How My Path Began
If you had asked me years ago where I thought I’d be today, I probably would have said at a hospital bedside, or maybe leading another wellness retreat. Writing was always in the background, like a familiar hum I couldn’t turn off. It just never seemed like a sensible path. I never imagined I’d go from nurse to novelist, but that’s exactly what happened. Firstborn children often take the practical route, and mine was medicine. Nursing gave me purpose. Coaching gave me freedom. Both allowed me to help people in ways that mattered. But the stories? They never stopped tugging at me.
My love affair with words started long before I held my first stethoscope. I was four when my grandma handed me The Story of Peter Rabbit as a birthday gift. By nine, I was writing poems. By fourteen, I was scribbling plays into spiral notebooks, and by sixteen, I was convinced an electric typewriter would turn me into a novelist. Those dreams didn’t vanish when life got busy — they just waited. Sometimes quietly, sometimes insistently.
When the Story Shifted
It wasn’t until much later, when the health issues I’d faced at forty-five resurfaced, that I began asking myself different questions. Coaching was rewarding, but I sensed there was more I was meant to give. At the same time, my connection to the past — and my own desire to leave a legacy — began pulling me deeper into my family history.
During one fever-ridden night, when I was frighteningly ill, I stumbled across the woman who would become my protagonist: a mother of five, just like me.
I wasn’t dreaming of writing a novel then, but the need to learn everything I could about her pulled me onto a path I never expected. That path led to Scotland, and eventually to a Post-it note scribbled with GPS coordinates — a small clue that sent me chasing ancestors through records and archives. It was a journey that carried me to the stones of Skene House, where I felt the unexplainable certainty of coming home.
Finding a Voice That Had Been Missing
That was the turning point. I began to see that the thread of writing I had tucked away for so long was not just about me — it was also about legacy. That thread connected my life to the lives of women who came before me, women whose choices and sacrifices had been lost in the silence of time. Their names appeared in registers, their marriages in contracts, their children in baptismal records. But their inner lives were missing. No one had written their thoughts, their longings, or their struggles.
The more I uncovered, the more I felt their absence. And the more convinced I became that their voices still mattered. These were not anonymous figures. They were mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, women who carried both duty and desire, just as I have. Their stories deserved more than a passing mention in the margins of history books.
It struck me that if I didn’t take up the work of imagining them whole — of giving them voices, hearts, and agency — then perhaps no one would. That realization was both daunting and strangely freeing. Writing stopped feeling like a private dream and began to feel like a responsibility.
How I went from Nurse to Novelist
So here I am, in a new chapter of life: no less committed to healing and helping, but now doing it through story. Historical fiction gives me the chance to weave research, history, and legacy into something larger — something that honors the past while speaking to the present. It reminds me that agency, sacrifice, and resilience aren’t just academic ideas; they’re lived experiences that echo across centuries.
I may have traded scrubs and coaching notes for manuscripts and archives, but the calling is the same: to care, to notice, to give voice. Writing was never really a detour. It was always the path— the one that carried me from nurse to novelist.
