The Coolest People I Know: Patricia Sands, aka, "The Accidental Novelist"

With no expectations but a fascinating story to tell, she launched a successful career as a fiction writer in her mid-60s.

This week I’m sharing the highlights of a great conversation I had recently with Patricia Sands, author of a dozen novels- and counting! We met through our membership in the Pro-Age Women’s Alliance- Patricia proudly features women in mid-life as the main characters in many of her books. She’s received multiple awards and honors for her writing; click here to find out more at her website.

Patricia and her husband call Collingwood, Ontario their home base, but her soul feels the most connected to the south of France. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Sally: Patricia, so many of us dream over the years of writing a book, or many books. But we don’t ever seem to finish the first one! You never had this dream, yet you’ve now published many books. What did you dream of doing when you were young?

Patricia: I dropped out of university when I was just 19 to go to Europe- all of my friends were going, and I don’t think I’d had a goal for a career at that time. It was 1967, the time of the mini-skirt and Carnaby Street in London, and a friend and I had jobs waiting for us there. Because we’re Canadian, we didn’t need a visa to work. All of our friends were there, and we had so much fun!

We also traveled around on the Eurail Pass and doing that is when I first visited the south of France. That was my first visit there, and I just fell in love with the region. I didn’t know I was dreaming of this place that would come to mean so much to me, but that was the start of it all.

I always meant to go back to university, but when I returned to Canada, I got a good paying job, I met the man I then married, we had two sons, and my life became all about being a wife and mother.

Sally: Perhaps you’re just a naturally creative person and had a writing gene in your DNA all along?

Patricia: You know, while I haven’t always been a writer, I’ve always been a storyteller through photography. I was given my first Kodak Brownie camera when I was seven years old, and I just always took pictures. Coincidentally, my first husband worked for Kodak, so we got free film!

I took several courses on photography through Kodak, and for a few years when my sons were very young, I had a portrait photography business. And I only worked outside in natural light.

Seven-year-old Patricia with her trusty Brownie camera. And so began her lifelong passion for storytelling, first with pictures and later with words.

Sally: Well, that’s what I like to call a “non-linear career path”- you made several twists and turns, but ended up with storytelling as the constant in your life.

Patricia: My first husband died when I was in my early 40s, which just exploded my life and for my sons, who were still young. It took quite some time to recover from that shock and I went back to university and ended up teaching for several years, which I really enjoyed.

Then when I turned 50, I married my current husband, and we put together my two sons with his three daughters and two sons, so I went back to being a stay-at-home mom as his sons were still under age 10. We were a real Brady Bunch!

My husband and I started traveling more often over the next decade. We visited many wonderful places in Europe, but it was when a couple who are friends from Toronto invited us to visit them at a new home they had in Menton, near Monaco, that I returned again to the south of France. I’d been to Paris in those decades since 1967, but this was my first trip back to the place I’d loved, and I fell in love all over again.

Sally: Was this time period when you got the urge to start writing?

Patricia: Nope! I still had no urge to be a writer, but being in a group of friends since I was 19, I was part of so many interesting stories, mishaps and situations we got ourselves into that made us laugh until we cried. We called ourselves, “The Bridge Club,” because we really did start out getting together to play bridge. But over time we started having so much fun just laughing and being together, we’d forget to play bridge. Over our many decades of friendship, we all often said, “Someone should write a book about us!”, but it wasn’t something that I ever planned to do. I had no idea I’d be the one to write that book about us.

Patricia’s first book, published in 2012

My husband started having health issues about 15 years ago, so we weren’t traveling and weren’t as active as we’d been. I still kept up with my friends, playing tennis, golfing, and so forth, but I didn’t want to be gone from him all of the time. It was at this time, when I had more time to fill, that the urge to try writing the story of The Bridge Club came to me.

Sally: Your first novel is based on people you know and stories you’ve lived?

Patricia: It’s fiction but based on facts and people I know. It’s really different from a traditional novel, it doesn’t have a “normal” storyline. It’s eight short stories of eight different women, and then after the separate stories there’s a crisis that intersects with all of them. They must deal with the crisis together. As a reader, you realize that you had to get to know each of these women to know how they would deal with the crisis.

Sally: That sounds like such a unique approach, and you didn’t see while you were writing that it was all coming into the form of a novel?

Patricia: You know, I never even intended to publish it. I was writing it just for fun, for something to do. I was sharing what I’d written with the others in the club, just talking to them about it. Then my husband shared what I’d written with a few people, and then friends heard I was writing, and they wanted to read my stories. And the feedback was just always, “You need to try to publish this.”

It was really interesting to hear from a lot of women saying how unique it was to read the stories of women as the main focus, and saying “My book club would like to read this!”

After hearing this enough times, I started looking into what it would take to actually get a book published. I went through the usual process, sent queries to publishers, and got a lot of very nice rejection letters saying that while they like my style of writing, my book “just wasn’t what they were looking for at this time.”

Sally: Well, that stops a lot of people right there. But you went on to publish it through a company you’d learned about following another writer’s publishing attempts?

Patricia: Yes, I did. At the time, I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. I paid this company a lot of money, but I had a good experience too. But you just don’t need to do that these days.

This book has a very controversial ending, and in my first editorial meeting with editors from this company, they said I had to change the ending. I told them I’m not going to do that, and I explained why- I had definite reasons why. And then the senior editor phoned me about it, and I again had to defend myself.

In the end they went along with me, and later both the content editor and the development editor I worked with agreed that it was the right way to end it.

Sally: As a first-time writer- no clout, no experience- you stood up for the ending of your first novel against the publisher’s requests to change it? Wow!

Patricia: That was the whole point of the story, what happens in the end. So, I thought, “If that can’t stay, I just won’t publish it.” At the time, I didn’t feel it would make a difference in my life if I published it or didn’t publish it.

I had no idea what was coming! I was hearing from readers who wanted to know what happens next and they were also asking what else I’d written. Well, nothing- yet.

Patricia enjoying the view of Antibes, less than half an hour from Nice in the south of France. “My heart lives here,” she says, and has made this region the setting for many of her novels.

Sally: What a great compliment for your writing from readers who want to know more and read more of your work!

Patricia: Yes, that’s a very cool part of all of this, hearing from readers. After my first book was out, I started meeting other writers, I entered writing contests and attending workshops. I realized I really loved writing!

And it was also at this time that I had fallen deeply in love with the south of France. My husband loved it too. We rented an apartment for four months in Antibes, and that’s where I wrote my next book called The Promise of Provence, which is set in this beautiful area.

And that was the start of the next few books. After it was out, readers said “Well, what happens next?” And the other writers I’d become friendly with said I should make a series to keep telling the story of my main character. My main character is again in the next two books that followed The Promise of Provence - she’s a Canadian woman, a mature woman, and it’s her story of visiting the south of France and falling in love with the area and a French man.

Sally: Just as with your first book, you’re taking some of your own life experience and weaving it into a fictional story.

Patricia: Exactly. After I’d self-published the second in this series, called Promises to Keep, then Lake Union Publishing contacted me and said they’d like to buy the rights to my first two Provence books and write more for them. So, then the third in this series came out, I Promise You This.

(Listen below as Patricia talks about choosing mature women as the main character in her books.)

Sally: What an amazing accomplishment, to go from writing a first novel for fun to being contracted by a publisher to write books about characters in the setting you love!

Patricia: It was an unbelievable thing to have happen, because usually it’s writers hoping that a publisher will pick them up. The fact that they came to me was a really wonderful gift.

They asked me next to write a stand-alone book, and I said “Okay, but the protagonist is still going to be a mature woman and it’s still going to be set in the south of France.” But I did offer to move the setting to a different part of the south of France, so it is set in Arles. That book is called Drawing Lessons.

I still heard from readers about how much they loved the characters in what became the “Love in Provence” books, so I took a little different direction with the series of four Villa des Violettes books. They’re short novels set again Provence. They include all of the characters from my first three books that are popular with readers.

Sally: What a string of hits you put together over the course of not quite a decade!

Patricia: Yes, then of course Covid came along, and I decided to go back to write another longer novel again, The Secrets We Keep. For various reasons, Lake Union Publishing did not pick it up, and so I self-published again. It’s won several awards, and a lot of my readers tell me they think it’s my best work.

For the past ten years, I’ve also really enjoyed leading a 12-day tour based on the locations in my novels. The tours were for 16 women once a summer. It was such a joy to do these tours, but I decided from here on I will be traveling to my favorite spots in the south of France with my friends and family.

Sally: What’s next for you in writing and life? I believe you’re working on another book, still in the research phase. What else is in your plans?

Patricia: I really am excited about this new novel I’m working on, it will be published in November. I’ve loved writing this story and I have plans for a more epic novel to be published by 2026 or 2027.

As always, I’m looking forward to my annual trip to the south of France. I’ll go for a month in September. I do spend some time on social media, on Instagram, because I love photography and I post a bazillion pictures of France, and a lot of other places, too (on Instagram she’s @psands.stories).

I also like to share the work online of other writers and those I’ve met over the years. I’ve recently been invited to be part of the Tall Poppies Writer’s Group, which is a great honor for me. I’m also part of another small writer’s group, Blue Sky Book Chat Writers, which is an amazingly supportive group (for more on these writer’s groups, you can follow both on Facebook).

Writers are just so collegial, so supportive. It’s one of the great joys I’ve found as a writer, the collaboration. Among so many joys, really.

(To view all of Patricia’s books, click here to visit her author page on Amazon.)

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