Author finds her true love in romance

Lane, a longtime Albuquerque resident, had gotten her share of rejection letters for her contemporary, light-hearted romances. One day her agent told her an editor at a publishing house liked her writing but wanted to see something else.

Lane submitted a manuscript titled “‘Going Cowboy Crazy.”

“The editor said she didn’t like it, but we continued to send it out to editors at other publishing houses,” Lane said.

Dejection followed.

“I thought, ‘God didn’t want me to take up writing.’ I told myself that I would go get another job, though my agent wanted me to continue to write. That night I was praying and said, ‘This is it. God doesn’t want me to go in this direction,’ ” she said.

The next day Lane’s agent called her with the turnaround news: An editor at Grand Central Publishing said she loved “Going Cowboy Crazy” and wanted to publish it.

“It was like an answer to that prayer,” Lane recalled.

“Going Cowboy Crazy” came out last month and made the Book Scan mass market romance best-seller list, she said. This month the sequel “Make Mine a Bad Boy” was released. A third novel – the series is called Deep in the Heart of Texas – is due out next year.

Lane’s first stab at writing was at Emerson Elementary. “My fifth-grade teacher had us write a short story. I got up to read it and everybody laughed. They thought it was funny. I wrote it to be humorous,” Lane said.

“Instead of writing it in the first person, I wrote in the voice of a skirt a woman was wearing. It was a skinny woman with a too-big skirt that fell down and showed her underwear. … I thought it was great because I made people laugh.”

Lane traces her interest in writing romance to her love of reading it as a teenager.

“I like happily ever afters. In romance that’s the key thing. That’s always going to be there,” she said.

As an adult, Lane worked as an assistant kindergarten teacher at John Baker Elementary. She left that job about five years ago to pursue her dream of being a writer. She joined the Land of Enchantment Romance Authors for support, taking romance writing classes, attended workshops and got suggestions for a literary agent,

Lane’s pursuit of that dream was bolstered when she took first place two years running in the Contemporary Romance category of a contest sponsored by SouthWest Writers.

“That was one more step of saying that I’m worthy to become a writer, that I definitely have what it takes,” she said.

Katie Lane discusses, signs “Make Mine a Bad Boy” and “Going Cowboy Crazy” at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 23, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW.