Lynda Sunshine West: Patty, welcome. I'm excited to share with our audience, especially your story, because you worked and then you retired and then you started something after you retired. For those of you who are in retirement or getting ready to retire. You definitely want to listen to this episodes.
Patty Wiseman: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
Lynda Sunshine West: We're excited to hear it from you because this podcast is all about taking action and Patty, after you retired, you took action on something. I want you to share with the audience what it is you took action on and where it's gone since that time. Cause I just love what you're doing.
Patty Wiseman: Well, you know, I worked for a financial advisor for 25 years and, you know, crunching numbers for 25 years. It isn't exactly feeding your creative abilities.
And I, at the end of that 25 years, I just had enough. And back in the background, I had been working on this book that I felt compelled to write. And so my husband is really the one who encouraged me to just retire and do it full-time. He told me he had my back. And so it was the scariest thing I'd ever done to retire when you've been in the workforce for as long as I have, it's really hard to let go of that safe haven, you know, that paycheck every month and whatever. But because I had been divorced for 10 years before I met my current husband and raised two teenage boys by myself, my job was my lifeline and to go off and do something that I really wanted to do that fed my creative juices was a terrifying thing. But once I did it, I got that book published within a few months and it actually won an award. It was a second-place national award, but I took that and thought, you know what, I'm doing something right here. And nine books later, I'm still going strong. I'm still at it. And I'm loving every minute of it.
Lynda Sunshine West: Well, that's fantastic. I have a few questions related to that. One is, do you write a certain genre? And how long did that first book sit around before you actually published it? And what's the title of it?
Patty Wiseman: It's called An Unlikely Arrangement. It's a historical fiction based on stories. My grandmother told me when she was a rebellious girl and her parents wanted her to marry and settle down. And so they arranged a marriage for her. And my father was the product of that marriage. Well, the story that I wrote is fiction, but I took so much of what she had told me and put it in the story, but she's long gone now and I couldn't verify some of the things. So I made it a fictional a story. What happened with that is everybody wanted more. And I ended it without resolving – well I resolved some things, but there was a couple of little things that I didn't. And so people would come to me and say, Hey, what happened to this? Or what happened about that? So lo and behold, Lynda, I wrote four books in that series and I'm working on number five right now.
So historical fiction is what I started with, but after writing four books of historical fiction, I decided I wanted to try my hand at something else and see if I can accomplish that. And so I wrote a contemporary, romantic mystery called That One Moment and it won first place in the Texas Authors Association Contest. And so I'm going, yes, well then my dog, we have a cream lab at home, and he was instrumental in saving two baby foxes from drowning in our pond. And so my husband kept pushing me, what would I do without my husband? But he said, you need to write a children's book. And I said, I don't write children's books. And so, you know, he kept pushing me and one day about a year after the incident, I finally sat down and I wrote that thing in one day and I had my son edited and found an illustrator. It got published and it won first place in a children's contest.
CONNECT WITH PATTY AND FIND HER BOOKS AT www.pattywiseman.com
