Sisters in their 70s embark on the write of a lifetime
In less than 24 months Linda George and her sister Kathy Steele published Bourbon and Benjamins, to rave reviews . . .
“Thankfully, we could laugh at the pitfalls of trying to write a book for the first time at our age . . .”
By Linda George
Age has always been just a number for my sister, Kathy, and me. For the most part it still is. But I will have to admit that driving at night has become a bit problematic.
My sister is only 15 months younger than I and throughout the years we have remained close, even if we lived 700 hundred miles apart. Even when we were living the busiest part of our lives, we didn’t lose that indefinable sibling connection.
So, it wasn’t a real surprise to our families that at ages 70 and 71 we undertook a joint project that neither of us knew anything about.
According to the 2020 Profile of Older Americans, in 2019, (the most recent year for which data are available) the population aged 65 and older numbered 54.1 million. We older Americans represent only 16% of the population. From what I can glean from census figures, about 4-5% of folks drop off the bar graphs between 65 and 70. Had anyone advised my sister and me that we were just statistically significant to be alive, I doubt we would have embarked on our journey.
But anyone who doesn’t believe ignorance is bliss has never tried to write a book, let alone with a co-author, when each are 70+ years old. But that’s what we did.
Many years ago, my sister Kathy and I started writing about two fictitious sisters who would end up living together. With less than 60 pages of musing under our belt, our hectic lives as working mothers got in the way. Living 700 miles part and being unable to spend a lot of time together, we laid it aside.
Fast forward twenty years. Amazingly, we each had kept our early work. Kathy suggested that since we were both retired and the kids were grown, we should dust off the old yarn and look at it again. Kathy even volunteered to run it through a blender and see what survived.
What survived was the original idea and a modest outline. All of a sudden, we were on our way to writing something that would resemble a book. The original idea revolved around two very offbeat 50-something sisters, their quirky cohorts and their day-to-day exploits. The sisters love their Bourbon cocktails and their Benjamin$. When the sisters begin to realize that they are blowing through an inheritance from their mother, their father passes and leaves them yet another inheritance. The problem is that he didn’t tell them what it was or where it was. The sisters set about to find their inheritance unaware that a psychopathic mystery man feels that it is rightfully his and will do anything to get his hands on it.
One of the traits that both Kathy and I have shared throughout our lives is an off-beat sense of exaggerated humor. We’ll often be talking on the phone about something as mundane and exhausting as sitting in the waiting room of a dealership’s garage waiting for an oil change and the wheels of one of our cars to be rotated and end up weaving a story about the experience that at least we find hilarious. I mean really. You are there forever. The pale green walls, the overflowing trash can with empty Big Red containers, the only television tuned to reruns of “Bear Grylls Running Wild”, and a vending machine with snacks that are on the “forgeddaboutit” list of every diet known to man. It begs the question, what would our two sisters do? Actually, we’ve written a short story about it. It passes the time.
However, I would be shot as a liar if I said this adventure was all laughs. The endless revisions, typing a couple of hundred pages with arthritic fingers, and agreeing on where the story was going required our share of cocktails, concession, and concurrence.
Thankfully, we could laugh at the pitfalls of trying to write a book for the first time at our age. For instance, at some point between our summer school typing class and a half century later, it became incorrect to space twice between sentences. Seriously? People care about that? Apparently so. That’s still difficult to remember and a bummer to correct.
But we learned early on, that you don’t ask questions if you don’t want to hear the answer. Particularly difficult some older people are comments like “that’s just not done.” Our first two critiques, very early on, pretty much decimated our first chapter. I thought it was okay to start the chapter with dialogue. Evidently not. This kind of news sticks with you. It followed me into the grocery. I stood in aisle of books and office supplies, opening paperback after paperback and reading the first couple of pages. Sure enough, none of the books started with dialogue. Does anyone think outside the box anymore, I wondered? In the end we scuttled the opening dialogue as we felt we weren’t in a position to challenge the establishment. We’d have to beat them up with our canes and then run. We weren’t feeling either option.
When we finally submitted our manuscript to a real editor, she asked what are plans for the manuscript were. We were truthful. We didn’t know. We asked our editor to let us know if we should just put a staple in the corner and will it to our children or if she thought it had legs. Much to our surprise, our editor encouraged us to give it go—after making more revisions and clarifying a few points.
We were hooked. In less than 24 months we were published. Now the really hard part begins—marketing book one while writing book two. Something else we’ve never done. But to paraphrase the poor man in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail, “we aren’t dead yet.”
*****Bourbon and Benjamins by Kathy Steele and Linda George can be purchased at Amazon.com, where it has received an average of five-star reviews from verified buyers. https://www.amazon.com/Bourbon-Benjamins-Kat-Denney-Archives/dp/B096TN9QD3/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8