T. A. Chase

Guest Blogger: K-Lee Klein

Please make welcome a dear friend and fellow author, K-Lee Klein, who is here to tell us about her new book, Unbreak My Heart. 🙂

Hi y’all. I’m K-lee and this is the second to last stop on my book tour for my new release, Unbreak My Heart. It was released on August 25 and it’s my first work from Amber Allure. Before I get started bending your ear, I want to thank one of the sweetest people I’ve had the pleasure to meet online and in person. Big gratitude for letting me crash your blog, T.A.

Okay, I’ll start with the blurb so I make some sort of sense in what I’m saying.

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UNBREAK MY HEART

Brett Taylor has been doing just fine living in his own little world for the past three years, thank you very much.  Losing someone special is life changing, and Brett doesn’t understand why everyone and their damn dog thinks they can get all up in his business about him needing to move on. He managed to make the transition from musician to rancher without relying on anyone else’s opinion or help, and he certainly doesn’t need some city kid coming into his life to disrupt his routine–one that involves grief, isolation, and a whole lot of Jack Daniels.

Moving from one meaningless job to the next, JT Campbell is on a quest to escape his old life and figure out who he is and where he belongs.  He’s not looking to save anyone, let alone a secretive, hotter-than-hell rancher who wears his heart on his sleeve.  JT likes working for Brett, but Brett’s made it perfectly clear that any relationship between them other than a professional one will never see the light of day.

But when JT’s lust turns to love, and he gives in to his desire to find out what makes Brett tick, will his interest push Brett away?  Or will he, through his patience and support, be the one who can finally unbreak Brett’s heart?

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Brett Taylor and I have something in common that I didn’t realize until after I’d written Unbreak My Heart—we both communicate our feelings on paper more so than with the spoken word. I’m not saying I don’t tell people how I’m feeling, but emotional dumpage is how I began writing in the first place, at least over the past few years.

Before I delve into the mess that is Brett’s mind, I’ll let you in on another one of the characters who shares more than a dabbling of my own personality—Scott Weston from Lazy Sundays. When I wrote Scott I knew he had to be quirky and not most people’s definition of cool. He became an accountant with next to no social life, and the quirks or more aptly called, eccentricities, that he inherited from me were OCD and panic attacks.

My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is on the mild end of the scale, but Scott’s panic attacks were sometimes true to life. I wrote them with vivid memories of how helpless, scared and embarrassing they can sometimes make me feel. It’s not that I think others look at raging anxiety as freakish or embarrassing to them, but in my head it does make me feel bad about not being in control.

That was also one of Scott’s biggest difficulties in accepting that Devon liked him for who he was and not some other impossibly obscure reason. In Scott’s mind it wasn’t only the differing appearances between him and Devon that got in the way, it was his brain telling him Devon was normal and he wasn’t. The mind is a hard thing to change on your own, but I think Devon’s support and love helped Scott realize there is no such thing as normal—everyone has their own quirks and insecurities, some people just hide them better.

I tell people that for me, emotions are the most important part of my stories. Of course, there’s characterization that I hope brings my characters to life on the page, and gives them distinctive personalities. There’s plot that obviously makes the entire story possible in the first place, and physicality that shows the reader the characters care about each other on the outside just as much as on the inside. But the thoughts and feelings inside a character’s head are always the piece de resistance for me.

In my toolbox of tricks, messing around in a character’s brain is called heart-writing because when I write, that’s the part of my body that provides the words. As I’ve already mentioned, I starting writing to unload some of my pent-up emotions, and I’m not shy about saying I’ve had clinical depression for over twenty years. Writing is my way of dealing with the waves of feelings that rant and rave and weep in my head with no place else to go.

Basically, instead of crying or fretting or pacing I write, and it doesn’t matter if I’m writing something publishable, dabbling in fanfiction or just recording something for myself. Writing is therapy and the best days I have are when I can share my emotions with the character I’m writing.

This leads me to Brett Taylor. What can I say about Brett? He’s beautiful but doesn’t know it, talented but prefers to ignore it, and his insides are torn to shreds from a loss that shattered his heart and turned him away from almost everything in his life. Brett tore me apart when I wrote him. He wrung me out like an overused dishcloth, left me in tears and broken in my own way, but he was also the most touching and therapeutic character I’ve ever written.

Saying it out loud like that makes Brett sound like he’s hopeless and unfixable which is so far from the truth. Part of Brett’s issue was his lack of awareness of just how far he’d fallen from being the man he once was, at least until he wrote his feelings down. Writing was therapeutic for Brett, as well, it was an outlet to dump all the churnings of his mind and heart in a way he didn’t have to share with anyone else. Unfortunately, before his brain would give up those feelings he had to be two sheets to the wind, at least at first.

I’m not sure I could write anything at all if I were overloaded with alcohol, or at least nothing comprehensible. But the overall result for both Brett and me was basically the same. We both use writing as a means to deactivate that time bomb in our heads. I won’t say it’s a cure-all or sure-fire means to ending my depression or Brett’s grief, but as an in-the-moment fix, writing lets me breathe.

On that note I’ll take my last breath—in this post—and invite you to check out Brett Taylor and his story. Unbreak My Heart is available in all ebook formats, and will be in print some time in the mid-September. I’ll have a few copies with me at GRL if anyone is interested in having me sign one. *blushes*

Buy Link http://www.amberquill.com/AmberAllure/UnbreakMyHeart.html

For a chance to win one of three draws just fill out my Rafflcopter form below and you’ll be entered to win one of three prizes—two ebook copies of Unbreak My Heart, and one print copy. You can have another chance if you leave me a comment here—what’s your favorite trope or subject matter in what you read? Thanks for stopping by.

And before I really go, here’s an excerpt from Unbreak My Heart:

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The first shot went down like he was gargling with glass. The second burned just as bad, but by the fifth, the whiskey was smooth as silk. Brett pushed the bottle to the corner of the desk as he scrubbed his hand over his face. He should have gone to bed, or cranked up the hot tub and spent the rest of the night looking at the stars. Instead, the yellow pad of paper sat in front of him—the page still blank.

He knew he had something to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Usually the alcohol helped. Usually the fog in his head cleared and he was able to concentrate by the third shot, but he still felt stuck, still felt like there was something hidden in the gray of his brain—something important.

He picked up the pen, letting it hover over the page, twisting it between his fingers, willing the damn thing to write on its own. He didn’t know why he was so wound up. He’d even dropped his goddamn beer bottle in the sink because he couldn’t control the shaking of his hands or the force of the need to shut himself away in his office with a different bottle altogether, the photo in the frame, and his words on the page. He studied the happy couple staring back at him in the frame, barely recognizing himself as he purposely drew his gaze to Walt.

“Gonna help me out here, Darlin’? Don’t seem to have the mind to help myself tonight so I sure could use the assistance.”

Pulling the bottle so it sat smack dab in the middle of the daunting yellow page, Brett caressed the shape, fingers running the full length, then down again. He’d never even liked the damn stuff until Walt died. The first bottle he’d finished had been Walt’s, and he’d downed it in an attempt to feel closer to him—like drinking the damn stuff would somehow make Walt stick to his insides. But all it had done was send him running into town the next day to get another bottle, and only The Good Lord himself knew how many more there’d been after that.

His anniversary blues didn’t generally last more than the day itself, but today had been different. He’d already assured himself he’d been productive so it hadn’t been a complete waste, and he’d even made that damn phone call he’d been fretting about for over a week. Supper had gone better than he’d expected, too, and talking to the kid afterward had been pleasant enough, but something still felt unsettled inside him.

Maybe he’d revealed too much about himself when he’d actually been planning on saying as little as possible. But the kid was comfortable to be around, and the conversation hadn’t been one-sided by any means. They’d both talked and listened, and it had been nice.

Nice. Familiar. Safe. All those things were good, but there was still a leftover confusion in his head. He was generally a forthcoming type of man, not hemming and hawing about things that could be said outright, but now he couldn’t remember a time when he’d blatantly told someone he barely knew that he was gay. He didn’t consider it to be a secret or anything to be hidden…at least not anymore, but once JT started stealing glances at him, he’d suddenly felt like a trapped animal. 

The last thing he wanted was for the kid to get some weird idea in his head about seducing his boss, and Brett definitely didn’t want to lead him on. Not that JT looked the type to be interested in forty-year-old ranchers with bad dispositions. The idea would have been funny if it weren’t so damn nice to think about holding someone close again. Brett knew that person was not JT though, and he’d have to nip any ideas to the contrary in the bud before they flowered up into something neither of them could handle. 

By the time JT had run his eyes over him for the fourth time, Brett hadn’t been able to get the damn bottle in his hand fast enough. It just wasn’t right—not JT’s interest, not the alcohol, not the stir of warmth in his groin, and not the pang of guilt in his heart. It wasn’t something he’d given into with such determination in a while. Yet there he was with five shots under his belt, his mind still reeling and not a goddamn word written on the page.

He forewent the tumbler for his sixth and seventh swallows, the amber liquid finally warming his belly and washing away the fog in his brain. Unfortunately, it didn’t cloud the shame in his heart so once he’d screwed on the cap and shoved the bottle away again, he put the frame back in the drawer.

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BIO

K-lee Klein has lived in one part of Western Canada or another for her entire life. She’s a doting mother of three now-grown kids, and has had characters and plots running around her head for as long as she can remember.

She lives with a patient husband who totally does not get her thing for gay men, two spoiled but wonderful sons (who don’t get it either), and two also spoiled but beautiful cats. Her days are filled with texts and phone calls with her daughter who has already left the nest, and an abundance of fabulous gay men, large and small, bouncing off the walls of her skull, competing for their turns to tell their stories.

You can find all of K-lee’s books on her website:

http://www.kleeklein.com

And K-lee herself at

http://chaosinthemoonlight.blogspot.ca

https://twitter.com/Klee_Klein

https://www.facebook.com/kleemoon

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