Love Bytes says hello and welcome to author Amy Lane joining us today to talk about her new release “Quickening” part of the Little Goddess series. Welcome Amy 🙂
The Final Frontier By Amy Lane
I’ve got four kids.
I had two of them when Mate and I skirted the poverty level, and had two of them after some financial stability. Three of them before Vulnerable, and one I labored with during a certain chapter of Bound. Two boys, two girls, two in the 90’s, two in the early 00’s, one with a cognitive disability, one with ADHD, one with chronic depression, and one who’s so bright and so sunshiny that I worry I have done something wrong.
Four kids, four pregnancies, four labor and delivery stories.
Four times I’ve told my parents, four times my husband has had to do the unthinkable and deal with vomit, four times I’ve had my nipples gnawed on for anywhere from eight to fourteen months, four completely different personalities I have had to adjust to when this little alien succubus takes over my body and moves into my house and makes me buy all this stuff.
Four kids.
They are a part of my life, a part of my psyche, a part of my waking and sleeping. When I was pregnant with my fourth, I would get home from a full day in the classroom, fall asleep in my chair while the third crawled around the living room, and suddenly sit up and terrify the first and second screaming, “OH MY GOD WHERE’S ZOOMBOY!” The first two kids may never recover—but that’s what having kids does to our psyches.
We. Are. Not. The. Same.
Oddly enough, this is a phenomenon that’s not dealt with much in urban fantasy.
I mean, I’ve been pregnant—with my first, I worked until the week before I gave birth, and after I left work, I spent the next week Christmas shopping until that kid popped out an hour after his due date had passed. I lost my mucus plug in the bathroom of Sunrise Mall for Christ’s sake—and kept on waddling until Mate and I by God had all the shit we needed. I went back to work when that kid was six weeks old. I had to. That kid smiled his first real smile from the back of the car as his dad pulled away from dropping me off.
Little shit. Way to break mommy’s heart.
What I’m saying is that one of the awesome things about women in urban fantasy is that they have equal social heft to the men. A woman can’t get an equal wage in real life, but by God in UCF, she can kick ass with the guys, right? She kills the monsters with the guys, changes the face of the world with the guys… uh, has sex with the guys.
And yes—having children should be a choice—always—but what if the choice is to have the children, no matter how inconveniently timed?
Does that make her less of a kick ass? Does that make her less strong?
I beg to frickin’ differ.
One of the scenes I wrote once that I’m most proud of was in Bitter Moon, when a secondary character—who was pregnant when she’s introduced—goes into labor as the men are having a town council meeting in her kitchen. She literally writes policy between contractions, and the only person who knows is her husband.
Tell me women aren’t tough enough.
But pregnancy can limit the body—and if your kick ass heroine goes out and faces danger on a regular basis, is, in fact, a little bit of a control freak about it, accepting these limitations in the course of her regular kick-ass day is going to be something of a challenge.
And pregnancy really is a magical thing—and not always in the good way, either. Shazam! You just put on 20 lbs. from eating coffee and bagels! Abracadabra! Chicken makes you yack! Things that doctors and nurses patronizingly tell you are “just normal body functions” feel accelerated and out of control and what do you mean I’m making a person just by breathing?
So I thought that this was unexplored territory. My heroine isn’t brain dead and she doesn’t have an incurable disease.
What she does have are two ginormous babies in a tiny, fragile, human body.
She got pregnant because her indomitable will broke her lovers’ birth control. And it’s not that she doesn’t want their children. It’s that being the mommy might just be the toughest test of will she’ll ever have—and that includes being the Queen of the Northern California Fey and Undead.
Because after four (or is it seven…) books wherein she saves the world and saves her lovers’ lives and tries to get her degree in every-frickin-thing, I thought she needed a wee bit of a challenge.
Blurb:
Little Goddess: Book Five Volume One Cory thought she’d found balance on Green’s hill—sorceress, student, queen of the vampires, wife to three men—she had it down! But establishing her right to risk herself with Green and Bracken had more than one consequence, and now she’s facing the world’s scariest job title: mother. But getting the news that she’s knocked up takes a backseat when a half-elf hunts them down for help. Her arrival brings news that the werewolf threat, which has been haunting them for over a year, has finally arrived on their doorstep—and it’s bigger and more frightening than they’d ever imagined. Cory throws herself into this new battle with everything she’s got—and her men let her do it. Because they all know that whether they defeat this enemy now or later, the thing she’s most afraid of is arriving on a set schedule, and not even Cory can avoid it. The trick is getting her to acknowledge she’s pregnant before she gives birth—or kills herself in denial.
Buy Links:
Amy Lane has two kids in college, two gradeschoolers in soccer, two cats, and two Chi-who-whats at large. She lives in a crumbling crapmansion with most of the children and a bemused spouse. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy, urban fantasy, and m/m romance–and if you accidentally make eye contact, she’ll bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.
Links:
Twitter: @amymaclane
FB Group: Amy Lane Anonymous
Website: www.greenshill.com