Spunky Fearless Author Liz Flaherty Not only Sews and Writes, but Also Parasails!

I'll let Liz Flaherty do the talking today, and she does a fine job of it!

   

Liz Flaherty with her dog, Bandit.

      I’ve been retired for two years and two and a half months. This is hard for me to believe, since I’m sure I just clocked out of the post office for the last time a week ago Friday.

          I worried before I retired, about the things I imagine most of us worry about. Would we have enough money to live how we wanted? Would our health hold up? Would we still like each other when we had more time to spend together? Would I still want to write when I had time for it? What about changes?—I hate changes!

         

But changes were my friends in retirement. I spent more time sewing. I volunteered in fun times at fun places. I decided to stop being afraid of so many things and went parasailing.

Fearless Liz Flaherty Parasails!

          Even my writing changed, although not because I wanted it to. Many, many writers’ voices don’t reflect their age. Nora Roberts writes a 20-some protagonist even better now than she did at the beginning of her career in 1981. So do Mary Balogh, Robyn Carr, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, to name but a few.

          I, on the other hand, can make a 30-year-old sound like…yes, exactly, like a 62-year-old retiree. A former—and very good—editor and a few contest judges referred to my voice as—shudder—old-fashioned. No one said it was bad, nor that I should just confine myself to helping with the church bulletin, nor that I should quit. I just needed to…well, what? Jazz it up? Oh, good grief, there I go again. No one says “jazz it up” anymore. No one has Early American furniture or decorates with baskets or still has flowery wallpaper in their bathrooms.

         Except maybe me.

          So here I was with Early and Nash McGrath, in their late 40s, divorced after 30 years of marriage. And it was time for another change.

          Although I’d read quite a bit of inspirational romance and some of my favorite people write it (Cheryl St. John, Cheryl Reavis, Diann Hunt, and Janet Dean, again just naming a few), I’d never seriously considered writing it. If for no other reason, I didn’t think of it because my faith is private. I once told my mother, when I was in the process of refusing to go to a revival with her, that I didn’t consider Christianity a spectator sport.

That hasn’t changed much. But inspirational romantic fiction has. More than just change, it has expanded. There are many evangelistic books to be found, but there are also many that are by and about people like me. People who go to church on Sundays and say quiet prayers every day and read a lot of secular fiction but don’t really like a whole bunch of cussing and are bored with sex scenes. Granted, even now most of the heroes and heroines aren’t 62, but Early and Nash fit just fine.

A Soft Place to Fall has already been released by Pelican Book Group in paperback and will be out digitally on April 26. Although I don’t know yet how my segue into inspirational fiction will work out, if it’s like the other changes of the past couple of years, I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh, and ziplining—I’m looking forward to that, too.

          Visit me at http://lizflaherty.com or email me at lizkflaherty@gmail.com —I’d love to hear from you and the coffeepot’s always on!

What A Soft Place to Fall is about:

Early McGrath didn’t want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it was forced upon her, she did the only thing she knew to do—she went home to the Ridge to reinvent herself. Only what is someone who’s taken care of people her whole life 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. Can Early and Nash find a Soft Place to Fall?

Liz Flaherty

www.lizflaherty.com 

JAR OF DREAMS / Carina Press / Available now!

ONE MORE SUMMER / Carina Press

A SOFT PLACE TO FALL / Harbourlight Books - 4/26

Please welcome Liz Flaherty to Spunky Senior Authors and Talents by leaving a comment.