I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Jennie Nash, CEO of Author Accelerator. We talked about my lifelong love of reading and writing, how I got derailed from my dream career in my twenties, my thirty-five-year career as a paralegal, and my long and winding path to becoming a writer, a certified book coach, and an editor.

John Lennon once said something like, “Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.” This has been true for me. I’ve lived my life in a career that was not what I chose for myself. It’s a career that’s made me financially secure and able to raise my family, and each morning when I count my blessings, I literally say out loud how grateful I am for my job. But it’s not my dream career. So I am thrilled at this stage of my life to be getting back to the things I dreamed of doing when I was a young mother and college student at U.C. Santa Cruz.

I also talk about how much I got out of my MFA program—I graduated at the age of sixty and wrote an award-winning book with the mentorship of some incredible professors, all best-selling authors—and how Author Accelerator offered me further insight into the craft of writing and helped me to finally come full circle and become a teacher, which has been my lifelong dream.