Rough Music a band story

 I started to write Rough Music quite some time ago; and then I wrote a sequel. It is a rather downbeat tale and I felt that a publisher wouldn’t be interested in it.  So I decide to publish it myself and hoped that some people would like it, even if it is not a romantic story.  So I amalgamated the 2 stories and rewrote it.  It is a story about friends rather than lovers, and it’s not really about romance at all.  Jeff Randles is a musician of the late 1970s, who has moved from having a small time band to moderate success, with his friend Brandon, who is a singer and guitarist.  They both grew up in post war America and began their career in the 1960s, working and traveling through the USA.  Now in the late 1970s’they are on TV at times, their records are doing well and they are making reasonably good money, but it never seems to be enough, and they are a bit jealous of the bands who have achieved big time status.
 They have a good friendship which has kept them together and helped them go on working hard till they achieved some real recognition.  But the pressures of their work often get them down. 
The other musicians are jealous of Jeff’s being the front man of the band.  Their manager wants them to do commercial work rather than the sort of rock and country they want to do.  They both have wives, but neither of them is faithful because they are on the road most of the time, and their wives are getting fed up with it. Jeff’s wife Lacy is increasingly tired of her husband’s absences, of his infidelities and his lack of interest in a fashionable lifestyle such as she wants to have.  She doesn’t care about his music, and he is not interested in her wanting to have a career or even to have a fancy home.  Brandon’s wife Angela is a bit bored being at home with their small child, and she too has little interest in Brandon’s feelings about his music.  But she is less fed up than Lacy.
Jeff finally gets the nerve to tell his wife that they don’t have anything in common anymore.  And they reach an agreement to get a divorce, at which point, he discovers that he is going to be a father.  One of the girls he has seduced on the road has become pregnant.  He is at first shocked and then pleased, because he always wanted children.  He agrees to marry the girl, although he hardly knows her, and she is rather shy and several years his junior.   But Like him, Claudelle is from the South and when they get married, she wants to live there so they settle In Nashville but Jeff is still away much of the time.  They have a son, whom they love but Jeff realizes that his second marriage has a lot of difficulties, even if it is not as bad as his first one. It has a wry conclusion, with both Brandon and Jeff going on with life, living from day to day and knowing that the perfect marriage doesn’t exist, nor does the perfect career.
I know that many people don’t like stories that don’t end happily but while we can give our favorite characters happy endings, in fiction, it isn’t for real. And it may help some people to realize that there aren’t any easy answers or perfect lives.  And I wanted to make the men more realistic than the sort of “very good apart from being rakes” kind of men one sees in a lot of historical fiction…
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton