Hi guys we have Layla Dorine stopping by with the cover for her debut novel Guitars and Cages, we’ve nicked a short excerpt and we have a great giveaway so admire that great cover and click that Rafflecopter link <3 ~Pixie~
Guitars and Cages
Layla Dorine
Asher Logan is a bartender and a pretty wicked guitar player, when he isn’t wrecking his hands fighting in a cage. With a past he keeps hoping to outrun, Asher’s been on a downward spiral for longer than he can remember. When his sister-in-law leaves Rory, his eight-year-old nephew, in his care, Asher is forced into two things he’s never been good at: sobriety and responsibility. As he struggles to care for Rory, his own life begins to unravel.
When Asher’s brother, Alex, turns up, presenting as a girl and announcing her new name is Alexia, it further complicates matters, as does the arrival of his new neighbor, Conner. Both, in their own way, compel Asher to look at his own closely-guarded views on sexuality.
When the siblings’ older brother, Cole, reacts violently to Alexia, Asher is placed squarely in the middle of a family conflict which compels him to confront who he pretends to be versus who he really is.
Asher must choose who to trust and who to finally walk away from.
Excerpt
HOW LONG does it take to unravel a life? A second? An hour? A minute? A year? In my case it took sixty-three seconds. That’s .0175 percent of an hour, or 63,000 milliseconds, or the time it takes to chug a beer and light a cigarette. Hell, there’s a ton of things I can do in sixty-three seconds; I should know, I’ve kept track of them all. In sixty-three seconds I can open a car door with a coat hanger or make a peanut-butter sandwich. Sixty-three seconds is 11.22 percent of The Doors’ classic The End. It’s the time it used to take to walk from the door of my apartment to the door of my favorite whore. Sixty-three seconds is also how long it took my eldest brother to die after we were left no choice but to pull the plug on him.
One minute and three seconds of gripping his hand, pleading, begging, urging him to breathe on his own, to give us a miracle, to live, because if he didn’t, the rest of us weren’t sure we’d be able to go on living without him.
There’s a difference between life and living, you know. Sometimes it’s a hair’s width, sometimes it’s shades of gray, and sometimes it’s just there and we don’t even realize it until we’re so far over the line that we’ve lost far more than we’ve found. I can’t tell you the exact moment when I got lost. It could have been when the declining beep, beep, beep turned into a loud, unyielding whine. It could have been the moment we shoveled the dirt down onto the coffin, or the moment we stood there, looking at one another, no longer able to stand each other’s company; eyes down, feet shuffling restlessly before one by one we turned away.
It could have been the days, the weeks, the months after that moment, as I pickled my brain in a bottle and lost myself in the firm thighs, gasping moans, and plastic promises of a street-corner whore. Did I lose myself in the fine lines I cut where no one else could see them, in the tattered rooms in which I dwelt, the raggedness of my appearance, and the carelessness with which I went about doing one of the only things I had ever really loved?
Maybe it was all of those, or maybe it was none; I honestly couldn’t say. What I can say is that I know the day, the hour, and the minute when I had no choice but to change.
For more excerpt click here: http://www.waywardinkpublishing.com/product/guitars-and-cages-by-layla-dorine/ (just click the excerpt tab)
About Layla
LAYLA DORINE lives among the sprawling prairies of Midwestern America, in a house with more cats than people. She loves hiking, fishing, swimming, martial arts, camping out, photography, cooking, and dabbling with several artistic mediums. In addition, she loves to travel and visit museums, historic, and haunted places.
Layla got hooked on writing as a child, starting with poetry and then branching out, and she hasn’t stopped writing since. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggle, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other folks that she’s met and fallen in love with over the years. Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes its aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing, or wandering somewhere outdoors, she can often be found curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.
Layla Dorine can be found at:
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