It’s probably not an exaggeration to call myself a late bloomer. My late August birthday barely got me into first grade at the right time. My social skills didn’t start to expand until I got to college. It took five or six years after college to find some work I could tolerate and I didn’t even commit myself to a relationship until my thirties. I enrolled as the oldest living graduate student at forty-something.

My so-called career as a writer has followed that arc. Because I started out writing poetry, I had no delusions about making a living as a writer. I was deliberate about the fact that I wasn’t going to be the 1970s equivalent of a starving artist in a garret in Paris, so I knew I would have to find work. And publication, so random-seeming in the poetry world—didn’t concern me that much.

Same story, really, when I skipped over to writing prose—short stories at the start. The short fiction markets were well past the point of supporting a writer. One of my well-published mentors at UNH was fond of pointing out that in 1950, a short story in Esquire paid the writer $1000. That number hadn’t changed by 1990 (and probably still hasn’t) but in 1950, a writer could live on three or four thousand dollars a year. Try that now.

By the time I was serious about book length fiction, I was lucky that I didn’t need it to support me financially, which was both an engine and an anchor. It meant I didn’t have to write anything I didn’t want to, in whatever form or language I wanted to use. The anchor, of course, was that because I wasn’t pushing to publish, I didn’t develop a readership. With my non-writing work, I had time to write or market. I chose to write.

Which explains why my first book was published in 2016, the January after I reached the federal statutory retirement age. Making me a late bloomer indeed.

Paradoxically, my crime writer models were people like Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald, who published scores of books each in long careers, a book or two a year. Being a late bloomer makes that less likely. What I’ve gained, I think, through waiting this long to publish, is the sense that my work is as much my own as it can be. This is freedom, yes, and maybe an anchor, but it’s where I’ve come to.

Why belabor you with the story of my late bloomer life? Only because when I teach, and when I talk to writers starting out, I’m often struck by their impatience, the feeling that if they don’t succeed right away, right now, they are failures for life. Those of us who’ve been doing this for a while understand that writing is a long game, as is publication. (And they are two separate things.) Some of us may take longer to bloom than others, but it’s the work that matters, not how long it takes.