Author Archives: Michelle Garren-Flye

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About Michelle Garren-Flye

I am an author of romance, poetry, children's books and graphic novels. I also own a bookstore. My love of the written word runs deep.

Day 1: Passionate About Writing

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Here I am in the very heart of the city that never sleeps and all I can think about is getting some sleep! It’s been an awesome day that didn’t quite go the way I had thought it would at first, but ended up great, anyway.

It started out on a high note, although I didn’t get to meet up with the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers who were here. I ended up on the wrong floor, but two lovely ladies, Jeannie Watt and Sophie Gunn** invited me to join them for coffee, noticed my orange “first timer” ribbon and gave me some excellent advice. Thank you ladies! I’m looking forward to reading your work now that I’ve met you. 🙂 After coffee I headed off alone to the opening session where Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen and Steve Berry answered questions about everything from what their most touching moments with their fans were to how can an author break through into the world of best sellers today. All three were highly entertaining and informative, and I enjoyed the session immensely.

Afterward I headed up to the room with my hands full of coffee and danish, and a lovely woman by the name of Diane Burke, who writes love inspired suspense, gave me her card and was exceptionally friendly, inquiring about my first experience with the RWA conference.

My afternoon was made up of several informative workshops. I got lost on the way to one, however, and happened along the Spotlight on Carina, Harlequin’s digital-first imprint. Editor Angela James was very informative and persuasive, and I will be looking very closely at Carina as a possible publisher for at least one of my two completed and polished manuscripts.

To wind up a very productive day, I met four other Lyrical Press authors for a drink: Pamela Hearon, Mary Abshire, Cathleen Ross and Cassiel Knight. We found we had much more in common than just writing for the same publisher, and wound up spending a very pleasant couple of hours together.

So now it’s off to bed after I take a sleeping pill to help cushion my delicate North Carolina eardrums against the constant racket of the Big Apple. Night, everyone!

**Note: I’ve recently realized that “Sophie Gunn” is also known as Diana Holquist, a very accomplished writer of contemporary romance. As Sophie Gunn, however, she writes small town romances. I’m looking forward to reading both! (BTW, I’m sure Sophie/Diana told me her real name was Diana, but in my mixed-up, confused, dazed state, I didn’t quite catch it. Sorry, Diana!)

Registration Day: Welcome to New York!

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I’m here at the RWA Nationals!!! All registered and properly worn out after a day of traveling, but really psyched to get started on things tomorrow. After arriving, figuring out the hotel’s (very) confusing elevator system (I’m not kidding, a lot of people are having trouble with it!), I got myself registered and received my bag of goodies. Six wonderful romance novels just for registering! Yay! I can hardly wait to dig into them.

To get in the mood for tomorrow’s workshops and (hopefully) networking, my husband and I hit the pavement and wandered a few blocks over to the New York Public Library to look at the excellent exhibit “Celebrating 100 Years”. I saw Charles Dickens’ letter opener, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, e.e. cummings’s typewriter, a Gutenberg Bible, George Washington’s farewell address (written in his own hand!), Jack Kerouac’s “Rain and Rivers” journal, and a lot of other amazing items, which, when you see them up close, really make you wonder how on earth they have survived in this world that loves the digital media so much. Why keep so many originals when we can digitize them and share them worldwide? As I looked at e.e. cummings’s typewriter and the sheet of music Beethoven actually touched, I felt like I might know the answer to that, however. You have to preserve the original. There’s simply nothing that can take the place of standing less than six inches away from a true original.

So tomorrow I rise early and get started meeting some current originals in my field. I’ll update again tomorrow night, if possible!

On the Eve of RWA…

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…my bags are packed, complete with butterflies in my stomach!

5 Housekeeping Shortcuts for Busy Writers, or How to Maximize Your Writing Time and Not Feel Like a Bum Mom and Wife

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This week I’ve been incredibly busy preparing kids for camp, taking them to the swimming pool and getting ready for the RWA Nationals next week (!!!). Sorry, I just can’t think of the RWA Nationals (!!!) without exclamation points. It’s my first time at a national writing conference. The closest thing I’ve ever done to this was Horrorfest several years ago, but that was just fun stuff. I signed a few copies of Horror Library Volume 1, which I helped copy edit and had a story in. I also hung out with some of my horror buddies and went through the haunted house. Mostly it was just fun watching the people in extreme makeup and costumes wander past.

But, I digress. The RWA Nationals will be so much more for me. Workshops and editor meetings and pitching my novels (I have TWO to pitch!)… oh my. So much to do. Keeping up with my blog has been low on my list this week. Not as low, however, as housekeeping chores. So, here are my top five ways to keep up with keeping up my house.

1. Have somebody else do it for you. Of course, right! Maid services are awesome, but they do cost money. Plus, the maids don’t move in, so they’re only there once or twice a week, and let’s face it, if you’ve got kids, there’s more housecleaning to do than can be done in one or two days. So, see the rest of my list.
2. Invest in convenience cleaning supplies. I have a bunch of these. Wipes come with all sorts of cleaning solutions already in them these days. There are wipes for cleaning windows, wipes for cleaning baths, wipes for cleaning electronics. If you read the labels closely, you won’t even have to buy every one of them. The wipes for electronics are also great for glass. Clorox wipes clean just as well in the kitchen as the bath (just make sure you throw away the one you used in the bath before you start on the kitchen — yech!).
3. Steam mop! Steam mops eliminate the need to lug about a big bucket of water that, after mopping the kitchen, is mostly dirty anyway. I’m sure you end up using less water and that’s good for the environment!
4. Stick vac. Like the steam mop, the stick vac is just plain easier to deal with than a big canister vac. Light, easily transportable, usually versatile enough to use on the stairs.
5. Don’t be afraid to let your kids do the fun stuff! Seriously, if it has a switch, my kids love it. Like the stick vac. I know eventually they will get to the point where the vacuum stops being a magical dragon swooping down to devour cities of crumbs, but until then I plan to enjoy this. (Do make sure the kids don’t vacuum up their younger sibling’s toys on purpose, however. I’ve learned from sad experience that this can be quite traumatic for everyone concerned!) My kids will also steam mop for me, but this has to be closely supervised or I won’t be able to tell they’ve done anything.

Watch for more regular updates next week, probably starting on Tuesday. I’ll keep you up-to-date on everything a first-timer sees at the RWA Nationals! (!!!)

Happy Father’s Day and a Bonus

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I’ve mentioned my dad on here before. He read my book. My father’s not exactly a romance kind of guy, but he read my book and told me he liked it. That means a lot to me. (Love you, Daddy!) Actually, a surprising number of dads have read SECRETS OF THE LOTUS and liked it. My friend A.J. has two gorgeous kids and told me liked SECRETS. My friend Jennifer’s dad won one of the Kindles I gave away and he let me know he enjoyed my book, too. My own husband, one of the absolute best dads I know, who has never ever read a romance before, gave me a glowing review of SECRETS.

I won’t actually say you should give the dad in your life a copy of SECRETS OF THE LOTUS or any other romance for father’s day, but hey, it’s good to know there are a few men out there who appreciate a good romance, huh?

Happy father’s day, Dads!

Now for the bonus. I finished another manuscript. Yep, just started shopping THE SIXTH FOLD (formerly ALWAYS FAITHFUL) around and now I’ve finished DUCKS IN A ROW. Well, first draft, anyway. It’s in no way ready for anyone else to even look at, but the whole story is there. And if I can finish copy editing it, I might even be able to pitch it at the Romance Writers Association Annual Meeting!

What a bonus — for me, anyway!

A Slower Pace: Remembering Silvermont

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This week I’m taking it easy. Finally have all the kids out of school and all activities wound up. PTO is done. (Yay!) Summer camps are all lined up and I’m not overdoing it for a change.

I love the slower pace of summer. I remember as a kid that I loved the chance to sleep late, then spend the day reading, riding my bike, eating popsicles and generally treating every day like a Saturday. When I got bored, I’d ride my bike uptown or to the corner minimart and buy candy with whatever pocket change I had. (Twenty-five cents was enough to buy a candy bar!) My brother and I would grab a towel and bike to the local community pool.

I think one of my favorite things to do was go to Silvermont, a park nearby. Doesn’t that name just ring with magic? Silvermont wasn’t just a park. It was built on the grounds of an old dilapidated mansion, The Silvermont Mansion, once owned by the Silversteens. Joseph Silversteen was a rich entrepreneur in Brevard, one of a few who helped establish the economy of my hometown in the years before the Great Depression.

Silvermont had the usual park stuff: basketball and tennis courts, picnic tables, amazing wooden playsets, swings, and the tallest slide in the world (seriously—it was a rite of passage to go down that thing). But it also had acres of overgrown land, and as we got older we explored every inch of the mysterious paths, obscure clearings and fairy glades—regardless of snakes and poison ivy.

To me, Silvermont was a wonderland. I learned the art of square dancing there on Tuesday evenings during one summer when a group of bluegrass musicians would play for free. I loved those long summer evenings of my girly days. No, square dancing isn’t cool, but it was fun, and even now on a particularly beautiful summer evening, I’ll long for those days when a crowd would gather on the basketball court to listen and dance to the twangy banjo and smooth accordion.

So this is my slow down week. I’m letting my kids do what they want, within reason. This week they can get up when they want to, play videogames, eat meals when they’re hungry. I can’t let them ride their bikes to the minimart, but I can take them out for ice cream. I can take them to the park, and I can let them explore the neighborhood.

And in the evenings, we can sit outside and watch the fireflies blink and breathe.

A HONEOWP Happy Birthday to Michael J. Fox!

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I actually had another, more personal reason that I won’t get into, for donating this month’s royalties to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. I didn’t know its courageous founder turns fifty today! Just saw an article on Yahoo! that let me in on that.

I’m not sure there were any preteen girls in the eighties who weren’t half in love with Michael J. Fox. Of course, we were all the way in love with Tom Cruise, too. But Fox was the one we’d have wanted to bring home for Mom to meet. Can’t you just imagine him as a teenage boy sitting at the kitchen counter eating cookies and drinking milk, wowing parents with his college plans? He’d probably walk out the door with the keys to your dad’s car and explicit instructions to have fun and not worry about getting you home in time for curfew.

Of course, preteen girls grow up. I’ve moved on, have a husband and family of my own now…and am only a little bit in love with Johnny Depp. But a part of my heart will always belong to Michael J. Fox. Happy birthday, Michael!

Sometimes Magic Happens

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“It has never been easier to publish that book you always said you’d write. The hard part is finding an audience for it.” –Molly Gaudry, The Lit Pub, interviewed in Luna Park Review

It’s a fascinating interview and I encourage you to read it, but those two sentences stood out to me as an essential truth. The last statement gets to the heart of every published writer’s struggle, but especially those of us who are decidedly unfamous. I mean, if you’re a good writer, you can be published. But just because you’re published doesn’t mean you’re going to sell your book. (Trust me.) So how do we overcome it?

An obvious answer would be to look at today’s most successful authors and trace their careers backward. What happened when J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book came out? How did Stephen King market Carrie? I saw a movie trailer for Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook the other day and I wondered, what sets these stories apart? What helps them reach our hearts and somehow set them apart from the rest? Nicholas Sparks himself said in a speech at a writers conference I attended that “Quality rises to the top.” That sentence stuck in my mind. Yes, I thought, and I write quality stories, so it’ll happen for me…someday.

So surely if you look at how the most successful novels of the day were marketed, you’ll be able to figure the trick, right? Trace it to the root and you’ll know the secret, the only ad campaign you’ll ever need. But it’s really not that easy. And I can only think of one reason why.

Sometimes magic happens. Sometimes a story captures our imaginations in such a way that we can’t just let go of it. We have to share it. We have to tell other people about it. It happened that way for me the first time I saw Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. I made my poor husband take me to see that movie no less than three times in the theater, and this was at a point in our lives when we didn’t have a whole lot of money to go to movies. And no, the magic didn’t just come from Johnny Depp in a sexy pirate suit (although that didn’t hurt). It was the whole story and feel of the movie. Like it could take me into another world and change me into something more special. I couldn’t stop talking about it, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one.

That’s magic.

J.K. Rowling wrote seven books absolutely filled with that magic. Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, Nicholas Sparks, Stephenie Meyer have all conjured it. Quality may eventually rise to the top, but magic is what sends it shooting, foaming over the rim of the glass. So how do I get it?

I’ve only come up with one answer. Keep plugging away. Keep writing, and write what I love to write. One of these days, maybe somebody will read one of my books and find themselves so lost in it they can’t stop talking about it. Maybe they’ll tell their friends and maybe across the nation, somebody else will do the same. Maybe a lot of somebodies will find it in themselves to take that leap of faith and pick up one of my books, become lost in my world for a while.

One last note. Next month’s HONEOWP charity is the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Because I want to.

A Depressing Task

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You know how irritating it is to visit somebody’s blog and click on a link and bam! you’re taken to some advertising site that has nothing to do with what you were looking for? You have encountered a broken link. I hate that. So this morning, for the first time this week, I had a few minutes and decided to check my links. I started with “My Stories”.

How embarrassed was I to find that quite a few of my stories which were available online when I started this blog a year and a half ago are no longer there. Worse still, the online literary magazines that originally published them are not there. As a former editor of a now-defunct literary magazine, this is depressing. As a writer who fought her way into several of these magazines, it’s discouraging. So many of my favorite writers I met online and learned so much from reading their online flash fiction and short stories. Ellen Meister, who I’ve mentioned on here before. If you’ve read The Other Life, Ellen’s latest, you might really enjoy this one: A Crack in the Foundation. And Steven Gullion aka Steve Gullion aka Steven Douglas Gullion. If you want to read some wonderful fiction, Google one of those aliases. Steve has a gift for wrapping tragedy with absurdity or vice versa. Try this one: BiC.

Just recently, one of my flash fiction stories, The Steps My Lover Built, was included in Flash Fiction Chronicles’s list of short stories available online for short story month. On that same list, you can find work from several excellent online literary magazines, including some I was lucky enough to be published in (SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Word Riot) and some I was never quite got into (Monkeybicycle, elimae, wigleaf). Thankfully, all these online litmags are still available for your perusal. If you’d like to see some excellent fiction, possibly even from tomorrow’s New York Times Bestseller Lists, take a breathing moment and check out the list.

Oh, and if I haven’t mentioned it, I’m number 34.

Winter Solstice Blurb

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A quick note to let you know I finished the galleys and just in time! The blurb for Winter Solstice is now complete. Check it out below or on my Books page.

Assignment from hell, or divine romance?

Becky Gray expects her new job in the Public Relations Office of Buncombe
County Hospital to be easy, but her first assignment takes
her onto the front lines of the Emergency Room. Assigned to follow sexy Dr.
John Grant–whose skill as a physician is overshadowed by his reputation as
a womanizer–Becky is caught up in a whirlwind of emotion and drama.
Can she find safety in the arms of a man she should despise?