Sunday, January 17, 2016

Sweet by Alysia Constantine


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 timewatch 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 agreementand 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
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8-Feb
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Rafflecopter Prize: $25 Interlude Press gift card to one winner, e-copies of ‘Sweet’ to five additional winners




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