Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, I’m also a late bloomer. She was 65 when Little House on the Prairie was published, and all you need to know is that (as of now), I’m younger. I’ve identified as a writer and a reader all my life. I have stories about horses and poems also about horses from grade school and some angsty stories from graduate school about young women who find their parents annoying. I have a YA novel in the proverbial drawer; I run an online book review site (bookclique.org); and like most gray-haired NPR fans and book club members in Atlanta, I have a “READ” bumper sticker on my car from one of my favorite indie bookstores, The Little Shop of Stories. I would be happy hanging out in bookstores and recommending books for the rest of my life. But amazingly, my debut novel, Hot Desk, will be published on September 2, 2025. 

The idea for Hot Desk came from my youngest brother, Colin, who works in publishing. After a work meeting discussing the implementation of “hot desking” (which if you don’t know, is the flexible workspace arrangement whereby employees use the same desk at different times) Colin called with an assignment: Write about two rival editors who are forced to share a desk and eventually fall in love. Immediately the characters of Rebecca Blume and Ben Heath leaped almost fully formed into my head. The book would be told in alternating chapters just as they had to alternate desk days.  

As I wrote, I kept expanding the story of what came to be, for me, the heart of the book: the characters of Rebecca’s mother, Jane, and her best friend, Rose, older women essential to the plot. I thought about how Rebecca and Jane experienced the work place 40 years apart. I thought about how publishing and books and writers and New York City had stayed the same over the years and how they had changed.  

Each character in Hot Desk is a mix of what I know, who I am, and what I imagine. But the character of Jane, not surprisingly, is probably closest to my heart. My trajectory has some similarities to hers, though without the drama and with more choice. But it’s not lost on me that both of us, in our 60s, are realizing our dreams of becoming published writers. For me, for Jane, for Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s never too late! 

I hope you pick up Hot Desk and that you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. Let me know what you think.