Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "in-his-eyes"

I’ve talked about this before but I believe every life has a soundtrack. My own life’s soundtrack is dominated by Donna Summer, Grace Jones, and Michael Jackson. Music is a marker—every song can take us back to a specific moment in time, or fix us to the mood we were in when we first heard it. Thus couples always have “our song.”

As I said, every life has its own soundtrack. The same is true, I believe of books. Songs referred to in books, can set a mood, it can also anchor the story in time, just as descriptions of fashion and hairstyles can. All of my novels have soundtracks and my latest, , which releases a week from today (August 1) is no exception.

This post is dedicated to looking at the songs from this book. I’ve included the Chapter headings in which the song appears for easy reference.

60. Independence Day

“Independence Day” by Bruce Springsteen. Each character is different so each has his own taste in music. This song sums up Reid’s inner tumult that leads up to the chapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKzOH...

83. Dry Kisses

“I’ll Tumble for Ya” by Culture Club. I choose this song for the particular scene it appears it for two reasons—one the song is one of joy. It is a reminder that even in sorrow we can extract joy. The other reason was because the lyrics can be hard to make sense of, much like the action that unfolds along with the song in this chapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwb9-...

117. Piano

Gershwin’s “Love is Here to Stay.” Micah is a pianist who loves Gershwin. In my post last week, I talked about the role of pianos in the book. When Micah sits down and plays this song we, the reader, glimpse something we hadn’t quite seen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zq7w...

135. I Am the Man for You, Baby

“I Am The Man For You Baby” by Edwin Starr. For me this was a sweet moment shared by two characters. It had a perfect nostalgic and hopeful feel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_yyf...

138. You Are My Friend

“You are My Friend” by Sylvester. I’ve always loved Sylvester’s version of this song. It’s joy, it’s gratitude, it’s acknowledgement. As people, we don’t always see what is right in front of us and this is true of the characters in this book as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryPpi...

Today is the release of my third novel—my first full length work since Unbroken which was released in 2013. This is my fifth release in six years—still it feels like the first time I’ve ever released a book. It’s accompanied by the same worry, the same doubt: did I write the best book I could? Will readers like it? Will anyone read it?

On Saturday, we saw Diana Ross in concert at the Mann Center in Philly. The outing was part of our new effort to get out more, to do things together. Our therapist says that’s important—yes, we have a therapist; after twenty years together, the waters of matrimony are still sometimes difficult to navigate. Anyway, back to Miss Ross. I watched her closely, as I watch all artists—and let’s face it we writers are artists, too. I was impressed by her energy, her humanity: from the stage, she came off not so much as a diva as a person, doing her best and hoping to please a crowd. Her daughter opened for her and she brought her grandchildren on stage—yes Miss Ross is a grandmother. Not surprising at 73 but still I always saw her as the legend, the diva, Miss Ross.

I watched her closely. Her brand is remarkable, familiar, and flawlessly executed: the hair, the glamorous form fitting—but not vulgarly so—floor-length sequined gowns with modest trains and miles of organza wraps.

Recently an opportunity unexpectedly presented itself which allowed me to escape the work-a-day world—at least for a while. I wasn’t necessarily looking to exit the job market, but I’ve been around the block enough times, and seen enough horror movies, to know that when a door slams shut behind you, you jump through the nearest window. So, I’ve had the wherewithal and time to focus on the release of this new book. Which meant thinking about marketing and understanding my brand. If Miss Ross’ brand is elegant old school glamour, mine is a kind of unflinching, almost brutal, honesty. Love isn’t everything and it isn’t always easily won. And romance isn’t all sex and flowers and candlelight. It requires compromise and patience and commitment, and room for others and the demands of a life lived. All of this is reflected in In His Eyes. I like to think I wrote a grown-up love story, less a coming out or coming of age story, and more of a coming to terms story. For most of us, gay men, gay men of color, in particular, (though I think this is true also of women and people of color and pretty much anyone outside the ruling majority) it’s all a life lesson, a negotiation, a schooling in the art of creating a place at the table when none has been reserved for us from birth.

In His Eyes tells the story of four young men, friends, and lovers, who meet in college, and spans more than two decades. But, unlike my other books, this story is told from multiple points of view. So, we get to know each character intimately. We get to watch Micah, Skye, Reid, and Calvin grow into manhood and learn to navigate the world and their relationships.

From this writer’s stage, I did my best and I’m hoping to please my readers. And I’m hoping they will be moved by the honesty, the humanity, of my characters.

Happy Release Day to me! And a big thank you to Debbie McGowan and the entire Beaten Track family for helping me bring another book into the world.

I have lived with dogs for 22 years. Channing, Coco, Toby of York (Toby), Victor Lorde Riley (Riley). But I have been with Toby the longest. Like an old married couple, we are familiars; we know each other’s quirks and preferences; we are comfortably with the rhythm of our life together as the tides wash us up against each other and pull us apart, secure in the knowledge that it will also bring us back together again. We take comfort in each other’s presence even when I am writing and he is sleeping at my feet. Our nearness is enough.

Channing, Coco, Toby, Riley. I have learned so much from living with dogs. This post is all about what I have leaned form the canine companions I’ve been lucky enough to know.

Approach every stranger as if he or she was a friend, a potential ally. If they respond by throwing shade your way, hike up your tail and walk away.

Help your friends. Coco used to always rush to the kitchen door to greet me when she heard the garage door open. After she went deaf, Toby would run to her bed, wake her and lead her to the kitchen door.

Live in the moment; don’t project your expectations and fears on every adventure. This was the hardest for me to learn/adapt. In truth, it wasn’t until my doctor started me on Klonopin that I gained the ability to live in the moment—Let he who has not needed pharmaceutical intervention cast the first Prozac—to not imagine the worst possible outcome of every adventure.

Allow no room for self-pity; be determined. Six years ago, Toby ruptured a disc in his neck. He ended up paralyzed from the neck down. We rushed him to Penn where surgery was performed 18 hours after the rupture. We saw him the day after his surgery. I am loud; stress and anxiety make me louder. I will never forget turning onto the ward, where Toby was being exercised to keep his muscles from atrophying. He couldn’t walk or stand but hearing my voice, he wiggled on his belly moving, painfully, slowly, towards the sound of my voice. I don’t think I’ve ever cried harder than I did at the moment I witnessed him, paralyzed, doing his best to get to me.

It’s not always in the words. Because dogs are non-verbal, I’ve learned to read non-verbal cues: is he feeling unwell? does he need to go out? Is he too hot? The hardest cue they give you is when they have had enough living, when they want you to let them go. People will break your heart regularly and for various reasons; a dog will break your heart only once and that is only because he can no longer shuffle alongside you on this mortal coil.

That brings me to the next thing I’ve learned from having dogs: the heart breaks; the heart heals. After losing Channing, after losing Coco, the pain was so great I didn’t think I could love another but then it occurred to me that they were each such wonderful dogs that the best thing I could do to honor their memory was to rescue another. I’d grieve for each of them whether I had another dog or not but how much less selfish to give another dog a chance while healing.

Be your best self. When we adopted him, Toby was…difficult. We were his fourth home in his 18 months on this earth. He was loud, determined, slightly out-of-control. In short, he was a canine version of me. With patience (and a very expensive trainer) he calmed down a little. About a year or two ago, a man approached us and asked what kind of dog Toby was. “Silky terrier,” I responded.
“Is he a good dog? he asked as my friend rolled her eyes.
“He’s the best dog he knows how to be.” I responded. “I can’t ask for more than that.”
I can’t ask for more than that from him and I can’t ask for more than that from myself. Thus, I try to be my best, most authentic self, every day. I am, the best man I know how to be. No one can ask more of me.

Never borrow someone else’s voice. What I’ve observed and what has had the most profound effect on me is this: dogs, learn. They learn from us, from each other, from other dogs they encounter. But, they never become another dog; they never borrow another dog’s voice. They may bark at the same things but it was always their own bark, their own voice, they add to the cacophony. When I started writing seriously, I was determined not to borrow another’s voice. It is always my voice, a bit too honest, too strident, perhaps, left-leaning, and determined, but always my voice.

All of these lessons influence my life and my writing. You can read about my newest book, In His Eyes which incorporates at least some of these lessons here.

To see photos from this post, visit my blog here.

A few weeks ago I was at the Authors Corner at the The Ask Rayceen Show. We were asked who we'd like to star in movie version of our books.

Today on my blog I list the actors I'd like to star in the movie version of In His Eyes: Darryl Stephens & Jensen Atwood from Noah's Ark and Benjamin Farmer from "The Falls" trilogy.

I'm missing one actor though. Read my blog post here and suggest an actor and you'll be entered into a drawing to win a copy of my latest.

I don’t read when I’m working on a book. I’m too easily influenced by what is happening around me when I write: events, conversations, songs, people—they all comes into play and get filtered into my work. So, I avoid reading to avoid another writer’s influence. Since In His Eyes was released on August 1, I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading. Most recently I picked up “The Best of Saki,” by H.H. Munro, a British writer whose witty, mischievous, and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. I fell in love with his prose. Often there were lines that were sublime: concise, biting. As read, I made notes highlighting those special lines. This post is about favorite lines from books I’ve recently read.

Saki's casual comments on marriage were a particular favorite of mine:

You’re married to him—that’s different; you’ve sworn to love, honour, and endure him: I haven’t.
–Laura

To have married Mortimer Seltoun, ‘Dead Mortimer,’ as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through…
—The Music on the Hill

And art:

His “Noontide Peace,” a study of two dun cows under a walnut tree, was followed by “A Mid-day Sanctuary,” a study of a walnut tree with two dun cows under it.
—The Stalled Ox

And family relations and motives for staying close:

He’s a kind of distant cousin of my mother’s, and so enormously rich that we’ve never let the relationship drop out of sight.
—Fur

And this during a flood, when one character was asked if any lives had been lost:

Heaps, I should say. The second housemaid has already identified three bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young man she’s engaged to. Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification. Of course, it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn’t thought of that.
—The Lull

Other favorites of mine were:

I’m always having depressing experiences,” said the Baroness, “But I never give them outward expression. It’s as bad as looking one’s age… –The Way to the Diary

In Whitehall and places where they think, they doubtless thought well of him.
–Cousin Teresa

This bread and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles away long before you can get it to your mouth. One feels so absurd, snapping at one’s food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at may-fly.
—Louise

This observation about the Salvation Army is easily my favorite of all:

…though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they’re so absolutely different to what they used to be when I remember them in the ‘eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and disheveled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions.
—Laura

I’m now reading the novel Shortcomings, by actor Darryl Stephens (Noah’s Arc, Hot Guys with Guns) and on page 6, I fell in love with this line:

His heartbeat echoes in his ear and slowly grows faint like a marching band drummer wandering away in a wide open field under a clear blue sky.

For me it was so evocative, so beautifully wrought. Later I came cross this line and read it over and over: it captures so much so simply, summing up a world of difference in just a few words:

He glimpsed the moment like a snapshot: one boy only saw two approaching girls; the other only saw the spot where the other boy had touched him.

I tend to remember these sentences, highlighting them, or writing them down. I’m a wordsmith. Or a word nerd, maybe. I was amused when I read a GoodReads review of In His Eyes and the reviewer referred to herself as a nerd because she included sentences she loved.

I don't think anyone ever really saw me until Reid looked at me. I sort of feel like I only exist in his eyes. And now that he's looked away - now that he only has eyes for...her - I may cease to exist.

I opened the door and he walked in, a dream from my past, and my every hope for the future.

She declared this one, perhaps her favorite sentence ever:

Though Calvin lived in the world of books and laws, his real home was in the corner of someone's eye.

Re-reading her choices, I as a bit surprised by …their brevity. I tend to write long, complex sentences (Hemingway, I am not.) I think my favorite sentence from In His Eyes is:

I suppose love is really just a patchwork quilt made up of random shared experiences, each in and of itself insignificant, but which, when stitched together by a depth of feeling, a determination to find peace, told a remarkable story.

That reviewer made me realize I am not alone in singling out specific sentences in the books I read. So, what about you? Do you have favorite lines from books you’ve read? If you do, feel free to share them in the comments below.

On June 26, I quit my job. I immediately stopped doing three things: setting my alarm, ironing clothes, and shaving. The next day I started Klonopin, an anticonvulsant often prescribed to treat panic attacks and anxiety. Five days later I sat in my doctor’s office and, in tears, admitted that for the first time in I didn’t know how long, I felt like myself. He referred me to a therapist and the work began.

With no job, and a new book set to be released August 1, I had nothing to do but work on myself and write. I needed to figure not only who I was but who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do next. Writing was a part of that. With the publication of my first book, What Binds Us, I was classified as a romance writer specifically gay romance, more commonly referred to as mm romance. I was never quite comfortable with that definition quite frankly. My books have strong romantic elements but I don’t see them as romances. Being so close to releasing In His Eyes, I really needed to think through that—especially since I hadn’t written the book’s blurb yet, and that essentially positions the book for prospective readers.

With all that going on, I didn’t think much about not shaving. In truth, I didn’t even start shaving until I was nearly 40, and then it was only twice a week. My first boyfriend in college who actually shaved daily and had chest hair, used to call me an “old smoothie.” I was comfortable being hairless. I was never particularly masculine—especially when I was younger. Facial and body hair seemed reserved for more manly men. Hell, I don’t even have hair under my arms. I stopped thinking about facial hair a long time ago.

It wasn’t until, I went to NY to have dinner with my parents and family one Sunday that I thought about it again. The first thing they said when I walked in the door was, “You look so relaxed.” Without the job-related stress, without a commute that added hours to my workday, I had begun to relax. The Klonopin muted the noise in my head and eased the tightness in my chest. With a fifth book out, which is probably the best one so far, I had relaxed into my talent as well.

The second thing they said was, “We’ve never seen you with facial hair before.” It was then that I realized the last time I had shaved was August 3 just before I went to OutWrite 2017 in DC. Other people began to notice.
My friend Shirley said, “I like it. Now you look like a writer.” Days later, a neighbor seeing me remarked, “You look so scholarly. You should write a book!” Amused, I dropped a copy of In His Eyes in his mailbox the next day.

A few weeks later, when I again visited my parents, I posted a selfie of me and my nephew Max to Facebook. It was the first time most people had seen me with facial hair. The comments poured in.

You have a beard???
Is that a beard I see?
It's so not what I think of you. It's like if you said you liked math! Who are you????

That comment echoed my husband, Stanley. When the beard care kit I ordered arrived, he stared at it, then at me and asked, Who are you?

I hadn’t meant to post a photo of the new me just yet. I was still trying to decide if I would keep it. It was a decision as weighty as the first time I pierced my ear and then later when I pierced the other one and started wearing earrings in pairs.

I had to reimagine how I saw myself—how I thought of myself. I wasn’t the type of man to have facial hair, was I? I was to sissy for that, wasn’t I? I’ve never considered myself particularly masculine and that was part of my struggle with the concept of facial hair on myself. Guys like me are supposed to be clean-shaven, aren’t they? I began to wonder if when people questioned my growing a beard, they were implying: I was too sissy for facial hair.

A few more weeks have passed and my beard is filling in. Am I going to keep it? Is it time to leave the “old smoothie” behind? Probably. It’s time for a change. I’ve always considered myself a serious writer, maybe it’s time I started looking like one. I’m still the same person but maybe it’s time to rebrand myself. And my facial hair has grown on me.

Let’s face it—despite its designation as the “Day of Sharing and Joy,” Thanksgiving can be a a minefield of emotion and stress. Perhaps that's why I like writing about it--all that drama and revelation in a relatively small window of time.

To honor the day, below is an excerpt from my last novel, In His Eyes. In this scene, four old friends gather for thanksgiving. A fifth is added to the mix, upending traditions and leading to secrets being revealed. Hope you enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving!

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