Friday 20 February 2015

April’s Interlude #5

 
Can You Ever Go Back Home?
 
My home town is a small and typical American small town. I looked up an aerial view of my home town on Google Earth once, just to see what Main Street looked like. From that Broad picture my town looked perfect. There are about a dozen shops on either side of Main Street and the Library just beyond them on one side of the street. Of course, I can pick out the library from space without a problem, believe me. I also was able to see how all the streets connect and how the cute little houses lined up. Even when you’re driving through town Main Street looks perfect. On the lamp posts they have little flags that represent the seasons. When football season is on the local high school football players each have their own little flags. What this broad view doesn’t show is where the drug houses are. Even if you don’t do drugs the average citizen who lives in my town knows where they are and who frequents those houses. We also know that the LGBT community is virtually non-existent and the small one that does existent is usually the center of most of the gossip. This was especially true for my character, Jaron McAllister, while he was growing up in Pickleville. There’s no such thing as anonymity in a small town.
 
The urge to leave and move to a bigger city to gain some sort of privacy is overwhelming, especially as a teenager which is when Jaron leaves. In a bigger city, getting lost in the crowd is easy and no one cares who you sleep with or what drugs you do. Meeting people in the LGBT community is much easier simply because there are more of us around and we can be quite diverse. This diversity tends to broaden a person’s perspective, allowing for less judgment and more acceptances of other people’s point-of-view.
 
The life experiences gained from branching out and expanding the world around a person are irreversible. Even when a person comes back to their small town to live permanently the experiences gained from interacting with different kinds of people will always broaden a person’s perspective on the world around them. Jaron finds out this is especially true for him as he makes a life for himself and his son. He also realizes that not everyone can be put in a neat little box based on where they live. He realizes that he has more friends in the LGBT community than he originally thought, but it is his own openness that allows him to make these friends in the first place.
 
 
All Jaron McAllister wanted to do was get out of the small town where he grew up. After being bullied all his life for being gay, that’s exactly what he does. He loses all contact with everyone in the town of Pickleville, including his emotionally distant mother and the only true friend he ever had.
 
When his best friend and mother of the child they share, get murdered he knows he must ask for help in the one place he thought he would never go back to. Coming back home isn’t easy and finding himself attracted to the town man-slut spells disaster. Travis Heath isn’t at all what his reputation suggests though.
 
Whispers of Home by April Kelley
(Pickeville #1)
Publishing on 15th of February 2015 by eXtasybooks
Contemporary Romance