Changes

Well. It's been a week, hasn't it? A couple of them. 

My tree, the cottonwood that stood up to lightning strikes, a committee of turkey buzzards I was afraid were going to take up residence in its branches, being a squirrel amusement park, and decorating the side yard with leaf clusters and sticks, went down in the last storm. It was there the entire 46 years we've lived here, and I miss it.

It seems like summer just started, but both the fair and the circus have passed. There are cars at school every day, where teachers are back in their classrooms already. The coolest thing about teachers--and there are many cool things about teachers--is that they don't have to make dramatic announcements or jump on a platform or make up swag or hire a PR firm to show that they're going to change the world. All they have to do is go to work, and they change it every single day. 

I remember saying--more than once, using different words--that my goal in writing books wasn't to give anyone a better life, but that I hoped to give them a good afternoon. I still hope that, but it makes me realize anew the enormity of what educators do.

Today, I'm starting what I hope becomes a series here at the Window. A friend shared a wonderful love story on social media yesterday and I asked her if I could use it on the blog. Thanks to Janie Haynes for the message of love everlasting. 

Janie & David Haynes

From Janie Haynes on July26, 2024. 

It’s been almost 51 years ago. I was coming home from another wedding of many I sang at. By that time a lot of my friends and cousins were married and I also sang in their weddings or was in their wedding parties or both. Windows down in my '66 Chevy and singing to the Carpenters eight-track tape, I was wondering when I would ever find my true love.

I remembered a sermon from a Billy Graham Crusade saying if you want something specific in life you need to pray what God wants for you. It was late, no traffic in sight, and I stopped on our road leading home. Under that beautiful, full moon, I kneeled on the roadside and asked God to bring who he wanted in my life.

It was just about two weeks later that I met David. Saturday we will celebrate 50 years being married.

I thank God for David and our family…and those 50 years.

Thanks for being here this week. If you have a story to share, one that changed your life or someone else's, we'd love to hear it. PM me. I hope Janie and David's story made you as happy as it did them...and me. Have a good week. Be nice to somebody.

Parade Day by Liz Flaherty

Taking the day off. Wishing everyone luck and happy marching in the circus parade today. I hope it's been a good week for the performers and everyone else involved with the circus. Until next week, may all your days be circus days. Be nice to somebody.

P.S. I did blog at Smart Women Need Romance today. Well, actually I wrote it several days ago... Stop by!

https://smartgirlsreadromance.blogspot.com/2024/07/everyday-by-liz-flaherty.html

Less than by Liz Flaherty

I usually only have Wednesday at the Window when I have a guest. Today, the guest is me. I wrote this for last night's Black Dog Writers' meeting. This morning, I added a little to it. Although it's written for writers and about writing, I think it matters in other areas, too. No one deserves "less than."

This week, I read a review on A Year of Firsts, a book I released last year. The title of the review was: This was a worthless and boring waste of time! One star was awarded, and the rest of the review went like this: “This was such a boring read. I seriously had a hard time getting into it. Was it me or was Syd always talking to herself? And I also wished the author made it easier to keep the characters straight. Too many names at once were just too confusing. And why did the chapters have to be so long? Oh, that made the read that much more daunting. Don’t authors know that it’s easier to read shorter chapters rather than longer ones? No, they have to go with 12 REALLY LONG and ENDLESS chapters!” (The book was 192 pages, just to give a hint of how LONG and ENDLESS they were.)

On Sunday, we went to watch a couple of musicians perform. They were retirement age, talented and funny and singing familiar songs. We liked them a lot.

After the show, I went to tell them how much I enjoyed it. My friend June was right behind me. I got there in time to hear one of them say they were both retired professors from a nearby private college.

As someone whose formal education ended with high school graduation, I am both impressed and intimidated by education and those who have a lot of it. (The exception to this is my kids, who have numerous degrees between them, but, as the saying goes, I did teach them to use a spoon.) I assume that people with letters accompanying their names other than M-R-S and Mom Emeritus not only know more than I do, but are smarter as well.

I asked one of the musicians what he taught. Art, he said, and talked about it a little bit, plus he said he painted as well. His partner taught history, but I didn’t catch whether it was art history or…you know…history history.

Behind me, June said I was interested in education and that I was a writer who’d written lots of books. Oh, my goodness, his face lit up. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “What do you write?”

Before I could mumble anything, June said, “She has 20-some books published. She writes romance.”

As impressed as he was by the fact that I had books published—which doesn’t carry nearly the cachet in its bag of tricks as it used to—was just how uninspired he was by the genre that I wrote. His face collapsed in on itself and he visibly recoiled.

He started to say something, and I admit to not knowing what it was. I just said, “Never mind. I saw your face. I enjoyed the show,” and went on to speak to his partner.

While my romance writing has segued pleasantly into women’s fiction over the years, I still have a loyalty to the genre that taught me a lot, entertained me a lot, and gained me publication and occasional paychecks. I still read it, although not as much. It grew one direction and I grew another. It became both uber-inclusive and uber-exclusive almost in the same breath. I just got old, which is where romance’s uber-exclusivity came in. The genre as a rule excludes people past their 40s wherever they can.

I guess that is the way genre fiction is. If you’re the protagonist in a cozy mystery, you can be old, but you’d better be quirky, too. If it’s horror, it needs to be…well, I don’t know; the only horror I’ve ever read was a couple of Steven King books that I thought I should like because he’s such a good writer.

And that line…that one right there before this…is the reason I wrote this.

Stephen King is more than a good writer; he’s a great one. His book On Writing was the most helpful instruction manual I ever read. But I don’t read horror or anything else that scares the bejesus out of me. The fact that I don’t read it doesn’t have a thing to do with its quality, does it? It just means I don’t read horror.

I read that Henry James said Louisa May Alcott was “not a genius” after he wrote a really awful review of Moods. While I’ve never read Henry James, I have read virtually every word Miss Alcott ever wrote and I will stack her genius up against his every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

But even then, if someone wrote in a genre not respected by the literati, a face was made. A writer’s work was denigrated. The words “less than” floated both silent and loud in the atmosphere just as they do now.

Romance novels often don’t hold their shelf space for long. They’re replaced quickly and easily. And yet the keeper shelf in my house is comprised almost completely of them. They, not the pretty hardbacks with their dust covers still intact, are the ones I re-read, that I’ve had to replace from eBay because I’ve literally read them until they fell apart. Less than? Hardly.

I have learned a lot in the process of getting old. I know about hair color, that refined sugar gives me heartburn, that either talking or looking down on someone else doesn’t make me any smarter or taller. I have learned that if the music’s too loud, you can leave. If you don’t like the book, you don’t have to read it. If artwork doesn’t touch your sweet spot, look elsewhere.

But don’t critique with the intent of harm. And don’t make a face.

Yeah, I'm tired by Liz Flaherty

I had a column half-written. Well, maybe a third. I really liked it, but when I read it over, then read it aloud, I realized I sounded like a bitter old person. What's really bad about that is that the subject of that first long paragraph was...yeah, bitter old people who complain about everything. So, you've been spared that. For this week, anyway. You're welcome.

But I didn't really have any ideas about what to write, which happens a lot these days (which might have something to do with being old; I'm not copping to bitter. Most of the time.) So I stole borrowed a subject from Sean Dietrich, one of my favorite columnists. 

Let's talk about food. 

It's been a lifelong love. While many people my age have seen their appetites diminish over the years, that phenomenon hasn't reached me yet. I love to eat, to have meals with friends, dinners or breakfasts with family members when my son and/or son-in-law make the best gravy ever. I love popcorn with  movies, cheese and crackers with anything, and potato chips if there is a bag or can of them that hasn't gotten away from me yet. 

Are you saying So yet? As in, when's she going to get to the meat of the matter? (Sorry. I had to say that.)

The meat is one I've talked about often, but needs to be re-addressed in case anyone missed it. 

I'm tired of cooking. I'm tired of choosing what to cook. I'm tired of choosing where to go out to eat. I'm tired of choosing when to eat. At a time when so many people in government are intent on taking away choices, they don't even address this one. This gives me a sneaking suspicion that they haven't been choosing what, when, and where to eat for most of their lives, and as long as it doesn't affect them, they're not interested. 

I don't see a solution to any of this happening soon, but I am happy to have gotten it said anyway. 

Again. 

I'm not cooking tonight, by the way. We're going to the ice cream social at Ebenezer Church and I'm going to have one of Gracie's chicken sandwiches and a piece of someone else's great pie--probably sugar cream--and whatever kind of ice cream I want. Because as tired as I am of cooking and of choosing stuff, I'm not one bit tired of eating. 

Have a good week and some ice cream. Be nice to somebody. 

The Woman's Journey by Liz Flaherty

If you've seen me on social media at all, you know I've been blogging a lot, saying Look at me! I wrote a book! a lot, and working on writing the next book--also a lot. I was going to put in a note saying I was going to take a few weeks off, but I'm really not. And then I thought I just did a Fourth of July post, so I could skip today, but that's not a habit I want to get started, so today I'm going to share a post that's just me, the writer. Not so much the Window Over the Sink girl, but the other one who's even more geeky that me at the Window. This is a combination of a couple of recent blog posts, so if you already saw them, I apologize. But here it is--the Liz Flaherty treatise on the Woman's Journey. Thanks for reading the Window. - Liz

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 Curtiss Ann 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.

To begin the story of Pieces of Blue, I had two words. Two! What was I supposed to do with that? But there they were: Trilby died.

Great. Who's Trilby? Why did he die? Did someone kill him? 

In a conversation at Home Ec club, my friend Tami Keaffaber said Town Lake was south of Akron and had been for…well, she had no idea how long. But it was less than 10 miles from my house, less than five from where I grew up. How could I not have known it was there? My sister said that of course it was there. Where had I been?

So my husband and I turned where she said to, off a country road onto a little bitty countrier road (yeah, I made that word up.) “It’s a T road. You can’t miss it.” 

Even with its small green sign identifying Town Lake Road, we could and did miss it. But there it was—the lake I’d never heard of and had possibly insisted wasn’t even there. Between the lake that wasn’t there--renamed Harper Loch by Maggie Edgington--and the town I’ve taken for granted for my entire life, one of my favorite settings was born. 

There are only 86 people on the lake, one store, one church, and one beauty salon, after all—but Placer, the town closest to it, strongly resembles Akron.

Akron is where my doctor’s office is, where I go to church, where two of my nieces live, where I used to sit at the drugstore counter and drink a small coke and talk to friends. My first bra and many pairs of stockings came from Eber’s Five & Ten. They have a great 4th of July parade and a pretty little park like the one you’ll read about in Maggie’s story.

Because after having that two-word start that wouldn’t get off my mind 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.

Blurb:

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.

Buy links:

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/FlahertyBlue

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

Thanks for reading. Have a great week. Be nice to somebody.

The Fourth of July and Pockets of Hope by Liz Flaherty

I wrote this four years ago. This is the third time to post it. I am more discouraged as an American than I've been since Vietnam days, And yet, I still have pockets of hope, too. That's what we're still about--filling those pockets  Have a safe and good Independence Day Weekend. - Liz

Today is the Fourth of July. It's always been a favorite day, full of family celebrations and parades and awe-inspiring fireworks. It's been a reminder of patriotism, of lives lost, and of sacrifices made. Of the amazing glory of our comparatively young country.

Do I still feel this way? Not so much. There is no place right now for those who tread the middle ground, which leaves many of us longing for the way things used to be. If I'm honest about it, I'll admit they weren't really that way even then. I guess we were just a lot politer about it.

There are things, though, that still feel the same. My husband, my brother, our son, and our grandson have all served--or still serve--in the military. I am proud of their service, proud of them, and proud of others who have answered that call. There is no limit to the love and gratitude I feel. When I watched my husband give our grandson (who now outranks him) his first salute as an officer, I re-understood the meaning of having one's heart swell with pride.

I remember, though, don't you? During Vietnam Era when people spat on soldiers? When they called them baby-killers. When the government tried to deny the damage that had been done to our own by Agent Orange and by the greed that led much of the war. So, no, not always better. I not only worry about my grandson having to fight in wars not of his generation's making, but of his own countrymen treating him badly when he is at home.

I love the flag and I'll always stand for the anthem if I'm able. But I'm happy the USA is still a place where it's your choice whether you stand or kneel or go on watching television when it plays. While I think burning the flag, emblazoning a political figure's face all over it, or making it into a shirt is disgusting, you are free to do so. 

And, oh, yes...protesters burned it "back then," too. There was a lot of noise about making it a constitutional amendment that outlawed burning it. But they didn't really do much about the reason for the protests. And the only amendments most people honor are the ones they deem the most important. The First one is big to me, but many people are perfectly willing to ditch it in a heartbeat as long as the Second one remains untouched.

So many people are angry. That includes me. We all feel betrayed by more people and more things than I can begin to name or understand. The Fourth of July holiday and all it's stood for for all these 244 years is just having the crap beat out of it, isn't it? 

I'm a sucker for patriotic songs. I remember most of the words to the ones we learned as kids and cop to having cold chills whenever I hear "God Bless the USA." Especially that one piece of a line in it: "...the flag still stands for freedom..."

It does, as it has for that 244 years, but if it's not standing for everybody's freedom, well, we have a really long way to go as a country, don't we?

Happy 4th of July, USA, and everybody in it. Have a good week. Stay safe. Be nice to somebody.

FOR TODAY ONLY! by Annessa Ink Publishing

 For Today Only!

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/FlahertyBlue

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