By Gerri Miller
Elmore/Autauga News
Sitting outside of a downtown Prattville coffee shop, 38-year-old Lynessa Layne is the picture of a happy, beautiful, confident and relaxed young woman.
But it was a matter of emotional survival that prompted the Prattville resident to write a successful series of romance-suspense novels. The books tell the story of fictional college student and runner Kinsley Fallon Hayes and her mysterious love interest Klive King.
Layne is her pen name and she has also written under the name Lynessa James. She said she prefers not to reveal her real name in this article because of issues she went through with stalking and cyber-bullying.
“I wrote to keep my mind sane while I was going through my post-partum depression,” Layne said. She said it was when she had PPD after the birth of her fourth child that the words just poured out of her. She has four books of a 10-book series currently published called “Don’t Close Your Eyes” or DCYE. She said she had no outline – she just let the words flow.
Layne is no stranger to domestic violence. She was in an abusive marriage that found the courage to leave. Her father was a drug addict and an alcoholic who abused her mother. Layne was also sexually abused by a friend of her father. “I cover a lot of things in my book I am familiar with from my life,” Layne said. “The main character, Kinsley, is really naïve and people take advantage of her.”
Layne said she and her father now have a great relationship but that didn’t happen until she was in her 20’s. “I had an amazing stepfather who stepped up to the plate while my real dad had to figure himself out and get sober,” she said. “Despite the contentious relationship my biological parents had, they have found true forgiveness and peace with each other and I modeled my own forgiveness for my ex after their example.”
She met her current husband A.J. in a writer’s forum and he offered her a safe place to stay when her ex-husband was abusing her. “I had to choose between going to live with a stranger I met online or possible death,” she said.
Layne moved in with A.J. and she said everyone just took for truth what her ex-husband told them. “Everything was taken away,” she said. “I was left standing with nothing to support me anymore. All I had was God. I went through a few months that I don’t know how I survived. Everything was broken.” She even tried to commit suicide by downing whiskey and pills, but A.J. managed to get into the locked bathroom and make her throw up.
Her ex-husband initially got custody of her children, but A.J. helped her fight for them and he has been her rock. “It was a four-year-battle to get them back,” Layne said.
The couple married in 2017 and the blended family with five children has lived in Prattville since 2019. A military wife, Layne has lived in Texas, Tampa, Pensacola, Tuscaloosa and many other places.
Layne’s love of books and writing started in Plantersville, Texas. If you weren’t a rancher or farmer, there wasn’t much to do. Layne filled this gap by reading books. She started out with R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series and her progression as a reader grew into genre fiction including Lois Duncan, Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark.
In her young adult phase, her reading bounced between the Bible, Shakespeare and poetry collections. During this time, she started writing her own poetry and prose which she drew from her teenage angst and rebellion. Discouraged from writing because her family would get her journal and read it without permission at the dinner table, Layne took a long break from writing.
At the age of 25, Layne was inspired to start writing again by reading the works of Kresley Cole, Charlaine Harris, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephanie Meyer, Jamie Alden, Megan Hart and Dannika Dark. Layne made it her goal that by the age of 30, she would have a novel written.
During what she calls her “dark period” when books like “Fifty Shades of Grey” were all the rage, Layne became successful writing Erotica, but she pulled all of these books offline after one of her readers began stalking her.
“I met so many readers in pain during this time,” she said. “When I left, I received a lot of hate mail, but God was tugging at my heart to follow him.”
“Jesus’ love is free to you if you want love without penalty,” she said. “The only requirement is for you to accept the only free love you can ever know.”
In 2017 she earned her copy editor certification and placed 20th out of 5,000 entries in the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition. She is also a member of Romance Writers of America, Tuscaloosa Writers and Illustrators Guild, Alabama Writers Conclave, Florida Writers Association, The Royal Society of Literature and Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She’s had work featured by Writer’s Digest and Mystery and Suspense Magazine.
Layne also ended up working on the 10-book series that would be known as DCYE. After two and a half years of rewrite after rewrite, she submitted the draft to three major agents and all three wanted to publish her series. The catch? They all wanted to make major edits that would rip at the heart and soul of the series. She gracefully turned them all down.
“What I thought was my dream could have actually meant killing my dream,” she said. “I always set out to publish for the one other person in the world who might love the story as much as I do. A reader who wanted something different from the formula. It was never to get rich or famous. Rather, it was the love of the read that I was after.”
Though she’s leaving the door open to agents and publishers for stand-alone novels, DCYE was too important to her for agents to turn it into something unrecognizable. She publishes through Ingram Publishing. Her books are available through major retailers such Amazon Kindle Unlimited, Barnes and Noble and many Indie bookstores.
Layne frequently does book tours and book signings and this past weekend at the Spinners Pumpkin Patch Arts & Crafts Show, she sold all the copies of the books she brought. She is excited about some of her upcoming tours. Her next signing will be on Nov. 20 at Mansfield Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, the filming location for Shawshank Redemption.
Other signings will be held in Orlando, Fl., Kansas City, Tampa, Fl, Deadwood, S.D., Prattville’s Independence Day Festival, Lexington, KY. and Salem, MA. She said she is especially excited to travel to Estes Park, CO. to stay in The Stanley Hotel, the place where Stephen King got his inspiration to write “The Shining.” She will also attend an event in Memphis where she will be set up in the Guest House at Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
To give you a little more insight on her writing, here is one of her many good Amazon reviews:
Author Lynessa Layne entices her readers to sprint toward the finish line in her recently-published e-book, ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes.’ Written for young adults who will certainly appreciate Ms. Layne’s inclusion of a music playlist to enjoy while reading the story, this book does a good job of staying true to the hormonal, emotional confusion and titillation that permeates life for many in their late teens and early twenties. The novel’s main character, Kinsley, is a college track superstar known among her friends and fans as ‘Micro Machine.’ She is also a young woman being romantically pursued by two males, Jace, a long-time close friend, and an older man who feels both safe and dangerous to her. While the reader meets the latter as a hitman in the first of the book, Kinsley has no idea. Mysterious, romantic, and action-oriented, she feels his magnetic pull in the same way Ms. Layne pulls her readers into her novel’s plot. Much of this story takes place in and around a bar where Kinsley is employed and where members of a dangerous gang, Inferno, have taken to hanging out. A second group which includes both of Kinsley’s main admirers, is prepared to keep Inferno in check. Like Kinsley, the reader learns more secrets about the older admirer as the book progresses, but at story’s end there is still much to learn. Ms. Layne’s characters are well-rounded with strengths and flaws and unusual quirks (Kinsley, for example, calls almost all males ‘sir,’ even in romantic interludes, and she is clearly still a daddy’s girl.) She is also tough, determined, and a cautious risk-taker, which are good assets to have, given the life-threatening dangers facing her. ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’ is a fun book for all ages. It left me anxious to follow Kinsley into her next adventures, romantic and otherwise, as soon as the sequel is available.
