50 ForOregonState.org/Stater ouR commuNity PHOTOS BY ROBBIE MCCLARAN THE SISTERS OF SUSPENSE How a steamy combo of romance and mystery catapulted two alumnae to the bestseller lists. BY > SIOBHAN MURRAY she returned to her job as a babysitter, one of a series of gigs she’d held since dropping out of Oregon State. As she watched children run across a tiny living room, her mind returned to her sister’s proposal. “I mean,we were dead broke.And I thought, ‘Who am I to say no?’” After Jackson gave each child a bottle, she took out a manual typewriter. By the time the children’s parents came to pick them up, she had written the first seven pages of Stormy Surrender. The two sisters, joined by a friend, passed the manuscript back and forth, trading chapter-writing until the book was ready to send out to a list of publishers. “And then we got rejected all over New York,” says Jackson. The publishers’ verdict was that Bush and Jackson’s book had too much suspense. And while the “I thought,‘Hey,we could do that,’” says Bush, who, like her sister, had young children with a husband she’d met during her OSU days and was struggling to make ends meet. Initially, Jackson brushed the idea off as a pipe dream. But the next day, In 1981, Nancy Bush, ’75, and her sister, Lisa Jackson, read an article in Time about young mothers who, after the sun went down and the last diaper was changed, pulled out their typewriters and wrote romance novels. ↑ Nancy Bush (left) and her sister, Lisa Jackson (right), together launched a career as novelists.
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