As far as Clay Carpenter is concerned, his abusive relationship with food is the best thing he’s got going. When a good friend starts kicking his ass into gear, Clay is forced to reexamine everything he learned about food and love—and that’s right when he meets troubled graduate student, Dane Hayes.
Dane Hayes doesn’t do the whole monogamy thing, but the minute he meets Clay Carpenter, he’s doing the friend thing in spades. The snarky, scruffy bastard not only gets Dane's wacky sense of humor, he also accepts the things Dane can’t control—like the bipolar disorder Dane has been trying to manage for the past six years.
Dane is hoping for more than friendship, and Clay is looking at him with longing that isn't platonic. They’re both positive they’re bad at relationships, but with the help of forbidden desserts and new medication regimens, they prove outstanding at being with each other. But can they turn their friendship into the love neither of them has dared to hope for?
Buy links: Dreamspinner | Amazon
Guest post from Author Amy Lane...
Fall Through Spring Blog Tour 6
The Thing About Sports
By Amy Lane
So, I write a lot of books that revolve around sports—The Locker Room, Winter Ball, Summer Lessons, Fall Through Spring—even Chase in Shadow features an athlete.
You’d, uh, think I was a sports enthusiast or something. Mm… not so much.
Part of it was being in the marching band—believe me, in the eighties, that was the kiss of
death for loving sports, because all of the athletes pretty much loathed us on sight. But those guys grew up—and most of them grew up and changed for the better, becoming actual sympathetic human beings—but that sort of general distaste for sports remained.
And then I met Mate.
I didn’t realize it at the time—Mate was pretty sneaky about it by letting me talk all the
time—but it turns out, Mate likes sports. All sports.
In the last thirty-three years I have been to professional soccer, basketball, and baseball games, as well as marathons and half-marathons in which Mate participated. We’ve missed out on professional football and hockey as a family because of distance and price—but Mate’s caught coattails and has been there.
And because I love Mate, I attend with him and the family, and I’ve learned to love them a little too. In fact, prolonged involuntary exposure to sports has taught me a lot, and Mate has
exploited my love of backstory and drama (and a little program called Thirty for Thirty that I
warn you all to buy tissues should you ever watch) to suck me in.
And these are some of the good and valuable things I have learned about sports—
1. Most real athletes aren’t cruel like the ones in school. Those are children trying to find
self-worth. Real athletes—the ones whose lives don’t end in tragedy—are men and
women who are deeply dedicated to their craft.
2. Strength, discipline, and good character more often than not translate into good things
on the field. Raw talent and a bad attitude usually only get athletes so far before they
have to grow up or go home.
3. Everyone’s got a story—because athletes play with all their hearts, their stories can
usually rip out ours.
4. Sports bring people together. Whether it’s meeting your most despised coworker at a
basketball game and thinking you might forgive them for being a douchewaffle, or
seeing a student whose been driving you nuts light up at the prospect of seeing a game
live, sports give you a perspective on how awesome people can be when they’re in
another element, and that’s valuable as a life lesson in general.
5. Sports make kids happy—even if they’re not great at them. One of my kids did karate,
but three of them have done soccer, and having the entire family gathered to cheer the
kids on was something we did as a family.
6. When athletes are on, and everything is working right, it makes us believe in a higher
power. There is something divine about seeing the human mind and machine
functioning at that level.
So, sports.
I’ve never been great at playing them—and I’ll still take a good (or bad) TV drama over
an average game with no big stakes any time.
Golden One Arena is still super uncomfortable and I hate walking downtown when I’m
tired and have had a long day.
Baseball games are still long.
Soccer is still officiated by the insane.
But I see the value now. I see the stories. I see the human component that I missed as a
kid. I see the potential for drama—and the potential for love.
And the potential to write a good story about guys who may not mesh on any other
plane, but who find their common ground on the playing field and go from there.
And now, for me, they are so much fun.
Guest post from Author Amy Lane...
Fall Through Spring Blog Tour 6
The Thing About Sports
By Amy Lane
So, I write a lot of books that revolve around sports—The Locker Room, Winter Ball, Summer Lessons, Fall Through Spring—even Chase in Shadow features an athlete.
You’d, uh, think I was a sports enthusiast or something. Mm… not so much.
Part of it was being in the marching band—believe me, in the eighties, that was the kiss of
death for loving sports, because all of the athletes pretty much loathed us on sight. But those guys grew up—and most of them grew up and changed for the better, becoming actual sympathetic human beings—but that sort of general distaste for sports remained.
And then I met Mate.
I didn’t realize it at the time—Mate was pretty sneaky about it by letting me talk all the
time—but it turns out, Mate likes sports. All sports.
In the last thirty-three years I have been to professional soccer, basketball, and baseball games, as well as marathons and half-marathons in which Mate participated. We’ve missed out on professional football and hockey as a family because of distance and price—but Mate’s caught coattails and has been there.
And because I love Mate, I attend with him and the family, and I’ve learned to love them a little too. In fact, prolonged involuntary exposure to sports has taught me a lot, and Mate has
exploited my love of backstory and drama (and a little program called Thirty for Thirty that I
warn you all to buy tissues should you ever watch) to suck me in.
And these are some of the good and valuable things I have learned about sports—
1. Most real athletes aren’t cruel like the ones in school. Those are children trying to find
self-worth. Real athletes—the ones whose lives don’t end in tragedy—are men and
women who are deeply dedicated to their craft.
2. Strength, discipline, and good character more often than not translate into good things
on the field. Raw talent and a bad attitude usually only get athletes so far before they
have to grow up or go home.
3. Everyone’s got a story—because athletes play with all their hearts, their stories can
usually rip out ours.
4. Sports bring people together. Whether it’s meeting your most despised coworker at a
basketball game and thinking you might forgive them for being a douchewaffle, or
seeing a student whose been driving you nuts light up at the prospect of seeing a game
live, sports give you a perspective on how awesome people can be when they’re in
another element, and that’s valuable as a life lesson in general.
5. Sports make kids happy—even if they’re not great at them. One of my kids did karate,
but three of them have done soccer, and having the entire family gathered to cheer the
kids on was something we did as a family.
6. When athletes are on, and everything is working right, it makes us believe in a higher
power. There is something divine about seeing the human mind and machine
functioning at that level.
So, sports.
I’ve never been great at playing them—and I’ll still take a good (or bad) TV drama over
an average game with no big stakes any time.
Golden One Arena is still super uncomfortable and I hate walking downtown when I’m
tired and have had a long day.
Baseball games are still long.
Soccer is still officiated by the insane.
But I see the value now. I see the stories. I see the human component that I missed as a
kid. I see the potential for drama—and the potential for love.
And the potential to write a good story about guys who may not mesh on any other
plane, but who find their common ground on the playing field and go from there.
And now, for me, they are so much fun.
Excerpt... CLAY ALEXANDER Carpenter was the first to admit it—his first love was a chocolate chip cookie. It was an illicit affair, because he wasn’t supposed to eat cookies like that. His mother didn’t believe in refined sugar, red meat, gluten, dairy, or saturated fats.
This cookie was four out of five of the things his mother disdained most about the world.And it wasn’t that Carpenter hated his mother. In fact, she was a lovely woman, kind, giving out hugs during appropriate times, very worried about making sure her children grew up to be happy, productive citizens with a closet full of childhood memories that would give them strength as they got older.
It was just that, well, she was a very busy woman—never too busy for her children, mind you—but she had meetings, and she had to give the maid directions to clean the house, and she had a job too, as a lobbyist, and she had to make sure her children were happy and fulfilled and doing extremely well at school.
Carpenter’s father was the same way. Kind, civic-minded, spent an allotment of happy, fulfilling time with his children, never yelled.
That was another thing.
There was no yelling in the Carpenter household. Yelling would be the sixth thing his mother hated in her home, but that would have involved hating and bringing the toll up to seven things. And honestly, Carpenter’s mother was really a nice person, and she didn’t have room in her heart for that much hate.
By the time Carpenter was in second grade, he was beginning to suspect he might.
For one thing, he hated the kids in his school.
He’d shown up on the first day of second grade wearing jeans that fit perfectly and a T-shirt that had a picture of Chewbacca on it. His mother had allowed him to pick his own clothes, and she’d been surprised. “Chewbacca, honey? Do you even know what that is?”
“It’s a who, Mother,” Clay had answered reasonably. “He’s a Wookiee. His species doesn’t make a difference in his personhood.”
His mother smiled happily. “What a wonderful argument, Clay. Well, with reasoning like that, I’m pleased to buy it for you. But where did you see this movie?”
“I don’t remember,” Clay lied. Of course he remembered. He’d awakened one night over summer vacation, when they were allowed to sleep until eight in the morning instead of six thirty. He’d been hungry, so he’d made himself an organic peanut butter with sugarless preserves on nut-grain unleavened bread sandwich, and turned the television on in the family room, very quietly. It was after eleven, so he must have found East Coast feed on cable—but he’d never forget that movie.
It had been perfect. A revelation. A vision of stars and wars and laser weapons and giant hairy beasts who wore artillery packs on their chests.
When he’d seen the T-shirt in the store, he’d almost cried.
So he was proud of that shirt as he walked into school. And then the kids had hit him with, “But isn’t that passé?” “Oh my God, the second series is so dumb. My parents said Jar Jar Binks was a racist stereotype.” And, worst of all, “You’re going to grow up to be a big fat hairy Wookiee just like Chewbacca!”
Carpenter didn’t realize that this was the price he had to pay for going to a “good” school, where all the kids had television sets in their own rooms and the parents were rich and trying to send their kids to first-tier colleges, which was why they’d all had flashcards in SAT vocabulary by the second grade. He knew he was smart because he had test scores that proved it—smarter than most of his peers, but he wouldn’t know that until middle school when he started to suspect he was the only one who got tutored in algebra by his older sister, Sabrina, and not a college student desperate to make ends meet.
All he knew at that moment was that he would throw himself in traffic for Chewbacca, and while he was not allowed to say “hate” in his home, he hated his peer group with the solar viciousness of the suns of Tatooine.
Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of growing children, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She’s been a finalist in the RITAs™ twice, has won honorable mention for an Indiefab, and has a couple of Rainbow Awards to her name. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy, urban fantasy, and gay romance—and if you accidentally make eye contact, she’ll bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.
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I love your books and look forward to more next year.
ReplyDeletedebby236 at gmail dot com
love the guest post and excerpt
ReplyDeletejmarinich33 at aol dot com
Thank you for sharing and for the excerpt!
ReplyDeletehumhumbum@yahoo.com