. Kindness matters. Defend what you love. Forgiveness isn’t weakness. The world isn’t neat and tidy, it’s messy–forgive things for not fitting in the box. These themes aren’t represented often in American fiction, but they’re important to me. Patricia Briggs once said to me (while I was signing her book and making a hash out of it, because OMG PATRICIA BRIGGS!) “Everything you write is filled with such compassion.”  The compliment made me cry–but it also made me aware of why I write–why I’ve always written, and it started with this book.

Start here and it will all follow 🙂

Don’t miss the release of Quickening Vol 2, coming June 13!