Author Name: Alysia Constantine
Book Name: Sweet
Release
Date: February 4, 2016
Blurb:
Not every love
story is a romance novel.
For
Jules Burns, a lonely baker, it is the memory of his deceased husband, Andy.
For Teddy Flores, a numbed-to-the-world accountant who accidentally stumbles
into his bakery, it is a voyage of discovery into his deep connections to
pleasure, to the world, and to his own heart.
Alysia Constantine’s Sweet is also the story of how we tell
stories—of what we expect and need from a love story. The narrator is on to
you, Reader, and wants to give you a love story that doesn’t always fit the
bill. There are ghosts to exorcise, and jobs and money to worry about. Sweet is a love story, but it also
reminds us that love is never quite what we expect, nor quite as blissfully
easy as we hope.
Praise for ‘Sweet’ by Alysia Constantine
from Publisher’s Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-941530-61-0
Pages or Words: 246 pages
Categories: Contemporary, Fiction, Gay
Fiction, M/M Romance, Romance
Excerpt:
"Speakerphone."
"What?"
"Speakerphone.
Put me on speaker so you can use your hands. You're going to need both hands,
and I won't be held responsible for you mucking up your phone. Speaker."
Teddy
set his phone on the counter and switched to the speaker, then stood waiting.
"Hello?"
Jules said. "Is this thing on?"
"Sorry,"
Teddy said. "I'm still here."
"It
sounded like you'd suddenly disappeared. I was starting to believe in the
rapture," Jules said, and Teddy heard, again, the nervous chuckle.
Their
conversation was awkward and full of strange pauses in which there was nothing
right to say, and they focused mostly on how awkward and strange it was until
Jules told Teddy to dump the almond paste on the counter and start to knead in
the sugar.
"I'm
doing it, too, along with you," Jules said.
"I'm
not sure whether that makes it more or less weird," Teddy admitted,
dusting everything in front of him with sugar.
"It's
just like giving a back rub," Jules told him. "Roll gently into the
dough with the heel of your hand, lean in with your upper body. Think loving
things. Add a little sugar each time—watch for when it's ready for more. Not too much at
once."
Several
moments passed when all that held their connection was a string of huffed and
effortful breaths and the soft thump of dough. Teddy felt Jules pressing and
leaning forward into his work, felt the small sweat and ache that had begun to
announce itself in Jules's shoulders, felt it when he held his breath as he
pushed and then exhaled in a rush as he flipped the dough, felt it all as
surely as if Jules's body were there next to him, as if he might reach to the
side and, without glancing over, brush the sugar from Teddy’s forearm, a
gesture which might have been, if real, if the result of many long hours spent in
the kitchen together, sweet and familiar and unthinking.
"My
grandmother and I used to make this," Jules breathed after a long silence,
"when I was little. Mine would always become flowers. She would always
make hers into people."
Teddy
understood that he needn't reply, that Jules was speaking to him, yes, but
speaking more into the empty space in which he stood as a witness, talking a
story into the evening around him, and he, Teddy, was lucky to be near, to
listen in as the story spun itself out of Jules and into the open, open quiet.
When
the dough was finished and Jules had interrupted himself to say, "There,
mine's pretty done. I bet yours is done by now, too," Teddy nodded in
agreement—and
even though he knew Jules couldn't see him, he was sure Jules would sense him
nodding through some miniscule change in his breathing or the invisible tension
between them slackening just the slightest bit. And he did seem to know,
because Jules paused and made a satisfied noise that sounded as if all the
spring-coiled readiness had slid from his body. "This taste," Jules
sighed, "is like Proust's madeleine."
They
spent an hour playing with the dough and molding it into shapes they wouldn't
reveal to each other. Teddy felt childish and happy and inept and far too adult
all at once as he listened to the rhythmic way Jules breathed and spoke, the
way his voice moved in and out of silence, like the advance and retreat of shallow
waves that left in their wake little broken treasures on the shore.
Only
his fingers moved, fumbling and busy and blind as he listened, his whole self
waiting for Jules to tell him the next thing, whatever it might be.
Buy the book:
Meet the author:
Alysia Constantine lives in
Brooklyn with her wife, their two dogs, and a cat. When she is not writing, she
is a professor at an art college. Before that, she was a baker and cook for a
caterer, and before that, she was a poet.
Sweet is her first novel.
VBT: SWEET—ALYSIA CONSTANTINE
Today I’m very lucky to be interviewing
(Alysia Constantine) author of (SWEET).
Hi (Alysia), thank you for agreeing to this interview. Tell us a little
about yourself, your background, and your current book.
1)
What
is your least favorite part of the publishing/writing process?
The
publishing part has all been really fun.
Everybody is working to make something you did successful… how can that
not be awesome? The writing process
itself is rough, because it’s intense work for me, and not easy. I think the toughest part may be the
isolation, the creating-in-the-dark, investing so hard in something that might
not work when it meets its audience.
That’s tough. You’ve got to
commit fully, but you’ve also got to be completely willing to “kill your
darlings” (I think Faulkner wrote that), those turns of phrase or idea in which
you’ve entirely invested your own belief and love. You’ve got to write while you keep your inner
critic bound and gagged, but then you’ve got to revise by letting that critic
have free rein, and at both moments, you’ve got to believe fully in what you
do. It’s a rather schizophrenic way to
function—I mean that in the literal sense of the word, that you’ve got to
create a schism, a rift between the part of your brain that’s creating and the
part of your brain that’s evaluating.
You’ve got to respect both those parts, but prevent them from talking to
each other. I find that hard, and often
rather painful, to do.
2)
As an
author, is there one subject you would never write about? What would it be?
There
are subjects that don’t interest me much at the moment—murder, political
intrigue, zombies—but I know that the minute I claim I would never write about
those subjects is the minute I commit to writing about them. So I don’t think I can say there’s a subject
I would, on principle, never write about; there are just subjects about which,
at the moment, I don’t have many ideas or am not inspired to think about too
carefully.
3)
When
did you first realize you wanted to write?
I
realized I liked writing, that I could do it pretty fluidly and found it
rewarding, when I was a kid. I’m not
sure how young I was, but when I was in fourth grade, I was sort of understood
as the “class poet.” This meant, for the
most part, I could rhyme anything, and I could write limericks about my friends
for Valentine’s Day. That was the
turning point, at which I started to think of myself as a “writer”, and to
organize my life and identity around that.
I knew then that whatever I wound up doing (at the time, I think I
wanted to be a psychologist), I would also be a writer.
4)
How
long did it take to write your book?
I’m
not sure how to answer that. I first sat
down to write and wrote about a chapter a week for a few months, then had to
take a break for more than a year. When
I returned to it, I wrote the last several chapters in a few weeks of
concentrated writing. But I think I
needed that year of rest in between for things to come to fruition. I don’t think I could have written the end at
the time I wrote the beginning. At the
time, the stopping was really painful—I felt exhausted and discouraged and all
spent—but in retrospect, it was really necessary. I was all ready to completely abandon the
project (I thought I had!), but the folks at Interlude Press really encouraged
me to finish it, were so supportive and kind and encouraging. That helped, as did making a commitment to
them—I wasn’t just going to finish it, but I was going to fulfill a
promise.
5)
For
Fun: Where is one place you’d like to visit you haven’t been before?
My
partner and I have been trying to figure out how to afford a trip to
Iceland. I have heard that the landscape
is pretty beautiful, although I’m a little wary about the food, since I’m a
vegetarian and I don’t eat fish. I could
say almost the same thing about Scotland: I want to see it, but I’m worried
about eating there as a vegetarian.
Haggis does not interest me. I’ve
also always wanted to visit South Africa or Cameroon, but I find the thought of
being on a plane (flying from the U.S.) really daunting, and the food issue
gets in the way again. There are a lot
of places I would love to experience, I just don’t want to have to travel
there.
Where to find the author:
Twitter: @ConstantAlysia
Publisher: Interlude Press
Cover
Artist: C.B. Messer
Tour Dates & Stops:
4-Feb
5-Feb
8-Feb
9-Feb
10-Feb
11-Feb
12-Feb
15-Feb
16-Feb
17-Feb
Rafflecopter Prize: $25 Interlude Press gift
card to one winner, e-copies of ‘Sweet’ to five additional winners
No comments:
Post a Comment