I guess you could say that The Price of Fame was the novel that was never intended to be. I suppose I should explain that, but pull up a chair: my tales tend to be long-winded and occasionally complicated <g>.

For as long as I can remember I have been saying that all I want to do is write books and be left alone. If I had a quarter for every time I saw or experienced something and said, "Wow, that would make a great story," I’d be on Forbes’s top 100 millionaires list right now (alas, such is not the case). I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve led a bit of an eclectic life professionally and it’s given me much material with which to work. At various times I have been: a broadcast journalist, press secretary to the New York state senate minority leader, spokesperson for the nation’s third largest prison system…Well, you get the idea. I’ve got a lot of stories to tell.

My mind, as anyone who knows me will attest, is a scary place. Standing in the middle of a riot of 400 murderers, rapists and robbers at Attica, I was thinking, "What if some of the details of this incident happened just a little differently? Wouldn’t it make a great novel?" Now I know some of you are convinced that I have a screw or two loose, and that may well be true, but for me all of the best fiction has at its core an element of truth. That, in my opinion, is what keeps you, as a reader, turning the pages. And, before you go worrying about my sanity, let me add that yes, in the middle of the riot I was also thinking a bunch of other things at the same time.

And so in the midst of terror and chaos, the germ of a novel was born. I started with a real-life situation and asked, "What if?" In the end, I had the outline for what I expected would be two traditional, mainstream novels. It had never occurred to me to write lesbian fiction, although I certainly read enough of it. (No tomato throwing, please). In fact, I started writing the second mainstream book first which centered on the female press secretary to the president of the USA, completing two chapters in the mid-1990’s. I was going to write the novel based in the prison later. Then life got in the way, and I set the novel aside.

Fast forward to 2001, when two very dear friends of mine began pestering me endlessly about reading something called "fan fiction." I was a huge Xena fan, and had been persuaded by the same two individuals to read some of Melissa Good’s X & G stuff. Naturally, I was hooked from the start. But I categorically refused to read fan fiction (not having any idea what it was), because I reasoned my life was already complicated enough without another distraction. Never willing to take "no" for an answer, my intrepid friends poked and prodded at me relentlessly. Finally taking matters into their own hands, they sent me a copy of Tropical Storm. As you can imagine, I became a devout reader of all things über from that moment on.

More than a year later, satisfied that they had corrupted me sufficiently, my buds decided it was time to push me to the next level. I had recently shared with them the early chapters to mainstream novel #2, and their new mantra became that this book would make a great über, if I just made a couple of minor adjustments <g>. Naturally, I protested that the book was just fine the way it was, but their nagging made me think (I hate it when that happens). "What if…" Sigh, here we go again. What if I gave the protagonist, whose husband had been killed in the mainstream novel, a girlfriend instead?

Well, I started playing with the idea in my head (although I sure wasn’t going to admit that to my friends), and I came to the conclusion that IF I were going to make this book an über, there would have to have a prequel, which would have been the equivalent to the first mainstream book, which would have come before the mainstream book that I had been writing (have I lost you completely yet?). And THAT is the über I sat down to write.

In other words, the mainstream book I was writing had no room in its plot for a live love interest, and I predicted that fan fiction fanatics would slay me if I just killed off the Gabby character before they even got to meet her. (Pretty astute, huh?). I couldn’t imagine how I could simply turn that mess into an über without first spending some time developing a relationship for the protagonist.

So I reasoned that I would spend twenty or thirty pages introducing a love interest for Kate before diving into the prequel. Then, as such things are wont to happen and quite without my permission, the twenty or thirty page "introduction" turned into the two hundred eighty page novel, The Price of Fame. Go figure. And now what was to be the prequel is the sequel, and what would have been the second book which I was writing first has become the third book in the trilogy <g>.

All of which is to say, I never intended to write The Price of Fame, it just sort of happened <g>. The sequel and the third book in the trilogy are what I meant to write. So I hope you enjoy The Price of Fame, and plan to come along for the ride for the next two installments!

Lynn Ames