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This is taken verbatim from https://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/quickening-vol-1-by-amy-lane-blog-tour-guest-post-excerpt/

How It All Began

by Amy Lane

So I know for a lot of people, the “big deal” of Quickening’s release is sort of lost.

Amy writes lots of books. Lots of big books. So?

And let’s face it—this one’s got a girl on the cover, and, yes, well, girls on the cover of an author known for her gay male romance work does not inspire a lot of “HUZZAH!”

But, like with everything, there is a story…

So, once upon a time there was an English teacher who felt compelled to go back to school to get her master’s degree. Why?  Well, it was unclear even then. All of her peers were doing it, and it appeared to be the only way to get any income mobility and…

Whatever.

Everybody else was getting their MA in education, the better to become administration, but this particular English teacher wouldn’t touch administration with a barge pole. Ugh. Gross. No.

But learn more about her subject matter? Holy Goddess YES!

So she took a bunch of different classes—an entire semester on Hamlet, anyone? And finally decided that creative writing was where she wanted to be.

And she was in this class, loving it, when some asshole dropped a couple of planes on some buildings in New York, and she had a big epiphany: She’d left her two young children at home during her school time, and they were only six and eight at the time, and she didn’t want to spend her precious moments taking classes to make a quota, she wanted to spend her time with them.

So she dropped out of the master’s program—but she kept writing.

Three and a half years later she self-published the book she’d started during that time in the master’s class. It felt like self-aggrandizement mostly—the master’s project was a finished novel, and hey, she’d done that, so even if she didn’t have the piece of paper to prove it, she had Vulnerable.

This was back when self-publishing was in its infancy, and our English teacher made a LOT of mistakes—a lot of them surprisingly enough, in English.

This was back during a DARK period in language instruction. A time called “whole language” learning—when it was considered unprofessional for an English teacher to so much as request a grammar textbook to teach her students how to write English with any sort of proficiency. They were supposed to just “absorb” that knowledge from the books they read.

For the record—it didn’t work.

Also?

It destroyed this particular English teacher’s basic knowledge of grammar and punctuation—all she was reading at the time was student papers.

Which meant when her masterpiece came out, there were some really fucking embarrassing errors all over the goddamned manuscript.

But she didn’t care. Because seriously. How many people were going to read something she wrote?  She worked in an extremely misogynistic environment—none of the people in her staff room would so much as let her finish a sentence. She grew up with people who thought she was too stupid to finish college in the first place—and were really confused as to why she’d take master’s classes in something that wouldn’t get her more money just because she hated the job.  Her students thought she was okay—but it was an inner-city school, and the ones who didn’t think she was okay told her she was a dumbfuck twat on a daily basis, and her administration didn’t really think that was too bad on the whole.

Her children—whom she adored—both had their own difficulties in school. Obviously her fault, because what did she do wrong to produce a kid with a communication handicap and one with a skewed, Eyeore view of life, even at six?

Nobody would read this book. (Except her outstanding and wonderful Mate.) Nobody would care. It was her accomplishment, and hers alone, and she was really proud of it.

And she was proud of the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. For six years, her Christmas gift from her husband was a chance to self-publish the book she’d written that year between kids and school and soccer and dance and karate and, oh, hey, giving birth to two more children for a total of four.

And then, one day, someone on Twitter asked for a short fic—just a short fic—based on a video of some really hot guys and a dirty guitar riff, and she wrote it, just for fun…

And these people—this publishing company—loved it.

In fact, they had read her books. They loved her stories. They thought she was worthwhile—they wanted to see what else she could write.

And her love affair with writing purely gay romance began.

Now, the last thing she’d written on her own had been the fourth book in her first series—Rampant.

And she’d dropped a helluva bomb at the end of that book. A sort of, uh, BIG cliffhanger. Or two.

And just when her writing career in gay romance took off, her teaching career took a HUGE, devastating, killing hit—and yes, the two things were very closely connected.  So suddenly, writing gay romance became the thing she absolutely had to do.

It became her livelihood.

And finishing that series—ending that cliffhanger—that became the last thing on her list.

So… what does this have to do with Quickening?

Seven years ago I wrote a book that ended with a teeny-tiny-itty-bitty sorceress being told some VERY BIG GINORMOUS LIFE CHANGING NEWS.

And people have been waiting to see how that comes out. For seven years.

So I’m going to be writing some blog posts about this book in the next week—and I’m going to be WAY more excited about its release than I think my community is going to be.

But that’s okay—because the first book was something I wanted to do for myself. And this book was a promise I kept to all the people who thought that first book was something special, something that resonated with them, and took the time to tell me that my voice—the one that seemed to be raised desperately unheard for so long—was really important to them.

So it’s possible Quickening isn’t going to take the gay romance world by storm.

But I’m so happy that it’s out, I’m could actually cry.

If you’re interested in the books that started it all, start with Vulnerable—it’s been re-edited and recovered, as have all of the original books in the series.

If you’re a fan of the series already, and you’ve been waiting for the last seven years—you’re the best. Period. I couldn’t have done the last twelve years without you.

Amy

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