Twenty-seven years, and then a first novel
How a family mortgage business taught me more about narrative structure than any writing course could have.
Kimberly and I founded Genisys Mortgage twenty-seven years ago. For most of that time, the book existed only as an intention — the sort a person carries quietly for decades and mentions to almost no one.
A mortgage is a story with stakes. Someone tells you what they want their life to look like, and you spend weeks helping them get there without anything falling apart. You learn to listen for the thing a person is not saying.
That is most of what a novelist does, too.
The business is still ours, and it still matters. But at some point the intention stopped being an intention. I sat down and wrote the first chapter, and then I kept going until there was a book.