A warm welcome to author Amy Lane joining us today here at Love Bytes to talk about the long anticipated release of Paint it Black.
Rock Star Pretty by Amy Lane
I have been in love with Bruce Springsteen since the sixth grade. Was he conventionally handsome? No. In fact, he was sort of scrawny, thin-faced, and he looked at you shyly in most pictures, from the corner of his eyes. Too much curly hair, really, and I liked my guys clean cut, and those hunched shoulders…
But then I’d listen to “Thunder Road”, look at those pictures of him again, and suddenly he was glorious, all of those unassuming features noted before falling into place to make Prince Charming, a roughhewn knight in muscle-car armor, a gruff-voiced Romeo that even someone like me—awkward, introverted, profane—could aspire to.
God, he was perfect.
He still is.
So is Matty Shultz from Cage the Elephant, and pretty much the entire roster of the Foo Fighters—I could be madly in love with any one of them at a moment’s notice.
But not because I’m looking at them with my eyes.
Most rock stars aren’t conventionally handsome. Let’s face it—it’s the medium of the disdained, the disenfranchised, the overlooked, and some of that pain, that empathy, that look at me! Aggression might be dimmed if this was a kid who was revered for his beauty for his entire life.
When we fall in love with rock stars, we’re not falling in love with their eyes or their jaw or the shape of their lips—unless they’re David Bowie, these things are usually quite average, quite like the rest of us, and we’re fine with that. When we fall in love with rock stars, we fall in love with their songs, their voice, their passion, their music—and it’s one of the purest loves there is. Every time I hear “Thunder Road” I am the same twelve-year-old girl I was the first time I heard it, and I’m also the eighteen-year-old student who saw him in college, and the thirty-five year old teacher who made it a writing prompt, and the fifty year old woman whose adult son started to love Springsteen too, and now we’re singing a duet down the dusty streets of our worn out suburb.
I love him with all my soul in those moments—he’s the voice that made me who I am.
So when I wrote Blake and Mackey and all of Outbreak Monkey in Beneath the Stain and Paint it Black, I didn’t write beautiful guys. Blake knows he isn’t conventionally handsome—and when Cheever says he’s beautiful, Blake thinks he’s lying. All Blake can see are the scars left by a rough life, and maybe a little bit of side-glamour thrown off by his lead singer.
Blake can’t see what his fans see when he’s on stage—and he certainly can’t see what Cheever sees, as Cheever recovers more and more from his own wounds.
Blake’s fans, Cheever, us—we see the man that inspires Blake’s music. We see his talent, his kindness, his passion, his soul.
Because that’s why we fall in love with rock stars. Television icons give you their jawlines and their thick black lashes around pretty eyes.
Rock stars give us their souls, and they are bright and shining and we will love them forever.
Just like Cheever loves Blake.
A Beneath the Stain Novel
Everybody thinks Mackey Sanders’s Outbreak Monkey is the last coming of Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus, but Cheever Sanders can’t wait to make a name for himself where nobody expects him to fill his famous brothers’ shoes. He’s tired of living in their shadow.
Blake Manning has been one of Outbreak Monkey’s lead guitarists for ten years. He got this gig on luck and love, not talent. So hearing that Cheever is blowing through Outbreak Monkey’s hard-earned money in an epic stretch of partying pisses him off.
Blake shows up at Cheever’s nonstop orgy to enforce some rules, but instead of a jaded punk, he finds a lost boy as talented at painting as Mackey is at song-making, and terrified to let anybody see the real him. Childhood abuse and a suicide attempt left Cheever on the edge of survival—a place Blake knows all too well.
Both men have to make peace with being second banana in the public eye. Can they find the magic of coming absolute first with each other?
Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of growing children, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She’s been nominated for a RITA 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.