Pictures by Amy Lane – Guest Blog


Long and Short Reviews welcomes Amy Lane who is celebrating the release of A Fool and His Manny.

Pictures
By Amy Lane

I recently watched Coco with my family, in which the family wall of pictures plays an important part—and I have to admit, I felt a little guilty.

I’m horrible at having pictures up at my house.

Part of it is the electronic age. Why update the pictures on your wall when you have a traveling slide show on your phone? Part of it is wall space. We have none. But the movie brought home to me that the pictures on your mantel and your shelves do help people understand who lives in your house.

In A Fool and His Manny, Quinlan doesn’t skimp on pictures. By the time he and Dusty fall in love, he’s been with Dusty’s family for seven years. He’s got pictures of the kids—and pictures of himself with the family—on every shelf in his little apartment.

But he’s never the center.

Now, in the few pictures I do have, me and my kids and my husband are all clustered together in the center. We’re a unit. So it made sense that Quin—the eternal outsider—wouldn’t feel that way. He was the nanny, so it was his job to make sure his family was in the middle of the people puddle.

When Dusty starts courting him—while Quin is away on tour—he has Quinlan send him a selfie a day, and returns them.

Now selfies are a very specific picture—the person taking the selfie is the center of the world. So Dusty was really very smart. He made Quinlan see himself as the center of Dusty’s world for two months, at a distance, where embarrassment or shyness wouldn’t hobble his growing awareness. And at the same time, Dusty got to be the center of Quinlan’s world, and the best part of his day.

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In Dusty’s family, hunting down and capturing a mate is a family enterprise, and having good moves, good habits that make a mate feel a little happier about being hunted down and captured, is a matter of pride. Tino hunted Channing by waking up at five in the morning so he could make Channing breakfast before going to work. Cooper made Sammy protein juice because Sammy needed help managing his health.

In Dustin’s case, Quinlan had been providing meals as a matter of course. He needed a better move.

And it must have worked—because when Quinlan got back from tour, he was primed to see Dusty as more than a kid he used to take care of. He was ready for Dusty to be an adult who helped take care of him.

Dustin Robbins-Grayson was a surly adolescent when Quinlan Gregory started the nanny gig. After a rocky start, he grew into Quinlan’s friend and confidant—and a damned sexy man.

At twenty-one, Dusty sees how Quinlan sacrificed his own life and desires to care for Dusty’s family. He’s ready to claim Quinlan—he’s never met a kinder, more capable, more lovable man. Or a lonelier one. Quinlan has spent his life as the stranger on the edge of the photograph, but Dusty wants Quinlan to be the center of his world. First he has to convince Quinlan he’s an adult, their love is real, and Quinlan can be more than a friend and caregiver. Can he show Quin that he deserves to be both a man and a lover, and that in Dusty’s eyes, he’s never been “just the manny?”

About the Author: Award winning wool-gather, Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with the children who are still growing, a fur-baby mafia, and a bemused spouse. She 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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