I’ve been writing since I was a kid, though I didn’t call it that then. At twelve, I wrote a song for a boy I met at Pismo Beach in California. Three days of sunshine, waves, and endless volleyball, and I was convinced I had fallen in love. When I left, I wrote my heartbreak into a notebook—believing somehow that if I pressed it into words, it wouldn’t slip away.

I often wrote about my father. Always my father. Occasionally my mom, but she was an illusion I more often kept in my head. He was the rescuer of a world he was also guilty of creating.

My stories always painted him in different shades—but always as the hero—and they always ended the same: me, the baby slung over his shoulder, staring out at the world from that high perch. That image was my definition of safety, even if the ground beneath was always only caving more.

Looking back, I think writing was survival. Some kids had diaries with locks. I had a couple of notebooks, more often loose pages—the light grey kind with soft lines you’d get from school—filled with versions of life I wanted to believe in.

Escape routes, reminders of who not to be, and many warnings. None of it lasted long. I was always destroying them so the adults around me wouldn’t read them. Privacy wasn’t a thing in my world. And if people caught me writing short stories about my dad rescuing us, that was a problem in itself. Writing was my way of releasing something—one thing or another—so I could breathe.

Years later, like all of my stories, Closing Costs started the same way—with something I couldn’t shake. An image. A conversation about an awful tragedy. And while I didn’t live it, I couldn’t let go of it once it got into my head. I tend to hyperfixate on tragedies, especially other people’s tragedies. They just sit with me, digging in. I find myself circling the same questions: How do people go on after the worst happens? What does recovery even look like when the unimaginable leaves its mark?

At first, that image shaped the story. It was dark, raw, and stuck in me. It was meant to be a mystery—a murder mystery. But as the words piled up, the focus shifted. A minor change here, another there. And then, as the characters grew, they began to dictate the story. The more I wrote, the more they twisted, moved, and refused to stay in the roles I thought I had planned for them. And then one day, they simply fit—and it only made sense in one way.

It was always about a murder mystery among midlife women—friends moving through their awakenings, their starting overs—and how this tragedy-turned-mystery would break them, or maybe reveal them. There was always going to be romance, deep relationships, and choices. But as David developed in particular, he refused to stay where I tried to put him. The story grew legs and ran in the only direction I could keep writing.

That happens to me a lot. I have four dozen stories, all unfinished, because when they morph and I don’t run with it, I get writer’s block and can’t finish. I fight what is pulling me to write the story as it wants to be written… and eventually I can’t continue. So they sit. And wait. Like me. Or like I once did.

Maybe that’s what writing has always been for me. I start with something I can’t put down—a boy on a beach, a father’s shadow, an image that won’t leave me alone—and I follow it until it shifts into something new. Writing never erases the weight, but it changes the shape of it. It makes it possible to carry. Or it sparks enough hope to keep believing in the impossible.

I don’t really consider myself an author. I don’t write pretty, fluffy words you get lost in. I don’t like metaphors, and fancy language has never been my strong suit. I write how life sounds. How people sound. How a story would be told if we were sitting around a campfire drinking a beer. I’m a storyteller—not Ernest Hemingway or Pat Conroy. And for me, it works.

So this is where I start—with Closing Costs. The story morphed so hard it became the fastest book I’ve ever completed. Because for once, I didn’t fight where it wanted to go. I listened to what it wanted to be, and I followed it this time. I followed me.