When Things Break by Liz Flaherty

Sometimes things break. Even things we love and count on can be broken by neglect, by wear, by the elements. And every time it happens, a little part of us breaks with them. 

I have a favorite tree, the cottonwood that sits in the side yard outside my office window--the one beside my desk. The tree is beyond the clothesline, nearer the field than the garage that houses the office. The tree has gone from healthy-sapling-size to huge, as cottonwoods do, in the years we've lived in this house. It has been struck by lightning more than once, so that its center trunk looks...well, as if it's been struck by lightning, but the tree is both home and playground to a plethora of squirrels and birds. Rabbits are all over the place, looking up. Deer wander around under the tree--unless they know they have an audience. Watching the animals cavorting around and hearing the birds shouting in the process lends brightness to the dimmest of days.

I am an optimist, a positive-thinker, a cup-more-than-half-full girl, but even at that, I have to acknowledge that there are a lot of dim days. Or, at least, dim hours. Being a writer, while it has been one of the greatest joys and satisfactions in my life, has also contributed greatly to that dimness. Speaking of things broken. 

The wind blew hard here last week, as it often does in March and April. More of the center trunk of the tree came down either from that or another lightning strike. A big part of it. I worry that the tree won't be able to survive nature's latest onslaught, that squirrels were hurt. Although they're still out there, fluffy tails flying. 

My husband wants to cut the tree down. Its core is dead. Cottonwoods are junk trees. But it sits far from the house so that it won't damage property even if it does come down. It hurts no one. It provides succor--how's that for a writer's word?--to both the animals and to the writer watching from the window. "Not yet," I say. 

This then is what we do when, as aging writers, our work isn't always welcomed in the publishing arena, the venue we've loved for so long and worked so hard to remain a part of. Sometimes parts of us get broken by changes we can't control. We flinch and swear and think about quitting because another piece of the center trunk has hit the ground hard. But we still have words, ideas, scenes we need to write, don't we?

On my tree--she's a girl; did I mention that?--the leaves still come back in the spring and the squirrels and the birds are still in the branches, the rabbits and the deer still gambol around. 

They bring brightness, just as we do. And joy, just as we do. And knowledge about other things, just as we do. It's the just as we do that I'm thinking about. Once again, quitting's not an option. 

Not yet. 

****

Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.


Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.

The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find a Soft Place to Fall.

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What's Your Favorite? by Liz Flaherty

Let's talk about favorites. I don't use that term lightly. I have a favorite oldest kid, middle kid, and youngest kid--same with kids-in-law and the grands. (Each of the seven grands thinks she or he is my favorite and guess what--they're all right!) While I relate better to some than to others--and they to me--the love is unconditional and all its cups are full.

Not so much with books. Either the ones I've written or the ones I've read. 

My favorites from when I was a kid are Little Women and Understood Betsy. Really, they are. But then I think of the Little House books, Caddie Woodlawn, and Away Goes Sally and how they made me feel, and...no...I can't choose a favorite.

When I was in junior high and high school, I spent a lot more time reading Betty Cavanna and Janet Lambert than I did school books. Oh, and Rosamund du Jardin and Anne Emory and Elisabeth Hamilton Friermood. And every word Mary Stewart wrote. Surely among those, there is a favorite, isn't there? No, more likely 50 of them.

Then came Harlequin...and Candlelight...and Silhouette...and Loveswept...and a long list of other publishers and imprints who published books by women, about women, for women. Like most everyone here, I've read hundreds of them. I occasionally re-read Muriel Jensen's category romances and others by Betty Neels, Jenny Crusie, Nora Roberts, and Kathleen Gilles Seidel. And more. 

It is easier with my own books, although it took years for me to figure out that it was okay to have favorites. Just because they're mine doesn't mean they have to be anyone else's. One More Summer is my favorite. It took 83 days to write and 10 years to sell to a publisher. It's still sells and I still ache over the writing of it. I'm an emotional writer anyway, and that story pushed every single button.

But I have a few that share second place, and most of them are ones written about older protagonists, because I can feel where they are and who they are. One exception to that is The Happiness Pact. Like One More Summer, its story included clinical depression. But they survive and they thrive, 

A Soft Place to Fall is about family and quilting and rearranging the pieces of a long marriage gone wrong. It is another one that pushed all the buttons. I kind of think Early McGrath was me...only better. 

The truth, the ones I've chosen here--both the read and the written--are the favorites of the day. Tomorrow it will be books by Cheryl Reavis, Nan Reinhardt, and Cheryl St. John. But which ones? Hmmm...

Want to share your favorites? We'd love to see them. 

~*~*~

Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.

Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.

The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find A Soft Place to Fall.

Amazon: https://a.co/d/e0zSQ4t

Everywhere Else: https://books2read.com/u/bW57yx

A Day in June by Liz Flaherty

My mind is on the mushy side today. It happens a lot these days, but especially when I try to crowd more events and thoughts and things-to-do lists into it. So I think I'll meander. I hope you come on along.

My grandpa Neterer died in June. He was what everyone's grandfather should be. Kind, gentle, funny, and so full of stories about a life well lived that I could never get enough of hearing them. He'd grown up a farm boy, although he worked his whole adult life at what had once been Buescher Band and went through several names during his tenure there. But even as Elkhart, Indiana grew up around the home he shared with my grandmother, Grandpa still went barefoot and wore overalls when he was at home. They had city water, but they also had the hand pump in the yard, where he and the grandkids went to drink from the well. 

I was only 13 when he died, but I was able to save up a lot of memories from those years. 

Our county fair is in June. I was there yesterday, helping to sign in adult projects. The fair used to be in August, but since it managed to storm every year in addition to being punishingly hot, it eventually moved back to June. It's often still wet and hot, but inspiring to see the kids with their animals and their projects. They learn so much in 4-H, and they have a good time.

I'm doing revisions right now, on a Christmas Town novella and on a book I've finished. I always worry during revisions--Is this what they want? Is it still my story? Seriously--they want that?--and yet there's an adrenaline rush that goes along with them, too. The thought that the story will be better when I'm done, because usually it is. 

Our youngest grandson is here this week. He's 13, the age I was when my grandfather died, when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, when boys started looking really different and I put makeup on when I was on the school bus because I wasn't allowed to wear it. So many changes that year, and I can see changes in our grandboy, too. He's fun and funny and smart. Grandpa Neterer would have loved him like we do. 

Three birds are hanging on one suet feeder while a woodpecker keeps the other one to himself. I used to be amazed that my mother-in-law could spend so much time watching birds. Now, in my much bigger yard, I watch birds, deer, rabbits, and squirrels, and I understand Mom a lot better. 

In A Soft Place to Fall, Early and Nash and Nash's dad, Ben, sometimes sat on the porch. I imagine they were watching and listening, too. Some books are special. You love them more. This is one of those for me. 

Thanks for going along on my meander. 

Still A Soft Place by Liz Flaherty

In 2013, Harbourlight books, an imprint of Pelican Book Group, released my only inspirational novel, A Soft Place to Fall. The cover was beautiful and the reviews good. The editing was excellent, although--as always--there were house rules I didn't like. (I still flinch when I see OK in a book instead of okay. During the editing of this book, I took all of them out I could, just to save myself.)

The book pretty much tanked. This isn't the only time I've ever had a book not do well and I don't blame anyone for it, but this was one that niggled at me. (In my second set of parentheses, I hate the word niggled, too, but I can't think of another one that fits.) 

One reason it may not have been successful is that what I call inspirational is more likely "inspirational-light." I don't say stuff when I mean crap, or darn when I mean damn. I can't pretend forgiveness doesn't leave scar tissue in its wake. Pam Thibodeaux says she writes inspirational with an edge, and I like to think I do, too. 

Back to that niggle. It just wouldn't stop. Maybe because marriage resurrected is one of my favorite plot points ever. To me, it is an actual trope, but I'm not sure about that. I think it's my favorite for personal reasons, in that I have a long and happy marriage that we've breathed life into more than once. It's important to me to share that the "breathing life into" doesn't preclude "long and happy."

So, in a move I don't take lightly, I got the rights back to A Soft Place to Fall and released it again at the end of December. It has a lovely new cover created by Nancy Fraser and okay is spelled out. I didn't change much because, even though the book itself might be dated. I believe the story is not. 

While Early and Nash's story hasn't achieved bestseller status anywhere but it in my own mind, it has done better this time around. I have learned lessons from this. 

• Sometimes you need to go with a gut feeling even when your gut is notoriously wrong.
• I really can write inspirational, but I should never try to be something I'm not. (Third parentheses. Yeah, I already knew that, but it bothered me I didn't fit into the community of inspirational writers. It kind of still does.)
• Even when a new release is not New but Again, it's still so much fun. 

Thanks for listening. I'll just tack Early and Nash's information here on the end. I hope, if you read it, you enjoy their story. 

Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.
Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.
The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find a Soft Place to Fall.

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