The Late Bloomer Author

Dr. Brandon Croud spent over 20 years leading corporate underwriting teams. He thought he was doing what he was supposed to do. Then the mortgage market collapsed, his team shrank, and he was laid off. What happened next was not what anyone would have predicted. A catering company. A food truck. A son born at 39 who cracked him open, helping him remember childhood experiences and energies he had s...

Rob McPhun spent 34 years in the UK police force. Every single day, difficult conversations. The kind most of us spend our whole lives trying to avoid. In a wonderful full circle moment, Rob was also Wendy’s coach during her property investing days.  Now here they both are,  authors, helping other people find their voice. Rob left the police and became a property investor, then a coach, then an au...

Noel Guilford has been a chartered accountant for over 50 years. He started his career as a partner at Deloitte's. He knows exactly what a conventional, successful practice looks like.  And then, in his sixties, he made a decision most people in his position never make.  He sacked some clients. He gave others away. He rebuilt around the work that actually helped people, the ones who were awake at...

My very first guest on The Late Bloomer Author podcast, and what a way to start. Fiona Leitch grew up in working class South London. Not the kind of place, she'll tell you herself, where people become novelists. Her parents weren't discouraging, creativity just wasn't really a consideration. You went to school, you got a job, you got married, you had kids. That was the path. And for a long time Fi...

Ten episodes. Ten Sundays. And you're still here, thank you. I genuinely wasn't sure I could do this when I recorded Episode 1. I sat at my microphone talking to nobody, hoping someone would listen. And here we are. Episode ten. So before we look forward, I want to look back, because a lot has happened across these nine episodes and I don't want to rush past it. I reflect on the journey so far: th...

Chris is back. And this week we're doing something a little different. The last three episodes have been all about using AI to write your book. Today we're stepping back and asking a different question entirely: why would you write a book in the first place? Because the answer might surprise you, and it might be very different from what you think. I share the story of how my Ultimate Retirement Gu...

Welcome back to part three of the AI mini series. If you've been following along you'll already know that AI is not cheating, and you'll have a title, a book description and a full chapter outline ready to go. This week we fill in the chapters. Because this is where most people get stuck. The blueprint is done. The outline is ready. And then you sit down to actually write, and the blank page wins...

Last week Chris and I talked about AI, what it is, what it isn’t, and why using it is absolutely not cheating. This week I want to show you what it actually looks like in practice. We’re using ChatGPT,  which is free, and we’re using my Ultimate Retirement Guidebook as the live example. Real prompts. Real responses. Exactly the kind of thing I used when I was building the book myself. By the end o...

This week I’ve got Chris back on the podcast, and we’re talking about the topic that’s dividing everyone right now. AI. A friend of mine told me this week she doesn’t want to use it. She thinks it’s cheating. It scares her. She just doesn’t feel comfortable with it. And I told her straight,  she has to. Because her competitors are. And every day she doesn’t, that gap gets wider. AI is here. Love i...

I'm dedicating this episode to Sue. She wasn't a close friend, but she was one of those people you knew well enough to know how special she was. She lit up every room she walked into. She was glamorous, funny, full of energy. Her brain never stopped and neither did she. I always thought of her as a butterfly, always beautiful, always moving. Her funeral was this week. She was four years older than...

I was halfway through my next book, part of the Communications De-coded series, when something stopped me in my tracks. Not writer’s block. Not life getting in the way. A realisation. A book gives you information. But it doesn’t give you accountability. And I think accountability is everything. So I stopped writing. And I built something better. In this episode I’m sharing exactly what the Late Bl...

What Will You Leave Behind? The Question That Changed Everything When you pictured retirement, what did you see? A rest? A reward? An ending? In this episode I want to flip that. Because retirement isn't an ending, it's a chapter. And the question I keep coming back to is this: what are you going to leave behind? I'm drawing on Chapter Eight of my Ultimate Retirement Guidebook, the legacy chapter,...

What happens when two competitive people sit side by side on the sofa with laptops, a seven-day deadline, and a shared love of cruising? Apparently, they both write a book. And then spend months arguing about who's selling more on Amazon. In this episode I'm joined by my husband Chris, software architect, tech geek, and now the author of more books than I can keep track of. We go right back to the...

Have you always wanted to write a book but talked yourself out of it before you even started? Maybe you've told yourself you're too old, too late, or that nobody would want to read what you have to say. I've said every single one of those things to myself, and then I wrote four books. In this very first episode of The Late Bloomer Author podcast, I'm sharing my story from the beginning. How a rand...