April snuck up on me! I don’t have a theme picked!
So I decided to do something I’ve done before and write a live poem each day.
Here goes today’s, which I will be using in the window of my book store (I’ll post a pic later):
April Haiku
April shower blooms
month flowers beautifully
pause a moment…read
April Haiku
April shower blooms
month flowers beautifully
pause a moment…read
More tomorrow!
It’s almost time! My Greek Gods meet Regency England romantasy that was SIX YEARS in the making lol. Actually, probably more like three because I kind of got sidetracked from writing novels for a while, especially of the romantic sort.
I tried to figure out a great way to spend this last day before the book release and what I came up with was inspired by how I used to do live poetry writing on my blog. (I plan to revisit that this April, btw!)
I’m going to do live excerpts. That’s right. I have a copy of the book here and I’m going to open it up, find something of interest and transcribe it here. I’m so confident in my writing, I’m certain I can find something to tempt you to buy my book on any page I open to! So get ready…here goes.
Excerpt 1:
“I was born mortal.” Callie wondered if it was true. She barely remembered her parents.
“There are no guarantees as far as that is concerned.” Aphrodite swirled the golden liquid in the glass. “Maybe your mortal mother thought she was never taken by a god, but the things I’ve seen…” She shook her head. “One could have come to her in her sleep, or disguised as your father. Or in a really good bath…” She widened her eyes.
Excerpt 2:
Hades sighed and reached forward as if to touch her face, then stopped, his fingers curling back into his hand. “Very well. But please, join me for a drink.”
Callie looked at the bottle on the table then back at him. His lips curved. “You won’t be trapped here. That was a little fiction my wife and mother-in-law cooked up. I just go along with it. For domestic peace.”
Excerpt 3:
With no other choice, Callie picked up the teapot and went over to the table. She noticed Dionysus’s little frown, Lord St. Clair’s quizzical look. But she focused only on the lady who’d summoned her. “Did you need more tea, My Lady?”
“No, I did not. I wish you to join us.”
Callie’s immediate reaction was dismay. Join the family breakfast table? She had been horrified when Samir proposed she accompany him to dinner, but to sit down with the family for a meal when Samir wasn’t even there? She shook her head. “No, ma’am. I would not presume.”
“You’re not presuming if I ask. There are plenty of servers and we have an empty spot at the table.” Lady Clarissa nodded to one of the footmen. “Please bring another teacup for Callie.”
And that’s all you’re getting out of me. I had so much fun adding my own spin to the gods of Greek Mythology that I fell in love with a long time ago. I don’t exactly remember the first time I picked up a book of Greek mythology, but so much of it has stuck with me. I remember devouring book after book. I thrilled to the adventures of Jason and Heracles, was horrified by the fate of Daphne, and I was always dubious about Persephone lol. (She’s not actually in this one, though, so maybe I’m just taking Hades’s word for it.)
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll open a Pandora’s pithos of our own when I let this book loose on the world of romantasy readers. If you’re intrigued, it will be available on Amazon and at my store, The Next Chapter Books & Art.
This is a little bit stream-of-consciousness, so bear with me.
Yesterday, my dad died. Today, I will write his obituary.
I loved my dad. He was a good man. Fallible? Yes, of course. Very human and definitely from a different generation than me. But today none of that matters, because today, I’m remembering the way he knew every birdcall that we heard when we sat together on our old screened-in porch. He loved wildlife, all animals, really.
And man, did he have a green thumb. When I was a kid, he had a garden. It must have been half an acre. He grew corn, tomatoes, okra, yellow squash, green beans, potatoes, onions…and sunflowers. I don’t know if he ever harvested the sunflower seeds or if he just let the birds come and peck them off themselves.
He grew the most amazing roses, too. If he planted the rosebush, it would bloom, and the longer he tended it, the more amazing the blooms were. I often sent him a miniature rose bush and would come home a few months later to find it planted and flourishing.
My dad worked hard. He worked at DuPont Plant for more than thirty years. Part of that was 12-hour “swing shifts”. During one of my summer breaks, I worked these shifts with him as part of a summer program for college students. The day shifts were tough. Getting up at 4 a.m. and driving thirty minutes up a mountain to start work at 6 a.m. and work until 6 p.m. while most of my schoolmates were working 6-8 hours at McDonald’s was one thing. Forcing myself to sleep during the day and get up to go to work at 6 p.m. was in some ways even worse. I sometimes wonder how many of those drives up the mountain I was actually awake for. In fact, my dad said he knew those hairpin turns so well, he could drive them with his eyes shut.
He may have.
My dad loved music, but to this day I could not tell you for certain what his favorite song, musician, or even genre was. If there was music playing, he was enjoying it. He could sing, too. When I was very little, I have a vivid memory of him clapping his hands and stomping his feet and singing:
Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man
Washed his face in a frying pan
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
Died with a toothache in his heel
…and my mother scolding him, “Carl, you’re going to bring the house down!” And I believed her because he did make the house shake when he wanted to. When he “roughhoused” with me and my brothers, for instance. My dad was a champion tickler. He’d make us shriek until my mother told him to cut it out, and we’d take a good five minutes laying on the floor giggling to recover.
I could go on about my dad and what a good man he was. He didn’t drink or smoke or gamble. Every penny he got, he spent to make the people and animals in his life happy. Us kids never wanted for anything. He fed and clothed us, took us all on a family vacation to the beach every year, bought us all cars to knock around in once we had our driver’s licenses (remind me to tell you about the Chevy Citation with power steering on only one side). He borrowed money from the government so I could go to college, and he was always there when I went over budget.
In every way, my dad was a good man. But more than that, he was an excellent father.
I love you, Daddy.
Now that my novel is done and off to the printer, I’m taking a short break from writing seriously. Although, maybe this is a serious poem? Who knows, really.
A Sonnet for My Last Hinge Match
By Michelle Garren-Flye
Let’s not fall in love, just listen a while:
I can’t sell myself short, it’s no longer my style.
I’m not even sure anymore what I want,
and I’m not saying that just to taunt.
I guess my desire is for a hero of old
a god shining above in a chariot of gold
or winging across the sky on Pegasus.
That’s why there can never be an us.
I expect starlit dance floors, fountains of wine,
and you to be faithful, handsome, and kind.
Settle for something less than? I won’t.
I think I’m destined to wind down my life alone.
I know your bargain doesn’t include all that,
so I’ll happily spend the night alone with my cat.
My last original romance novel was published in 2020. I believe it was at the height of Covid, when we all thought the world was going to end. I remember people caught on cruise ships and getting stuck because of Covid cases being detected onboard. And I bravely published a romance that took place on board a cruise ship.
Ah, those were the days.
No fear this time, though. Covid has been interwoven into our society (along with some other unpleasant things). So for my comeback, my first novel in nearly SIX YEARS, I chose to write a total escape romantasy set in 1700s England and featuring Greek gods. Yep. It’s like if Jane Austen met the crazy-ass gods of mythology.
Here’s the summary:
In a world where magic and religion are outlawed, the fates of a natural mage and a wandering god collide.
Callie has hidden her powers all her life while working as a kitchen maid for the St. Clair family—until one night when she is discovered in the woods by Samir, a servant of the Muses. Drawn to the beauty of her magic, Samir recruits his friend Dionysus to help him discover more about the young woman with extraordinary power.
Together, they embark on a search for the lost pithos of Pandora. The journey tests their love, expands their beliefs, and leads them on a wild ride from the excesses of London’s “season” to the mysterious depths of the Oracle of Delphi.
Can the new love Samir and Callie have discovered survive the demands of London society and the quirks of the gods of Olympus?
And here’s the final cover:
Laws of Lightning will be released on February 28, 2026. I’ll be posting more about it between now and then. I’ve ordered my preview copy of it, just to make sure it really is going to look as good as I think it will when it comes out. Just FYI, although it’s a romantasy, I doubt this one would get even 3 spicy peppers on today’s spicy scale. Still, I’m old-fashioned and recommending it for 18+ readers. So approach with caution.
Poetry Bullets
By Michelle Garren-Flye
we will start a revolution
under the willow in the park
where you lay with your head in my lap
while I read sonnets and odes and haiku
and you and I store up ammunition
that we fire off in whispered words
to passersby
(I’m Nobody, who are you?)
maybe they want to be nobodies too?
and walk with us across the bridge
—pausing to listen for Basho’s bullfrog’s splash—
to the woods Frost knows
and Whitman’s untrodden paths
(and our souls rejoice in comrades)
the cars back up on the highway
as we march hand-in-hand-in-hand
singing rhythm and verse
firing off our poetry bullets
until someone comes with a real gun
and the blood runs scarlet like Sandburg said
(dreams go on)
and we wander lonely
—where are the daffodils, William?—
(and then my heart with pleasure fills)
as we lay dying maybe we’ll hear at last
the whistle of the balloon-man
echoing
far and wee ee
This post is for a fellow poet, Renee Nicole Good, who was killed by ICE this week. Her death was senseless, brutal, and unjustifiable.
It was murder, and it was sanctioned by our government.
I’ll be honest, when I first heard about it, I thought it was just another one of the insane things that happen in our crazy-ass world. Our government is blowing up fishing boats and kidnapping presidents of other countries, after all. They’re locking up immigrant children in juvenile detention facilities known for child abuse. Americans are being encouraged to eat red meat, drink alcohol, skip immunizations…and don’t worry about not being able to afford health insurance. Our president is barely conscious, and those are his good moments. And there’s the Epstein files, which are undeniably damning to the bastard.
So, what’s one more dead 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis?
Except…shit. She was shot by ICE, she was a U.S. Citizen…and she was a poet and writer.
“Don’t kill the poets,” says the old Irish proverb. So writers have enjoyed this “immunity” for centuries, running around battlefields with press passes stuck in fedoras and “REPORTER” emblazoned on bulletproof vests. And yet, this is no proof against a bullet.
Reporters, scholars, historians, writers, poets are the first to be sought out by a would-be suppressive government. But in the end, there is another proverb that has proven truer than the first.
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
The Poet Wins
By Michelle Garren-Flye
This is how it begins:
killing poets in the street.
Let’s see who wins.
Grow some thicker skins,
don’t be indiscreet:
that’s how it begins.
They’re watching your sins:
Big Brother brings the heat…
But wait! Who wins?
No way out of these ins,
just learn to keep the beat
cause this is how it begins.
Shall we all become shut-ins?
Bend the knee, become obsolete
and let Him think He wins?
No, we’ll stand up against the spins.
Face death, oh, it’s bittersweet!
So this is how it begins…
But in the end, the Poet wins.
Has it really been almost a month since my last post?? Horrifying.
Well, not really, because I think that was about the time I realized I needed to get my next poetry book together. I’ve been working on it for the past year, and I knew it was done, just needed to be put together.
So…with that said, here it is!
Presenting:
Here’s the description: “Author and poet Michelle Garren-Flye has always been fascinated by poetic forms. In Thick & Thin, Michelle explores the relationship between two of her favorites, haiku and sonnets, using the one to inspire the other. Two forms from very different cultures, yet somehow very similar. Is it possible William Shakespeare might have befriended Matsuo Basho if he’d been given the opportunity?”
Thick & Thin is currently available on Amazon. It’ll take a few weeks to get them printed for the store, but then you’ll definitely be able to get a copy there!
Last week I went home for a vacation.
Home is the mountains of North Carolina. At least, that’s where my hometown of Brevard is. As I’ve now lived on the coast for longer than I grew up in the mountains, I sometimes wonder where “home” really is. If my blood was once the red clay of the mountains, surely it’s now mixed with the Crystal Coast seawater.
It wasn’t totally my choice to set down roots here on the coast, but I can’t say I’m totally sorry I have. And I definitely don’t feel as at home in my old hometown as I do here in my new one.
But oh, those mountains. I spent a fair amount of time outside during our stay. I walked with my son and his dog in the little neighborhood where we stayed. We all hiked through the gardens of Biltmore Estate one afternoon. The steps we got that day! We spent a day touring the Western North Carolina Nature Center. The animals were mostly asleep while we stood gaping at their beauty.
And in the evenings, a glass of wine in hand, I sat on the front porch looking out at the trees, wondering if I ever moved home would the roots I had put down in the sandy soil of the coast re-acclimate to the mountain soil?
Starting over is not something I’m great at, so I won’t be doing it anytime soon. I love my life here, and I don’t want to leave it.
But oh, those mountains. They call me still.
I think we all need to hear something like this now.
BREATHE: Michelle Garren-Flye 