12 days of Kissmas Amy Lane: Exclusive Guest Post, includes Giveaway

Day 4 of 12 Days of Kissmas is brought to you by Amy Lane. And I LOOOOVVVVEEEEE the kiss she brought today. It isn’t a “normal” kiss, just as she says, it speaks of intimacy and tenderness. It speaks more of love than even a grand gesture kiss. I adore today’s pick. So, check out her post, let her know your thoughts, and don’t forget about the giveaways. All of them! Still time to go back and check out the previous Kissmas posts, as well, and enter. Welcome to Amy Lane (who I saw is going to be at Coastal Magic, which Victoria Sue talked about in her Guest Post yesterday…and I am hoping to go…and I’ll get really nervous meeting her!). Yes, Welcome Amy!

 

Small Moments

By Amy Lane

I have a way of smashing the grand romantic gesture.

Once, right after Mate and I moved in together, he tried to grand-romantic-gesture me. He set up an airplane buzzing around in a circle from our ceiling over flowers and a card—it was adorable and charming.

Of course that was the day I never went home because my friends came and got me and we did Epi-lady things at their apartment (a whole over post involving tears and blood) and anyway, by the time I got home, the flowers were wilted and the plane had stopped buzzing.

And it was not nearly as awesome as it would have been if I’d just gone home when I normally do, and that’s been pretty much every grand romantic gesture he’s ever made for me.  It’s not his fault. It’s all me. I suck at them.

But when I’m cooking sometimes he’ll come up behind me and hug me, and kiss my cheek. And the rest of my day is filled with warmth and all is right with the world.

Sometimes, that moment, that kiss, that call during your day, that, “I thought we could do this,” or that, “Here, I’ll do this chore,”—sometimes those things are the things that we love most of all about our lover.

The small things.

So I picked this moment not because of a sunset or a picnic or a thing or a place that was supposed to be romantic.

I picked it because the kiss was spontaneous, and tender, and it was one of those small moments that make up a larger, more complex relationship.

Because the small things are important.

My Christmas novella this year, Regret Me Not, is basically two guys healing—one physically, the other emotionally—in a beach condo in Florida. There’s no murder mystery, no subplot, no dramatic weather or fear for their lives.

There’s just two guys, talking, day to day, making their personalities mesh, entertaining each other, trying to Christmas without forgetting the five-hundredth thing from Target.

Two guys, working shit out.

The small stuff matters—not intruding on each other’s privacy unless asked, making dinner, doing the dishes, playing or celebrating when there’s cause.

Kissing someone’s shoulder tenderly, because you are together, and intimate, and the shoulder is there, begging for a kiss.

So that’s why this picture.

Christmas always seems to be about the grand dramatic gesture—and there is a grand romantic gesture at the end of the story. But most of the rest of the story is about the everyday moments that keep a couple together, that they can build on.

Small moments.

A kiss on the shoulder.

An hour together in front of the TV.

A shared text, a shared game.

They matter.

Amy Lane has two grown children, two half-grown children, two cats, and two Chi-who-whats at large. She lives in a crumbling crapmansion with most of the children and a bemused spouse. She also 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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