I know it's not Music Monday Moves me
3:25 PM Posted In Christmas , monday music moves me Edit This 3 Comments »
...but this song moved me today! I hope you like it!
Just when you think you're safe - everyone's laughing at you!
12:00 AM Posted In funny , video Edit This 1 Comment »With life going on in my house - this video was watched about 20 times to get me into a better mood! I hope it helps you too!
ZA Maxfield: Good Morning St. Nacho’s
1:08 PM Posted In ZA Maxfield Edit This 2 Comments »Welcome to Santo Ignacio, population 3141.5, a sleepy coastal California town where the Red Hat Society ladies will take you under their wing and a local motel owner will keep an eye out to make sure you're doing okay.
Where else will a Juilliard educated violinist plays mariachi music at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Where else but Nacho's bar can you dine on authentic Cali-Mex specialties then push the tables back for in impromtu string quartet or a dance performance by the local college's hearing-impaired theatre group, then dance the night away to the thumpa thumpa of disco music?
Where else but Day-Use Ex Machina will Izzie the gym owner and her right hand man Jordan rehab your muscles so you can burn off the calories you consume at Miss Independence Pies or the new local bakery, unamed as yet because Jacob Livingstone's investor brother wants him to call it Jacob's Larder and they're still fighting over it.
Local legend has it that the land is sacred, and only those who belong in St. Nacho's will even notice it's there -- resting demurely along the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. At Rune Nation, St. Nacho's occult bookstore owner Minerva, who stopped in St. Nacho's on her way to meet up with her boyfriend in Haight Ashbury for the Summer of Love -- and never left -- will tell you that's the gospel truth.
Take a road trip today and find out if Santo Ignacio has plans for you!
You can find out all about the St. Nacho's series and other books by Z.A. Maxfield here:
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ST. NACHO'S
Book 1
Z. A. Maxfield
Contemporary Erotic M/M
Loose Id
Available NOW
Buy HERE
Cooper has spent the last three years running from a painful past. He’s currently moving from town to town, working in restaurant kitchens, and playing his violin for tips. As soon as he starts to feel comfortable anywhere—with anyone—he moves on. He’s aware that music may be the only human language he still knows. Ironically, the one man he’s wanted to communicate with in all that time is deaf.
Shawn is part of a deaf theater group at the nearby college. Shawn wants Cooper as soon as they meet and he begins a determined flirtation. Cooper is comfortable with down and dirty sex, just not people. As far as Shawn is concerned, dirty sex is win-win, but he wants Cooper to let him into the rest of his life as well.
Cooper needs time to heal and put his past away for good. Shawn needs to help Cooper forgive himself and accept that he can be loved. Both men find out that when it comes to the kind of healing love can bring, the sleepy beachside town of Santo Ignacio, “St. Nacho’s” as the locals call it, may just be the very best place to start.
Publisher’s Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Anal play/intercourse, male/male sexual practices.
PG Excerpt:
When Shawn came into the bar with his friends, he immediately sat the group at a table on the patio where I was playing and went to get them a round of drinks. He had three men and two girls with him. Their little party was so lively; they caught every eye in the place. Shawn returned and Kevin put a protective hand on the back of his chair. He and Shawn began to talk, and I saw a lot of glances headed my way. Kevin’s looked a little frosty, and I wasn’t surprised. He kept a hand on Shawn, or his chair, the entire time. Shawn even knocked it off a couple of times, but Kevin simply put it back surreptitiously when he wasn’t paying attention.
Shawn waved at me and I gestured back with the neck of my violin without interrupting the piece. He and Kevin engaged in some sort of discussion. They all looked like passionate debates, and he scooted his chair away from Kevin’s a little. Then Shawn smiled at me with the kind of smile that usually meant leaving town. And from the way Kevin stared at his profile, I saw I was right. Whatever they were saying, I would not be staying in St. Nacho’s long enough to find out.
I turned and worked the tables in the opposite corner, deliberately. When it comes to a smile like the one on Shawn’s face, I had to say, I was not immune to its charm. It spoke to me of summer and liking a boy because he helped you off the ground when another one shoved you. It reminded me of music camp, pancake breakfasts, cold lemonade, and playing in the orchestra at the Mall of America and going on an amusement park ride with the first chair cello, only to find out that he wanted to kiss me as badly as I wanted to kiss him. It was an open, curious smile, free of guile, which I could not even look at for its brightness and its hope.
Then suddenly, he was standing right before me, having tired of trying to get my attention any other way, and between songs I sighed and smiled back. He held out a beer as an offering, and I shook my head and declined, telling him firmly that I did not drink.
Wide, curious eyes that told me nothing met mine. “Iced tea?” he asked, carefully signing and speaking the words.
I nodded. He left to get me a glass and brought sweetener and lemon back with it on a saucer. “Play for me,” he said. “I’ll watch.” He indicated the violin.
What devil possessed me, I couldn’t say, but perhaps the simple troublemaker that was my constant companion made me take his hand and place it on the bottom of my violin as I began to play “La Habanera,” from Carmen. His eyes widened, and he jerked his hand back completely as if it burned when I played the first few notes. Kevin leaped to his feet.
Oh, yeah. I’m a fucking Venus flytrap, all right. A man-eater.
Shawn motioned to Kevin to sit, adding, “Just chill, Kevin. It tickled is all,” in his unmusical voice, and he replaced his hand, feeling the music through his fingers. I happen to know, because I play the thing all the time, that you can feel the difference between the high notes and the low. You can feel the violin tremble with my vibrato. You can feel both the inclination and the emotion of a musical piece by placing your hand on the side of the instrument, even if you’re locked inside a soundproof box. Its voice carries in waves, like yours and like mine, and Shawn could feel my voice, my true voice, through his fingertips as I played my violin for him.
The last thing I expected was for him to understand this, but curse me for the idiot that I am, he did understand, perhaps too well. It was in his attitude. It was in his posture. But mostly it was in his eyes as they met mine, and he once again smiled. At me.
For the first time in ten years, my fingers lost their nerve. Or rather, I lost my concentration, and my violin sounded like a cat hitting a wall or a needle scratching across a record as the world stopped on an imaginary point in space. Silence hung thickly in the air as we stared at each other. I tried to return his smile, but couldn’t find one that wasn’t so used it was completely unworthy. I didn’t have a fresh one and neither could I create a new one. I didn’t have one to share with nice boys anymore.
Had Shawn shoved me out the door and up against the wall, or better, to my knees, I would have known just what to do. I laughed off my inability to play, made some kind of joke, and I took a long sip of my tea, unsweetened as penance for my sins, to buy myself time to think. Then I returned to “La Habanera,” finishing my night out in the cantina with that piece. Shawn was back in his seat, looking at me thoughtfully, but I didn’t let him have my eyes again.
