How Can an Old Biddy Become an Author?

 I’m an old biddy who released her first book at the age of seventy-one. I want to share my story of becoming a traditionally published author of four humorous nonfiction books after retiring from a forty-year career. We older women need to tell our truths. We have much to say, wisdom and experience that younger women could not possibly know. No one else could ever tell our unique, personal experiences, so let’s vow to make our voices heard.

Writing a book is not an easy task. According to a 2017 Writers Digest survey, about 81% of Americans say they’d like to write a book but only about 3% ever do. And of those few who complete a manuscript, only about 1% ever publish it. These are dismal statistics. I’m hoping my story will stimulate ideas to motivate you to share your stories.

I’d wanted to be a writer since middle school, but I became a social worker instead. During my four decades of working with children and families, I felt like I had a front row seat on the human condition. I thought I’d later use those experiences to write poignant gut-wrenching dramatic fiction.

But after retiring, I realized it was not my clients’ stories that I’d fallen in love with. Instead, I’d become enchanted with words, with their infinite ability to twist, turn, and land in creative and unusual arrangements, to ultimately express feelings and ideas never before arranged in such a revelatory way. For me, after spending four decades of hearing and observing the real-life stories of clients, nonfiction felt more real, honest, deep, and amazing than any fiction I’d ever read.

Enter retirement, when my younger, excitable husband came up with the cockamamie notion that we should buy an RV and see the world. I’d never once looked at one of those monstrosities tootling down the road and thought, “Wow, if only I could do that!” My charming, sweet-talking hubby eventually convinced me in 2015 to give it a try. I envisioned short trips of two or three weeks at the time.

But then came the five-month-long trip from Florida to Alaska a couple of years later, the one that tore me away from my manicured yard and 200+ orchid collection suspended on the pool cage at the back of my house.

Become An Author

How did I handle this horrid disruption in my life? I did what any despairing aspiring writer and gardener would do. I began pounding out my angst on my laptop. With every RV mile on that long road trip, the tagline and story arc became more focused and my enthusiasm and determination more intense. I started waking up at 4:30 a.m. every day to write several hours before our sightseeing activities began. By the time we returned home, I’d pounded out over 70,000 words chronicling my initial reluctance toward RVing that had magically transformed into an exuberant embrace of a nomadic lifestyle.

That angst-driven tirade at being torn away from my literal and figurative roots ultimately became my first book, appropriately titled The Reluctant RV Wife. When we returned from the Alaska trip, I workshopped the manuscript at Writers in Paradise, an annual writers’ workshop where I studied with Ann Hood, a NYT best-selling author.

I entered the revised manuscript into the Florida Writers Association’s annual contest and won a second-place trophy. And finally, I pitched to agents and publishers. Three weeks later, I signed a contract with Sunbury Press, who released the book in July 2019. The entire process from the first written word to publication took less than two years. Stunned does not begin to capture the exhilaration and shock at what I’d accomplished, all stemming from my adult temper tantrum of being dragged across the country in an RV.

It was as if the publication of that first book unleashed a monster, and I responded with such resolve that nothing could have stopped me from writing a sequel. I submitted book two, Home Is Where the RV Is, to my publisher less than a year later.

My husband and I were on such highs, him from RVing and me from my writing success, that we upgraded to a larger RV and took off full time in 2020, becoming nomads at last.

But life throws curveballs, and we caught a hard one. The pandemic erupted, and everything we’d planned to do and see changed as campgrounds closed, travel slowed, and even quick grocery store trips felt death-defying. We sold our house over the phone and hunkered down as best we could in parts of the country with good weather, outside recreational activities, and low incidences of COVID-19.

That social isolation while waiting for vaccinations proved to be one of the most enjoyable of our RV experiences and resulted in a third book: Running From Covid in our RV Cocoon.

When we first began RVing in 2015, my husband and I would look at each other, shake our heads, and realize we were perhaps too old to be doing this. The joke became, “But we’ll keep on truckin’ until the transmission falls out of the RV,” our metaphor for when our bodies broke down.

Our transmission tumbled in late 2022 when health issues required proximity to medical care. I mourned the loss of RV travel. My three RV books had landed in a small niche genre, and I despaired that I’d be able to continue as a humorous nonfiction writer when my subject matter had gone poof.

I shouldn’t have worried. Enter our introduction into an over-55 community, and my original RV angst paled in comparison to the shock of looking out my kitchen window at uniformed first responders wheeling my neighbors out of their homes on gurneys and into ambulances. In horror, I realized I was looking at my own future. What was I doing living in an area with such OLD PEOPLE??? Despite being seventy-four, I railed that I was too young to live there.

The Old Biddy

This inspired my fourth humorous nonfiction book, Over-55 Conniptions: An Old Biddy Battles Aging, which seamlessly relates our transition from an RV to a house in an older community to my eventual acceptance of my age and mortality. Yes, there’s humor to be found in aging, and I see this newest book as proof that life doesn’t stop just because you keep having birthdays.

But I’m not done yet. I’ve a fifth book in my publisher’s queue and a sixth in process. I hope that if, or when, I’m wheeled out on a gurney by a paramedic one day, I’ll have a huge beatific smile on my face, triggered by the pure joy at having achieved that middle school dream of becoming a writer.

If you dream of writing a book, don’t be in that 97% of people who never do it, and don’t be in that 3% who never publish. Want to know the difference between a writer and an author? Authors finish what they start. If I can finish what I start in my seventies, you can, too.

Your stories have the potential to inspire and empower. Find your passion, find your voice, and write, damn it!