When Edna Gratzer receives a phone call with the fabulous news that she’s won a trip for two to Las Vegas, she signs up, no questions asked. Gertie Larsen, the sensible one, smells trouble, but who can deter Edna when she’s ready for some fun?
And thus begins the first adventure of these two “women of a certain age,” Edna and Gertie Do Vegas. Edna is tall, raw-boned, and glitzy, ready for fun and unafraid in the face of minor disasters. Gertie is more sophisticated. She’s well-dressed, quiet, and prefers to lead a reserved life away from the limelight.
The girls have been best friends since high school, a relationship five decades in the making. Gertie owes a lot to her wild and crazy friend who stepped up to protect her from bullies when she was the new kid in school.
Edna has been married twice. The first marriage, a long and content one, ended when Fred died of a heart attack. Her second marriage ended when her rat of a husband, Sam, ran off with a blonde floozy twenty years her junior. “He left me like yesterday’s leftovers.”
Gertie had a long and very boring marriage to Donald who recently passed away. She is in the process of learning to live as a quiet widow. Edna is intent on getting both of them back in the game and living life to the full. Gertie isn’t so sure.
If you loved Lucy and Ethel back in the day, laughed along with the Golden Girls or get a kick out of Grandma Mazur’s antics in the Janet Evanovich stories, you’ll love Edna and Gertie.
Author, Jan Pierce
I love words. I was the kid reading books under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. Words like mystery and treasure sent a thrill up my spine and I’m still an avid reader today. After a lengthy career in education, I attended a writer’s conference and found “my people.”
The presenter at the conference gave us a prompt and sent us outdoors in the beautiful Oregon sunshine to write. The prompt involved creating two characters who happen to meet, and the wonder of wonders outjumped Edna and Gertie. Edna, with the over-the-top personality, and Gertie, the shy, careful one. They surprised me, but I knew they had stories to tell.
I tend to be a seat-of-the-pants writer. I honestly don’t know what my characters will say or do until they do it. That means a lot of rewrites to add necessary conflict, bolster the behaviors of each character, fill plot holes, and all the rest, but when you have two rich characters such as Edna and Gertie, the stories very nearly tell themselves.
I’ve taken the girls on three adventures in this first book and am currently working on a fourth. They’ve made friends along the way, lived through some precarious situations, and have grown as individuals entering the latter years of life, always remaining fast friends. And they make us laugh out loud.
Today’s world is filled with trouble. But with each new day, we can choose love and goodness and a hearty belly laugh. With Edna and Gertie, there’s no time for mourning the fact they’re getting older—there is fun to be had.
I hope you learn to know our two best friends as well as I do, and that you see beneath their exteriors to two hearts of gold that understand how very important friendships are as we live our lives to the fullest.
The Exploits of Edna and Gertie launched this week. It’s available on Amazon in either Kindle or paperback. Find Jan Pierce at www.janpierce.net.
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