Author Spotlight: Bestie Liz Flaherty Dropped By Today!

What’s more fun than having your bestie stop by the Author Spotlight? Not much! I’m so pleased to welcome Liz Flaherty to the blog!

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. Find her on Facebook or her blog, Window Over the Sink. A girl just can’t have too many friends!

Linktree | Window Over the Sink | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Thanks for having me here today, Nan. I’m here to complain and to offer up a 99-cent book (check out A Year of Firsts below) and…you know, just to talk. Merry Christmas to you and all your readers!

I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I think in every writer’s career, there are disappointments. Things we thought would go so very well tank miserably. Times we’ve been encouraged to send a full manuscript because our proposal was presumably compelling, we do so only for our work to land with a hollow thud somewhere in the great cyber-unknown. We have covers we don’t like, reviews that are awful, and numbers that are abysmal.

Even when everything seems to be going right, sometimes it doesn’t. So what do we do? (After having tantrums, announcing plans to quit writing forever, and talking about drinking even if we don’t actually do it.)

We start over.

The three books in A New Season have been published before. It didn’t go well. As I said above, I’m not the only one.

But Syd, Riley, and Dinah’s stories stayed in my heart. So has Fallen Soldier, the small town in Pennsylvania where they all live. Although the women, and their lives, are different, they all make me think of the term nevertheless she persisted.

They’ve loved, they’ve lost, and they’re starting over.

Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, a small lake town in the shelter of the Alleghenies, is a place soldiers have come to heal, to find new lives, and–sometimes–to die, in all the wars since the 1860s. Its comfort and welcome has extended to others in need of a place to heal and a place to begin again.

A Year of Firsts, the first story in the A New Season series, is on sale now for 99 cents. I hope you give it a try and enjoy it!

“I’m Sydney Cavanaugh. Just passing through.”

Widow Syd Cavanaugh is beginning a “year of firsts” with the road trip she’d promised her husband she’d take after his death. An unplanned detour lands her in Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, where she meets the interesting and intelligent editor of the local paper.

Television journalist Clay McAlister’s life took an unexpected turn when a heart attack forced him to give up his hectic lifestyle. He’s still learning how to live in a small town when meeting a pretty traveler in the local coffee shop suddenly makes it all much more interesting.

While neither of them is interested in a romantic relationship, their serious case of being “in like” seems to push them that way. However, Clay’s heart condition doesn’t harbinger a very secure future, and Syd’s already lost one man she loved to a devastating illness—she isn’t about to lose another. Where can this relationship possibly go?

Reinventing Riley

He’s afraid a second time at love wouldn’t live up to his first. She’s afraid a second round would be exactly like her first.

Pastor Jake McAlister and businesswoman Riley Winters are in their forties and widowed. Neither is interested in a relationship. They both love Fallen Soldier, the small Pennsylvania town where they met, even though Rye plans to move to Chicago, and Jake sees a change in pastorates not too far down the road. Enjoying a few-weeks friendship is something they both look forward to.

However, there is an indisputable attraction between the green-eyed pastor and the woman with a shining sweep of chestnut hair. Then there’s the Culp, an old downtown building that calls unrelentingly to Rye’s entrepreneurial soul. And when a young man named Griff visits Jake, life changes in the blink of a dark green eye.

The Summer of Sorrow and Dance

In the midst of a summer of change, they’re both searching for an anchor.

Dinah is a mom, a giver, and a doer, so she’s used to change, but this summer is kind of overdoing that. The diner where she’s worked for half her life is closing, her college-age kids aren’t coming home for the summer, and a property on nearby Cooper Lake is calling her name, bringing long-held dreams of owning a B & B to the fore. Newcomer Zach Applegate is entering into her dreams, too.

Divorced dad, contractor, and recovering alcoholic Zach is in Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, to visit his brother and to decide what’s coming next in his life. He doesn’t like change much, yet it seems to be everywhere. But he finds an affinity for remodeling and restoration, is overjoyed when his teenage sons join him for the summer, and he likes Dinah Tyler, too. A lot.

Dinah and Zach each experience sorrow and tumult, but go on to dance in the kitchen. Together, they have something, but is it enough?

All three books are available at Amazon