By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

San Diego’s North Park neighborhood has a lot of history and diversity, some great galleries, microbreweries and restaurants — and plenty of gyms to compensate. Like most trendy city quarters, it also has a literary scene: closet writers who grumble across unshared pages about gentrification and rising rents, the audience-hungry who spin their tales at local open mics, and an occasional author who takes the bold plunge into the world of publishing.

JD Lakey, a 13-year North Park denizen, is bold — in a quiet, writerly sort of way.

Author of a young adult sci-fi series, the five-book “Black Bead Chronicles,” Lakey has nestled into a nice writing life in the heart of North Park, one that’s garnering some recognition. Opting for self-publishing, she and her illustrator — her daughter Dylan Drake — have made a splash on Amazon.com, achieving bestseller status in science fiction.

The path to success was a classically long and improbable journey: Lakey was born in Montana, in a region not known for boutiques and microbreweries, although it has its share of UFO sightings.

“I grew up on a big wheat and cattle farm — 3,000 acres,” Lakey said in a recent interview. “I think it’s the source of most of my writing. You learn to accommodate infinite space — big sky, as they say — and it gives you fuel for thinking of strange ideas and things — science fiction, in my case. It’s hard to look up at the sky and see all the stars and not try to imagine the infinite variations of creation. You have to believe that there’s something more than yourself. You live in the city, and there’s all the street lights — it’s hard to describe to people how crazy that expanse is.”

But life yanked Lakey around a bit, and her first grandchild reeled her into North Park. Then, in 2008, she was laid off from her job. With “a lot of free time,” she decided to write a book. She wrote three of them.

“I think it’s the atmosphere,” she explained. “It’s an easy place to live, relaxed. I grab a notebook, go to Claire de Lune [which unexpectedly closed Feb. 16], and sketch away, write vignettes.”

Think J.K. Rowling scribbling the first Harry Potter book in an Edinburgh café, but replace Harry with a powerful female protagonist. Actually, think Hermione Granger instead of Harry. Cheobawn, Lakey’s main character, is a 7-year-old girl with her people’s psychic powers, living in a matriarchal society and pursuing a quest dependent on her gifts. Lakey’s stories have magic, a complex mythology, and her dedication to avoiding milquetoast females.

“I’m 61, all the college-educated women of my generation became witches in 1992, when Estés wrote ‘Running with the Wolves’ — the powerful female thing. And the women who settled in Montana were crazy strong. My grandmother was college educated. She came out West and homesteaded with her brother. That’s a source of strength in my women characters that I want to emulate. All the women I knew growing up were kick-ass women. I don’t like Shakespeare because all his women are wusses. I want to write books I want to read, with characters I like,” Lakey said.

“The story of Cheobawn, I’ve been writing that for 30 frickin’ years. It started out as a short story and everyone died in the end. It was bloody. I liked the possibilities of world building, but it was brutal. So I kept rewriting it, and she kept getting younger. It reminded me that innocence is a weapon, and the character can be strong in that respect — not physically strong, but emotionally strong. The West is littered with stories of really powerful women. Their stories don’t get told much, because Hollywood controls the storytelling.”

While the genesis for Lakey’s strong female characters might be found in Montana, it’s San Diego that will see her through the final books of the series.

“I love the weather — it always comes back to that,” she said. “I remember winters when it was 50 below. There’s a reason old people move south. But what I need to keep me writing is on the page, not outside.”

—Kit-Bacon Gressitt writes commentary and essays on her blog, “Excuse Me, I’m Writing,” and has been published by Ms. Magazine blog and Trivia: Voice of Feminism, among others. She formerly wrote for the North County Times. She also hosts Fallbrook’s monthly Writers Read authors series and open mic, and can be reached at [email protected].