Today we are proud and excited to welcome Miss Amy Lane to our blog !
She joins us with a guestpost and offers a giveaway 🙂

Welcome Amy to Love bytes 🙂

Poetry and Mirrors

 

By Amy Lane

I was not expecting Mackey Sanders to make such an impression on me, which just goes to show how deluded an artist can be about the sources of her own inspiration.

The original idea came to me when I was watching a Muse concert.  I sat in the dark, enthralled by the myriad stage effects, and suddenly the entire story, Mackey, Grant, and Trav unraveled before my eyes.  I shit you not—from beginning to end, and even some of the side trips.  I was there.

And I knew, from the moment I outlined the plot to my beta reader, that it would be longer than 140K, which is where my company pretty much sets the bar for novel length.  But what I didn’t know is how Mackey would get under my skin.

I didn’t know how much of me was going to go into Mackey.

Mackey’s mother was very young—and so were my parents.  Like Mackey’s mom, my dad made a rather unfortunate choice for his first love, and like Mackey’s mom, my dad was trying to raise me with very little in the name of resources.  I remember Top Ramen, powdered milk, and Christmases with handmade gifts, as well as a house that was falling apart around my ears.  I also remember being a magenta goldfish in the center of the goldfish bowl, and how not easy that was.

I could easily be Mackey Sanders.

I think maybe I was him for a little while—not addicted to drugs, no, but I certainly didn’t shy away from pissing off authority.

I really didn’t see the point of following rules that had no purpose in making my life easier—and Mackey is just like that.  And Mackey is used to fighting his way (much more physically than I was) for any benefit he achieved.

And he’s devastated when life proves to be unfair.

When I was student teachibng, I remembered crying for hours when my first class staged a riot to get rid of me.  I planned to crawl under a blanket and stay there forever.  I very much identify with Mackey’s urge to hide between the bed and the wall under a hotel comforter and to just stay there until the world goes away.

And I definitely that disgruntled feeling that goes with trying to refine your craft and not rip the face off of anyone who even remotely seems to get in your way.

It’s funny—I’ve often said that there’s a little bit of me in all of my characters.  In fact, I think that’s an unavoidable fact of authorship.  If personality is a series of successful gestures, an author takes a lot of the unsuccessful gestures—or simply single events—in his or her life, and decides what would happen to a person if those qualities went another way.  It’s why—for me, at least—I have a hard time writing unredeemable villains.  When I dowrite someone who can’t be redeemed, that personality is so alien to me, I have a hard time adding balance to it. Most of my characters are people I feel empathy with, and when you empathize with someone, you see a little of yourself in them.

Oh yeah—me and Mackey?  We go way back.

And I could swear I grew up with his brothers.  And his best friend and his mom and his impossible boyfriend and his drug dealer and the guy who broke his heart.

I know all of them, and they have all hurt me, either a little or a lot.  All of them make me feel like people in general can stumble, fall, and get better.

I love that feeling—that there is no deadline on being a good person.  We don’t come crying into the world knowing right from wrong, and even with a good teacher, we don’t always live up to that ideal.  If our teacher is less than good, we don’t always recover right away.  Human beings are given the potential to be a work in progress—and in a work this long, we get to see lots of work, and hopefully lots of progress in the main characters.

And, with any luck, we get to see parts of ourselves in him—either the best or the worst—and see a chance to fix those parts that hurt us the most.

And hopefully celebrate the parts that make us happy.

The title of this book comes from a line found in “Hurt”.  The song was originally released by Nine Inch Nails, but immortalized (and changed slightly) by Johnny Cash.  The original line read, “Beneath the stains of time/The feelings disappear,” and that can be both a good and a bad thing.  The “stains of time” indicates all of the mistakes that we make—and the feelings?  Well, that’s up to us, right?  Those could be feelings of love, which makes the line bittersweet, or they could be feelings of anger, of inadequacy, of powerlessness—in which case the line is hopeful.

When I wrote this story—and came up with the name—I wanted both those meanings.  The sad and the happy, the mistakes and the redemption, the death of the old and the glorious rebirth of the best of us.

Like I said—this story is close to my heart.

 

Beneath The Stain by Amy Lane

available at Dreamspinner Press ( in different ways ! )

Blurb:

In a town as small as Tyson, CA, everybody knew the four brothers with the four different fathers– and their penchant for making good music when they weren’t getting into trouble. For Mackey Sanders, playing in Outbreak Monkey with his brothers and their friends—especially Grant Adams–made Tyson bearable. But Grant has plans for getting Mackey and the Sanders boys out of Tyson, even if that means staying behind.

Between the heartbreak of leaving Grant and the terrifying, glamorous life of rock stardom, Mackey is adrift and sinking fast. When he’s hit rock bottom, Trav Ford shows up, courtesy of their record company and a producer who wants to see what Mackey can do if he doesn’t flame out first. But cleaning up his act means coming clean about Grant, and that’s not easy to do or say. Mackey might make it with Trav’s help–but Trav’s not sure he’s going to survive falling in love with Mackey.

Mackey James Sanders comes with a whole lot of messy, painful baggage, and law-and-order Trav doesn’t do messy or painful. And just when Trav thinks they may have mastered every demon in Mackey’s past, the biggest, baddest demon of all comes knocking.

 

 

Rafflecopter prize : Ecopy of Beneath the Stain after release  (oct 17 th)

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