The Last Day of School and Why “Amy Lane”

My computer is having trouble loading pictures, and if that doesn’t stop, well, my post is going to be way more boring than I’d planned.

Anyway– today was the kids’ last day of school.  They were so excited– we picked them up and took them to buy a book and then took them for frozen yoghurt.  We got to look at Squish’s report card, at least– Zoomboy’s is still hidden in his backpack.  But one of the nice things that Squish’s report card had was this picture, right here, from the beginning of the year.

Isn’t she adorable?

Well, she’s more than adorable.  She’s smart– she’s now at or above grade level for pretty much every category on her report card.  That Let’s Read sign?  Yeah. She can do that.  Her dad and I are SO PROUD of her.

Because seriously–

See how she’s grown!

But look at her expression– Squishy to the last.  For the record?  My Squish gives the best squishy hugs of any kid around.  (And that white thing she’s carrying is the alpaca bunny named Unicorn.  And now you know.)

And if I sound a little maudlin, it’s because I had a sudden attack of Chicken-sans today.  There I was, driving to go get the little kids, and suddenly I was remembering that, in the past, every time I’ve gone and had a little mini-school’s-out-party, Chicken was there.  And suddenly I wanted my Chicken home, very very badly.

So badly in fact that Mate tried to move up her ticket–and, in fact, spent money we don’t have to move it up three days.  Chicken was grateful too–but seriously.  Who gave children permission to grow up and the world permission to change?  Oughttabeafuckin’ law.

 And, of course, Zoomboy continues to be my little monkey man– can you tell?

This picture, was, in fact, taken when Chicken sent me a request for a picture of him acting like a monkey.  I tried to send her this one, but she sent back, “No, mom, I need one where I can see his face and he’s not so fucking creepy!”

I had to give her credit– she sort of nailed it in one.  But that doesn’t keep Zoomboy from being damned clever too.  This morning, he was petting the dog as it slept in my shirt, and he said, “There is no training bra for this mission, soldier– booby-diving is always in the deep end!” I almost died.  Damned funny, that one– can you tell?

So, aside from that–and the post I made for RRW that you can find here, which is sort of kicking ass– not much is doing.  I did have a funny moment on Twitter though, that led to the next part of this post.

This picture here is why we sent Chicken to school.

I was listening to Pandora when Aimee Mann’s song, “Momentum” came on.   I tweeted that Pandora read my mind again– I love this song, and it’s a little obscure.  And then Stephanie Grober– the publicist for Riptide– replied that she loved Aimee Mann.  Sensing a kindred soul, I told her that I had named myself after the singer, and that’s when I realized– hey!  Not everybody reading this blog knows this story.  Those of you who have been around for a while might, but those of you who are new?  Well, I figured I’d tell it again, just for Stephanie, cause she’s nice, and for shits and giggles in general.

So, about 2.6 zillion years ago, I had moved from Loomis to San Francisco to go to school.  I was living with my grandmother and taking bus from Daly City down the peninsula.  Daly City was not a great place to be in the late 80’s, especially not at ten o’clock at night.

I was SO fresh off the turnip truck I can hardly stand it.  I had a braid of red-rabid-squirrel down my back and freckles and big brown eyes, and, essentially, I was a lot like Chicken without the confidence or the travel under my belt.  And I was also much thinner, and I was getting hit on.

So there I was, listening to Aimee Mann, wanting to be back in the foothills with my boyfriend (who is now Mate) when I got chatted up again.  And I didn’t want to tell the guy to piss off, so I gave him the equivalent of a fake number– a fake number and fake address.

I said my name was Amy Lane– Lane is Mate’s middle name.

Back in those days, before texting, e-mailing, chatting, tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, or cell phones that wouldn’t break a window instead of the other way around, we had two options.  One was the insanely expensive long distance call, and the other was the letter.

I wrote Mate a letter a night.  (And he, the romantic that he is, saved every one of them.  I didn’t know this until we moved in together.  *sniffle*)

That night I told him that when we were married and done with school, I’d be a writer, and I’d go by Amy Lane.  I kept that as sort of a hope.  When I wrote my first books– not actually Vulnerable, even before that when I thought I’d write for Harlequin, I submitted Amy Lane as my pen name.  When we decided to self-publish Vulnerable, publishing under Amy Lane was a no brainer.  Amy Lane was still a hope, right, that this thing I’d always dreamed of could come true.  I think I realized that it takes a while for dreams to come true when I had to change my pin number.  It occurred to me that anyone who knew me knew of Amy Lane, and that a whole lot of people who didn’t know me still knew Amy Lane, and maybe I should change it to something else.

So, you know, it wasn’t a pin number and it wasn’t a pipe dream and it wasn’t a fake name a 19 YO made up to get an unwanted douchebag off her back.

It was me 🙂