Liz Flaherty's Blog, page 6

The Hate Tree

I complain about hate. A lot. At halvesies with greed, I consider it to be one of the two worst things that have ever happened to our civilization. There are other limbs on the hate tree, too. Disrespect. Prejudice. Intolerance. Cruelty. Self-involvement. Lying. Lying. Lying. (It needs lots of branches because it's epidemic in its proportions.)

This morning--it's Tuesday as I write this; I expect it to take me all week--it occurred to me that maybe instead of being all righteous, which I have...

Men in Books Aren't Better by Amanda Nelson and Lisa-Marie Potter

Men In Books Aren't Better is a sweet contemporary romance about author Molly Covington, who feels pressured by her looming deadline for an unfinished romance manuscript. Desperate, she applies her immersive research skills and goes all in by hiring a male companion for inspiration during three days of research in Las Vegas.

Enter sexy, confident Jared Washington - an extreme sports enthusiast and relationship skeptic who moonlights as a Plus One male companion. Molly's contract puts him with...

Trees and Stories

"In the end, we'll all become stories." -  written by Margaret Atwood.  "... but it is up to us whether that story is unremarkable, or, because we touched someone's life, unforgettable." -  written by a dusty old baker aka Joe DeRozier. 

Let's talk about trees.

There's always a tree for me. When I was really little, there was a hollowed out place inside Mom's biggest lilac bush that was just big enough for me to climb into with my doll and ... well, likely pout. I am the youngest, which I c...

Clutter and Decisions by J. J. Ranson

Are you tired of the stuff lying around your house? Or in your car? Your workplace? I sure am!

A few years ago, I embarked on a theme of organization (It was my word of the year, of course). I started out with Marie Kondo’s book about tidying up. Hubby and I tried to

watch her Netflix series, but we struggled with that.

With my own plan, I pecked away at the edges of our middle-class accumulations, but I didn’t go as far as I should have.

Stuff, it seems, causes stress. No, really, it does! ...

A New Heart by Roseann McGrath Brooks

After nearly three years of living one day at a time in recovery, Nathan believes that any change of heart is possible. And maybe agreeing to Sofia's fake-dating scheme is one way to prove that to her. But Sofia has guarded her feelings for so long that she’s not sure what to believe. Is Nathan playing games or truly making himself vulnerable? Can Sofia risk her heart as well?

My latest book, A New Heart, is about just that: two people learning that they can, indeed, have a new heart to cheris...

Speaking of... by Liz Flaherty

This week someone called me a Marxist. Actually, it was a liberal Marxist, so I was okay with part of it. So, even though I learned about Karl Marx in school and although I see the term tossed around along with socialist, snowflake, woke, and other cuss words, I really didn't know for sure what Marxism espoused. So I looked it up.

I still don't know.

I hate to admit this, but there were just way too many big words in the definition for me, and I even like big words. So even though I didn't l...

Twice A Target by Susan Vaughan

Disaster strikes DEA Agent Holt Donovan twice, when a gunfight ruins his mission and a car crash kills his brother and sister-in-law. Home on the Colorado ranch to raise his infant nephew, Holt enlists a nanny—Maddy McCoy, the woman who once jilted his brother. The world-traveling photographer never expected to return to Colorado, the only real home she ever had, and to the man she never forgot. Burned out from covering too many starving children and refugees and short on funds, Maddy agrees, v...

Note to Self: Make Room for Animals by Nan Reinhardt

I confess, for a long time, I rarely included animals in my sweet, small-town contemporary romances, or if I do, they play a pretty minor role. For example, do any River’s Edge readers remember that Conor Flaherty’s daughter Ali had a dog named Lily? And two winery cats named Zin and Merlot? They do, and those critters popped up again in my newest release (book 14 in the River’s Edge sagas), Made to Love You, book 4 in the Walkers of River’s Edge series when Sam and Ali meet veterinarian Sawyer...

Forever and Inexorably by Liz Flaherty

It's Friday morning and it was three degrees when I got up. After whining a bit about this being winter at its worst, I remembered a few blizzards from days gone by and refined my whining to It's so dang cold! and stopped.

Please don't expect me to make sense today. Joe DeRozier can make a day of memories interesting. I can make it sound like just another day. I might resent him for this, but I don't. He's too much fun to read and way too nice of a guy.

The bare branches of the trees are bea...

Are audiobooks considered reading? by Jan Scarbrough

My late husband Bill loved to read. He often turned off TV to read. However, it wasn’t a paperback or eBook. He “read” an audiobook.

Check out Google and you’ll find many articles questioning whether an audiobook is considered reading. Reatha-Mae Newman in a recent article answered that question to my satisfaction.

Are audiobooks considered reading? The short answer: Yes.

Reading is widely defined as the act of moving one’s eyes across paper to comprehend printed words. However, this notion...