Today I’m excited to have author Liz Flaherty post on the blog. I’m grateful for her sharing news of her new novel, Pieces of Blue, and the term The Woman’s Journey. I find that a perfect description for the stories that I love to read and to write, and, in fact, what fascinates me about all fiction and all of life is the telling of everyone’s journey. Read on to learn more about Liz and the writing of Pieces of Blue.
Pieces of Blue, by Liz Flaherty
For all of her adult life, loner Maggie North has worked for bestselling author Trilby Winterroad, first as his typist, then as his assistant, and finally as his ghost writer. Throughout her first marriage, widowhood, remarriage, and divorce from an abusive husband, Trilby was the constant in her life.
When he dies, she inherits not only his dachshund, Chloe, but a house she didn’t know existed on a lake she’d never heard of. On her first visit, she falls in love with both the house and the lake. Within a few weeks, she’s met most of the 85 inhabitants of Harper Loch and surprisingly, become a part of the tiny community. Her life expands as does a new kind of relationship with her friend Sam Eldridge. She finally feels not only at home, but safe.
Until her ex-husband is released from prison. The fragile threads of her new life begin to fray, and that feeling of safety is about to shatter into a thousand pieces.
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Thanks for having me here, CurtissAnn. It’s not a stretch to say you’ve been an inspiring force in my writing career, and I’m so glad to be visiting you.
I’m not sure when the term women’s fiction entered my consciousness. I don’t recall whose I read first or even if I liked it. The words Woman’s Journey had been bandied about most of the years I’d been writing romance, and I thought that’s what we should do with romance and women’s fiction—just make them into one huge glorious genre known as The Woman’s Journey.
The idea didn’t catch on.
But I read CurtissAnn Matlock’s Lost Highways and Robyn Carr’s Deep in the Valley and Cheryl Reavis’s Blackberry Winter and Elisabeth Ogilvie’s Bennett’s Island series. I kept thinking yes, this! They’re all women’s fiction, but they’re all love stories, too. They’re all women’s journeys and I’ve read most of them more than once. While I love the relationship that grows between the heroine and hero, I also enjoy the ones between girlfriends, between sisters, between work friends who are there for each other. The romance is important, but it’s not always most important.
Because it’s the story that’s important. The journey. How you feel when you finish reading. To a lesser degree, as a writer, how I feel when I finish writing is important, too.
After having a two-word start that wouldn’t get off my mind and stay there and a trip back a skinny, curvy road to a small lake I’d never known existed, heroine Maggie North invited me on her journey. It took her a while, and writing it took me a while, but…gosh, I loved Maggie. And Sam. And her adoptive parents. And Pastor Cari Newland. Oh, and Maggie’s friend Ellie and the dachshund named Chloe, too.
Pieces of Blue has some romance, a setting I never wanted to leave, and, most of all, it has friends and family and community. Their dialogue was so much fun to write. The house—the Burl—is a character unto itself.
How did I feel when I finished writing it? Oh, I felt good. Happy with how Maggie found herself. Sorry it was over and slapping back thoughts that maybe it wasn’t over…maybe there was another story at Harper Loch. Or two.
We’ll see. In the meantime, it’s a story from the “huge glorious genre” I mentioned above. I hope you like it.
Liz Flaherty has spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide most every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that. You can find her at any of these places. She’ll be glad to see you!
Curtiss Ann Matlock 
5 responses to “Please Welcome Author Liz Flaherty”
I like the term “Woman’s Journey,” and I agree with CurtissAnn that good fiction does, indeed, give us “everyone’s journey.” Pieces of Blue is an everyone’s journey kind-of story.
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Thank you for stopping by and recommending Pieces of Blue!
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Hi, Roseann! Thank you so much for coming by, and I’m so glad you feel that way about Pieces of Blue.
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Thanks for having me here today, CurtissAnn, and for letting me go on and on! I love this book more than is attractive for me to admit. I hope its readers do, too.
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Liz, I so understand. It is wonderful when an author feels the sense of completion from saying what she has to say. Congratulations!!
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