Think you missedyour window?I wrote my first novel at 54.

I call it my ‘Winter of Swiss Chalet and Chardonnay’.

I'd lost both my parents exactly twelve months apart (and I mean exactly – July 10th 2023 and 2024). There was an estate, family issues, and a house to clear out. I was drinking way too much. I was eating way too much. I was not moving at all.

Somewhere in the middle of the two hardest years of my life, realizing I’d probably watched every murder mystery from both sides of the Atlantic, I wondered whether I could write a story of my own.

I had no business wondering. I was thirty years into a corporate career: television production, management consulting, human resources, and then, for the past decade, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). I got into DEI with a deep sense of purpose and intention, like many of my peers. But, like many of my peers, I was suffering from burn-out. I wasn’t ready to return.

And in my family, my mother and my brother were the creative ones. I was in the math club and the debating club! That had been settled since I was about ten.

So, I was burnt out, grieving, and “not creative”.

I followed the urge anyway.

I mapped the whole thing on a flip chart – all seven acts (Why seven? Why not?), I wrote on the walls and the sliding glass doors. I tracked every red herring in an excel spreadsheet so it's believable to the reader and to every character who falls for it. And the characters started talking back before I'd finished the outline. I looked up “writing software” online and ordered it. I dove in. Some nights I had to ice my forearms from typing all day.

That is how “For Maria” came into being.

In families, we tend to decide early who each person is, and then nobody goes back to check. We just continue telling ourselves the same stories.

“I'm not creative” was a lie I'd been telling myself for over forty years. I didn't make it up. I just never went back to check.