My path to writing was never a straight line. For years I worked with numbers — patterns, forecasts, and the quiet discipline of analysis. That work taught me patience and precision, but it also left me hungry for a different kind of truth: the kind that lives in memory, contradiction, and voice.
Journalism came next, and with it a front-row seat to stories that rarely make the headlines in full — communities under pressure, voices at the margins, and the gap between what institutions say and what people feel. Those years sharpened my ear for dialogue and for the unsaid.
Why fiction
Fiction became the place where I could weave those threads together without reducing them to a single headline. Novels and children’s tales alike ask us to slow down, to inhabit another life for a while. That act of imagination feels as serious to me as any report — because empathy, in the end, is a form of understanding.
Today, whether I am drafting a chapter for young readers or revising a scene for adult fiction, I carry the same questions forward: Who gets heard? What does courage look like in ordinary lives? And how do we tell stories that honour complexity without losing hope?
If you are early in your own creative journey, know that detours are not delays. They are material. The desk job, the night class, the conversation on a bus — it all accumulates. The writer you become is built from the life you actually lived.