Patty McWilliams

Patty McWilliams was born in central Texas and grew up in a family full of storytellers.  As soon as she could compose a complete sentence, she was seated at her grandma Flossie’s pine desk with a Big Chief tablet, and plenty of sharpened pencils, where she was encouraged to write about life going on around her.  Instructed to watch her grammar, and to never write the morbid, Patty would receive a buffalo-head nickel for every story that had a satisfactory ending.  This habit of writing in her spare time followed her through life, causing her to pay close attention to her world and to fill many notebooks. 

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Finding a need to offer hope to women undergoing the trauma of breast cancer, Patty wrote Color Me Pink, Still Rolling Strong-- Years After Cancer Diagnosis, a Christian memoir of her own five-year battle where prayers were answered, dreams became true, and survivors soak up the sweet taste of winning. The book full of noteworthy quotes and inspirational Bible scriptures has accompanied Patty on her rounds as guest speaker at numerous Relays for Life and Mardi Bras Brunch. Twenty-years after her double-mastectomy, she is still speaking to women’s groups and praising God that she kept her mammogram appointment so many years ago.

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Remembering how special she felt as a child weaving her own name into an adventure story, she set out to capture her three grandchildren’s personalities. Putting on paper their emotions while they wait for their father to come home from war, and as they work through the difficulty of leaving behind the homes they love as his Army rank rises and he takes on larger commands.  The trilogy, written under the genre of Christian Military Family, includes Abigail and Rumpus the Green Dinosaur, Thomas’ Little Light, and Mia and the Missionaries.

In 2022, Patty felt the need to unburden herself from a secret she carried for six decades and sat down to write a fictionalized memoir about herself and her brother, Tommy.  Still in possession of the small orange box holding seven little packets of paper, his creations filled with love and direction that he called Belly Buttons, Patty wove a story of their life-long promise to each other and the hardships such a promise entailed.  With the help of her daughter and grandchildren, while standing over Tommy’s grave, they acted out in real life what would become the last chapter of the book.  Finally confessing to a spiteful secret she’d been hiding for so many years.   Belly Buttons: Lifelines From My Brother was published in December of 2023.    

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Published Blue Buttons & Red Tomatoes is full of actual incidents and memorable people Patty encountered as the fifth token female hired by a large package delivery service when it moved into central Texas. Retrieving the stories she’d spent years recording at night after her long days at work, she wove clues through them, ending up with her first mystery novel.  Its satisfactory ending surely earning a shiny Buffalo-nickel from her grandma Flossie.  It was published in November of 2023.

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Santa’s Buttons will be available in 2024, and will hold her newspaper-published Christmas stories that were welcomed into hundreds of homes over the last twenty-plus years.

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 Daddy’s Buttons came about because of the love letters Patty discovered after her parents’ death.  Having divorced her mom some four years earlier, her father goes on to lose everything to a woman named Dimples.  Writing from a boarding house that he rents by the week, he writes twice-weekly love letters to Patty’s mother over a five-month span. Each letter begins with the endearment of Sweetheart, in which he attempts to woo her back, wishing with all his heart to be a family once again.  In one of the letters he states that he has a great need for her sewing skills to replace the buttons on his white work shirts.  The fourth book of the button series was born from those few words.  The story will have a happy ending, as his love letters become the glue that reunited his family of six.  Patty is hoping for a publishing date in 2024.

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Patty was a free-lance contributor and columnist for several newspapers over the years. She operated both a Saturday Mystery Club and a free, private summer camp for military children called Camp Gecko in Bell County.  Her latest exploration was to become a licensed Texas Auctioneer donating her time and skills for benefits such as cancer retreats, church bazars, and for fund raising activities for military families.  She is married and lives in the hill country of central Texas just outside of Fredericksburg. 

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Under Patty’s feet at all times, is a toy Australian Shepherd that weighed  2.2 pounds when she brought her home. Since she has a button tail, and Patty’s life has been so engrained by the “b” word, the name of Buttons Galore was bestowed upon the puppy.  Click on the blog tab above to follow the pair’s progress in writing yet another novel.