The Woman’s Journey

My guest blogger today is Liz Flaherty. Liz 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. She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com or please come and see her at http://lizflaherty.net.

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I’m not sure when I first heard the term women’s fiction. I don’t recall whose I read first or even if I liked it. The words Woman’s Journey has been around most of the time I’ve been writing romance, and I always 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 hasn’t caught on. 

But I’ve read women’s fiction since long before it became an accepted category all its own. As a teenager, I read Elisabeth Ogilvie’s Bennett’s Island series and fell in love with Maine. I read CurtissAnn Matlock, Robyn Carr, Cheryl Reavis, Kathleen Gilles Seidel from their very first category romances on, and relished the extra something that was in their voices. 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. From the very beginning, while these authors’ books were under romance’s extensive umbrella, they were writing women’s fiction. Not just them, I should add, but they were the ones whose voices I can still hear. Still feel.

More than the formula in genre fiction, it’s the story that’s most 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.

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Liz’s latest release, Pieces of Blue, is now available.