![\"JDLakeyColorweb\"](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/JDLakeyColorweb.jpg\")
<\/a>Author of a young adult sci-fi series, the five-book \u201cBlack Bead Chronicles<\/a>,\u201d Lakey has nestled into a nice writing life in the heart of North Park, one that\u2019s garnering some recognition. Opting for self-publishing, she and her illustrator \u2014 her daughter Dylan Drake \u2014 have made a splash on Amazon.com, achieving bestseller status in science fiction.<\/p>\n \u201cI grew up on a big wheat and cattle farm \u2014 3,000 acres,\u201d Lakey said in a recent interview. \u201cI think it\u2019s the source of most of my writing. You learn to accommodate infinite space \u2014 big sky, as they say \u2014 and it gives you fuel for thinking of strange ideas and things \u2014 science fiction, in my case. It\u2019s 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\u2019s something more than yourself. You live in the city, and there\u2019s all the street lights \u2014 it\u2019s hard to describe to people how crazy that expanse is.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca lot of free time,\u201d she decided to write a book. She wrote three of them.<\/p>\n Think J.K. Rowling scribbling the first Harry Potter book in an Edinburgh caf\u00e9, but replace Harry with a powerful female protagonist. Actually, think Hermione Granger instead of Harry. Cheobawn, Lakey\u2019s main character, is a 7-year-old girl with her people\u2019s psychic powers, living in a matriarchal society and pursuing a quest dependent on her gifts. Lakey\u2019s stories have magic, a complex mythology, and her dedication to avoiding milquetoast females.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m 61, all the college-educated women of my generation became witches in 1992, when Est\u00e9s wrote \u2018Running with the Wolves\u2019 \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019t like Shakespeare because all his women are wusses. I want to write books I want to read, with characters I like,\u201d Lakey said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe story of Cheobawn, I\u2019ve been writing that for 30 frickin\u2019 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 \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI love the weather \u2014 it always comes back to that,\u201d she said. \u201cI remember winters when it was 50 below. There\u2019s a reason old people move south. But what I need to keep me writing is on the page, not outside.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Kit-Bacon Gressitt escribe comentarios y ensayos en su blog, \u201cDisculpe, estoy escribiendo\u201d, y ha sido publicado por el blog Ms. Magazine y Trivia: Voice of Feminism, entre otros. Anteriormente escribi\u00f3 para el North County Times. Tambi\u00e9n es anfitriona de la serie de autores Writers Read mensuales de Fallbrook y de micr\u00f3fono abierto, y se la puede contactar en\u00a0<\/em>kbgressitt@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Kit-Bacon Gressitt San Diego\u2019s North Park neighborhood has a lot of history and diversity, some great galleries, microbreweries and restaurants \u2014 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 […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":249855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"North Park author writes powerful female characters","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11547,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-features","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>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<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u201cI think it\u2019s the atmosphere,\u201d she explained. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>While the genesis for Lakey\u2019s strong female characters might be found in Montana, it\u2019s San Diego that will see her through the final books of the series.<\/p>\n