I became a novelist at age fifty-eight.

That’s as crazy as it sounds. What’s the normal career path for a novelist, if such a thing even exists anymore? Start young, earn a creative writing degree, find a job, write day-and-night, take a second job, keep writing, hook an agent, get published, garner praise, write the next novel, win awards, become a social media star, write another book, pray again, grow your career, build your platform, earn a living if you’re lucky, sell the TV rights if you’re luckier.

The wrong career path, I suspect, is to publish your first novel at fifty-eight. No writing degree, no agent, no platform, no awards. For nearly twenty years, I ran a nonprofit conservation organization called The Quivira Coalition that I cofounded with a rancher. I did a ton of writing as part of my duties, but all of it was heavy nonfiction stuff. I hadn’t planned to pen a novel – until I decided to give it a go. It didn’t feel crazy because that’s what writers do. We write. I didn’t want to write just one novel, however, I wanted to write a bunch of them. A series, possibly. I knew my timing was terrible and the path forward ridiculously difficult, but I’m the sort of person who doesn’t follow paths very well anyway. I like to find my own way. That makes life harder, but more interesting. Stick close to the edge, the views are better!

The decision to become a novelist didn’t arrive out-of-the-blue. I dabbled in creative writing over the years, including two screenplays that I wrote during my film school days at UCLA. In the mid-1990s, I worked out the plot for a murder mystery set in Old West. I also wrote a two-act play titled Canyonlands, which is set in a bicycle shop in southern Utah during the glory years of the so-called New West. However, my work at the Quivira Coalition precluded any major literary endeavors, though I put a great of energy into essay writing.

All that changed in 2010 when I stood on the Rialto Bridge in Venice on my 50^th birthday and decided to start writing books. A sequence of nonfiction publications followed each focused on the hopefulness of regenerative agriculture and other save-the-world schemes. I intended to keep going, but I had begun to suffer from a serious case of futuritis which necessitated a change of gears professionally. Besides, stories were drifting into my head – fiction stories – occupying larger and larger amounts of my addled brain, sort of like hearing voices.

They were voices I decided to heed.