The Making Of Us - The Fat Controller #RainbowSnippets #LGBTQIA

Brief explanation:
Another snippet from The Making Of Us. You can read the others here.

The Making Of Us is the fourth book in the Checking Him Out series, but it’s a stand-alone story about friendship, love and romance—LGBTQIA, with the emphasis on the B, Q and I.

The main characters are Jesse and Leigh, who first appeared in Taking Him On (Book Two), which is Noah and Matty’s story.

The Making Of Us is first-person, told from Jesse’s perspective.

In the snippet below, it’s the morning after Jesse and Leigh’s ‘date’, and Jesse’s reflecting on his sleepless night. The poetry relates to his university coursework.

Here’s the snippet:

I had too much Larkin in there, but in our seminars, we’d been exploring ‘irony and understatement’, which was surely just being ‘British’—something Philip Larkin did particularly well. I preferred Roger McGough’s dry sarcasm, largely because when I read his poems, I heard them in the voice of the narrator of Thomas and Friends, which was fun in an ‘I’m a sad English student’ way.

At the platform, he awaits
Percy in his green-grey regalia…re-grey-leer
Neither Henry nor Thomas nor any other
Loco, oh no—it must be Percy
The Fat Controller decreed.

Who actually thought it was a good idea to name a character in a kids’ programme ‘The Fat Controller’? Well, anyway, sad English student that I was, I still didn’t read post-war British poetry for fun, and I’d thought it would help me sleep, as in bore me to unconsciousness. Needless to say, it didn’t work, because every time I thought about Leigh—therefore every couple of minutes or so—my belly did a roll and my pulse shot off at some dangerously high speed. I was too hot, threw the duvet off, too cold, pulled it back on, too thirsty, needed a drink, drank too much, needed the loo, and so on and so forthed my way through to giving-up-on-sleep time.

For reference, here’s a clip from Thomas and Friends:

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Rainbow Snippets is a group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week to share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation (no spoilers please!).

In this group you'll find anything from romance and historical fiction to mystery and YA. The common thread is that every story's main character identifies as LGBTQ+. The snippets could range from zero flames to full-on sexytimes, anything goes content-wise. The only rule is snippets will be 6 sentences long–one for each color in the Pride flag.

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Thanks for reading,
Deb x