Then came the brand years. An MBA from William & Mary, including one sweltering summer in a tiny Philadelphia apartment above one of the best dive bars in the city. Boston, where I marketed for Polaroid and Welch's and became quietly famous inside the company for my March Madness recap emails. A woman I'd never met stopped by my office and told me I should be in LA writing sitcoms. Instead, I moved to Seattle to work for Starbucks. When that chapter ran its course, I jumped into two startups on the wild edge of the dot-com era—a thrilling ride that came with a side effect: I was constantly job-hunting after the next company ran out of runway. (One of them landed me on CNNfn and ABC World News Tonight, which sounds far more impressive than the unemployment that followed a few months later.)

In 2001, I left Corporate America with no plan whatsoever. I sold my beloved little condo on top of Queen Anne hill, taught at Seattle University as an adjunct professor, wrote lots of white papers, and consulted for Microsoft, HP, and HTC. I also joined a running group called the Wining Women (the dinners and wine outranked the running). And then the best thing Seattle ever gave me: my son Luke, born at Swedish Hospital. Every chapter since has been more special because he's been in it.

Then came Idaho: eighteen years in Boise, my own marketing strategy firm with clients from U of Idaho and Mercedes-Benz to Blue Cross of Idaho, a board seat with UNC, Girls on the Run, and Anser Charter School. And many trails in the foothills—by bike and foot. I ran marathons, nineteen of them, and qualified for Boston “not because I suddenly got faster. But because I got older and hadn't slowed down.” I finished the Boise 70.3 Half Ironman despite nearly freezing in the swim, and welcomed my 49th birthday with a 12-mile mountain ultra that started at 12:12 a.m. on 12/12/12. Turning fifty came next, in Scottsdale, surrounded by my closest girlfriends—a weekend that, without my knowing it at the time, planted the seed for the novel I'd write years later.

Then, in one season, everything shifted: my mom passed away, Luke left for Belmont, and the startup where I worked ran out of cash. Life was nudging, and it was pointing me back home—to Nashville. I sold most of what I owned, loaded up my bikes, and drove thirty hours east while my furry babies stared at me the entire way.

Publishing found me next: VP of Strategy at Forbes Books, then Brand Builders Group, where I help authors clarify their voice, expand their influence, and launch books that outlast their launch week. I've written three books of my own (Finding Life's Secret Sauce, Eat In Not Out, and Heart & Sole), and my debut novel, Dirt Before Dessert — book one of the Fifty Yard Line of Life trilogy — arrives in February 2027. What I've learned, doing this work, is that I genuinely love it—reading books, writing them, and helping other women bring their own voices into the world as authors. Every season taught me the same thing: a next chapter is something you can write on purpose. That's the business I'm in now.