And yes, I do mean regular mail.
Envelopes. Stamps. Waiting by the mailbox like a golden retriever with anxiety.
Kids, gather ‘round: this was before email was standard, and long-distance calls were expensive. We lived like pioneers.

The “Oh, She’ll Never Respond” Letter

In 2000, I wrote a mystery novel featuring a female investigator and decided it was perfectly reasonable to mail sample pages to several authors asking for a blurb. For reasons I cannot explain but can only blame on multipassionate optimism, I included a line in my letter that said something like:

“I’m sending this to several authors, though I don’t expect to hear from Sue Grafton.”

Because who expects to hear from Sue Grafton?

Well.

Sue Grafton did not play.

She wrote back.

And because the universe enjoys comedic timing, her letter began with something a little like:

“Never assume I won’t respond.”

Touché, Sue. Touché.

From Three Pages to Fifty to… the Whole Book

Not only did she respond, she asked for more pages. Then more. Then the entire manuscript.

This is the point in a writer’s life where your soul leaves your body, floats up to the ceiling, and hovers there blinking like a startled owl.

Over the next year, we mailed pages back and forth.

She gave me actual, real-deal editorial feedback.

Through envelopes.

And stamps.

And postal delivery times longer than gestation periods in the animal kingdom.

My novel did not end up publishable — it was a classic early-writer situation where the voice was there but the structure was… let’s say artistically abstract — but I learned more in that year than in the decade before it.

Sue Grafton taught me how to tighten narrative.

How to track plot threads without strangling them.

And most importantly, how to take myself seriously as a writer.

Why This Story Belongs in The Leonardo Trait Universe

Every time I revisit this memory, I think:

Only a Leonardo would ever do this.

Only someone with multipassionate boldness mixed with a dash of chaos energy would:

• Send pages to big-name authors with hopeful audacity
• Assume none of them will write back, yet simultaneously dream they might
• Jump into correspondence with a major author by mail (??)
• Learn at hyperspeed
• And then pivot — gracefully or gracelessly — into the next creative adventure

Leonardos live in that liminal space between “this is absolutely unhinged” and “oh wait, it worked.”

We’re reckless in the best possible way.

We follow instincts that feel ridiculous until they turn out to be exactly right.

And we learn from the failures just as much as the triumphs.

Sue Grafton didn’t just help me as a writer — she midwifed a truth I would not fully articulate until 2006 when I coined the term “The Leonardo Trait” with Judy in her living room:

Creative lives don’t follow straight lines. They zig, they crash, they resurrect themselves, and occasionally they involve handwritten notes from bestselling mystery authors.

What I Keep From That Year

The novel is tucked away somewhere, fossilized in a storage box like a creative relic.

But the lessons stayed.

And now, as I’m revising The Leonardo Trait for its 4th edition — almost twenty years later — I can see exactly how that experience shaped me:

It taught me that audacity is a creative tool.

It confirmed that mentorship can appear from unlikely places.

It proved that imperfect work is still worthy of attention.

And it reminded me that slow processes (like postal mail, like personal discovery, like rewriting a book decades later) can change everything.

Plus, if you’ve ever doubted your creative instincts, just remember:

Once upon a time, I assumed Sue Grafton wouldn’t respond…

And she proved me profoundly, hilariously wrong.

I spent a generous portion of my life believing something was fundamentally off about me—not dramatically wrong, just… excessive. Too curious. Too scattershot. Too excited about something brand-new at precisely the moment everyone else thought I should double down on whatever I’d just started.

I assumed this was a personal defect, possibly inherited, possibly karmic. You know how some people are born with dimples or a charming sense of direction? I seemed to have been blessed with a brain that collected interests the way some people collect stray cats: impulsively, enthusiastically, and with absolutely no foresight about where they’d all sleep.

If you’ve lived this life, you know the drill. You fall in love—hard—with photography. You build a tiny shrine to your new camera lens. You watch documentaries about Henri Cartier-Bresson and start wondering if maybe you could become the Forrest Gump of artistic careers. Then—hello, hello—painting strolls in, batting its eyelashes like it owns the place. Meanwhile, writing is in the corner clearing its throat because you swore 2023 was its “comeback tour.”

And you? You’re standing in the middle of the circus, apologizing for the elephants you didn’t invite but desperately want to keep.

For decades, I tried to tame this. I labeled it. I therapized it. I bought planners—plural. I even read books that insisted I needed a color-coded filing cabinet for all my disparate “selves.” (If you felt a sudden breeze, that was the collective sigh of my entire soul exiting my body.) Another book advised me to create a Master Plan, because apparently I was going to “focus.” The implication was always the same:

If you don’t pick one thing, you’ll never be taken seriously.

Which, translated into human, meant:

You, Angie, are doing your life wrong.

And for the longest time, I believed it.

Then came the moment—the big, transformative, cosmic-bonk-on-the-head moment—when I realized the joke was not on me, it was on the expectations I’d been trying to contort myself into.

It wasn’t a thunderclap. There were no angelic choirs, no glowing neon sign that said “Congratulations, You’re Free Now.” It came slowly, like a sunrise you don’t register until your whole kitchen is full of golden light.

It started the day I noticed that the things I loved—writing, art, photography, creativity, psychology, teaching, storytelling, painting, building weird online projects at 2 a.m.—weren’t random. They were constellations. They were puzzle pieces that made no sense in isolation but snapped together with that satisfying click when I finally stopped treating them like misbehaving children and started treating them like… me.

The multipassionate brain wasn’t a problem. It was a design feature.

And here’s the real kicker: the moment I stopped assuming I had to choose, I started creating things I never could have forced myself into. Books that needed both my writer brain and my photographer eye. Projects that fused art, neurodivergence, humor, and a deep devotion to the unusually wired. Businesses built on creativity and chaos and compassion. Worlds inside worlds.

The day I realized “multipassionate” wasn’t a character flaw was the same day I realized I’d been underestimating myself for decades.

I wasn’t too much.

I was too compressed.

Once I quit flattening myself into other people’s expectations, the whole weird, vibrant, joyful, unmanageable masterpiece of me snapped into place.

And maybe—if you’ve read this far—some part of you knows exactly what I mean. Maybe you’ve got the same jangly internal music, the same itch to learn twelve things before breakfast, the same tendency to start three new hobbies just because the lighting was good.

If so, here’s the truth I needed someone to tell me much earlier:

Your curiosity is not a liability. Your delight is not a distraction.
You are not scattered—you’re profoundly creative.

And honestly? The world needs more of us.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered a project I forgot I was excited about.

Back then, I thought I’d write the book, launch it, and move on with my life like a normal person. (Insert laugh track here.) Instead, it became the one project that refused to let me drift away. I’ve written other books, built businesses, painted oceans of ink, raised kids, collected cats, and hyperfocused on everything from falconry to fountain pens… but The Leonardo Trait has always been there, sitting patiently in the corner, tapping its foot in that way people do when they know you’re coming back eventually.

And here’s the strange part:

I can finally—finally—do what I always wanted to do with it.

But the reasons why are… complicated.

Beautiful, but complicated.

I have time… because I’m disabled.

Not exactly a fairy tale origin story.

I didn’t choose this slower life.

I didn’t choose the chronic pain, the mobility changes, the days where getting out of bed is an achievement worth confetti.

But disability reshaped my world until the only things that stayed were the things that truly mattered.

And when everything else fell away, this book was still there.

In the quiet, in the pain, in the long stretches of rest, it became clear:

If I ever wanted to bring The Leonardo Trait fully into the world, this was my moment.

Not because disability is a blessing.

But because I finally have a life that lets me create without collapsing.

I have money… because I was in a wreck.

Another glamorous twist, I know.

I’d have preferred not being in a car accident, thanks.

But with the settlement comes something I’ve never had: the breathing room to invest in my own work.

Paid ads.

A proper website.

A real marketing plan.

A summit that brings neurodivergent creators together.

A podcast tour.

The tiny luxuries that turn “bootstrap and hope for the best” into “let’s do this right.”

It doesn’t erase the wreck.

But it lets me build something from the wreckage.

I have perspective… because I finally learned I’m autistic.

This one is the tectonic shift.

For decades, I thought I was just “too much.”

Too scattered.

Too curious.

Too intense.

Too sensitive.

Too many passions, not enough follow-through.

And then came the diagnosis.

And suddenly, the last fifty-something years made more sense than they ever had.

The Leonardo Trait isn’t just a quirky idea I had in 2006.

It’s a map of how my brain works—how our brains work.

It’s the book I needed long before I knew why I nereded it.

That perspective changed everything.
Including the way I show up to write it.

And I have help… a lot of it.

People I trust.

People who believe in me.

People willing to share their audiences.

People excited about the summit.

And my digital assistant, Ziggy, who keeps me organized enough to appear human and reminds me to keep going when my brain decides to open seventeen new tabs.

For the first time in nearly two decades, I don’t feel like I’m trying to drag this book uphill by myself.

Which leaves me with the most surprising truth of all:

This book—this stubborn, brilliant, infuriating, beloved book—survived everything with me.

And now I finally have the life that can hold it.

It didn’t happen the way I expected.

It didn’t come wrapped in ease or luck.

But the difficult things carved out space I never had before.

I don’t think hard things are “meant to be.”
But I do think we can grow into someone who can finally carry the dream we’ve been trying to carry for a very long time.

The Leonardo Trait has been with me for almost 20 years.

It’s time for me to bring it home.

Welcome home. You might just have The Leonardo Trait.

The Night It All Began

Back in 2006, I was sitting in my best friend Judy’s living room after watching her daughter, Carrie, perform in Our Town. (Yes, I know, I’ve been calling people “my people” since before it was cool.) We were talking about creativity, and I was grumbling — lovingly but loudly — about how the books I’d been reading on the subject didn’t get people like us.

Barbara Sher wanted me to use a file cabinet for every project. Another author suggested a spreadsheet. I was exasperated. “That’s not how my brain works,” I told Judy. “We’re not crazy — we’re just… Leonardos.”

And there it was. The name. Judy, in all her brilliant mischief, said, “You should write a book about that.” So I did.

What It Meant Then

The original Leonardo Trait was my love letter to people who couldn’t stop creating, learning, and reinventing themselves. It was a manifesto for the multi-passionate — those who felt broken because they didn’t have just one calling. It was for the artists who write code, the writers who paint, the painters who suddenly decide to learn falconry.

At the time, I thought of it as a personality type. A category. A way of saying, “You’re not flaky. You’re just wired differently.”

What It Means Now

Nineteen-ish years later, I’ve grown up a bit — and so has the idea.

Now, I see The Leonardo Trait less as a label and more as a lens.

I understand that many of us aren’t just “creative multipassionates.” We’re neurodivergent. We’re autistic or ADHD or AuDHD. We mask. We unmask. We burn bright and then need to lie down for a week. We’ve been told to “focus” or “finish something for once,” but our brains are built for constellations, not straight lines.

Disability reshaped this understanding, too. When I lost mobility and had to slow down, I thought I was losing my creativity. Turns out, it was waiting patiently for me to catch up. Creativity isn’t a race. It’s a rhythm — one that keeps playing, even when you have to hum along from bed.

What It Means Here

The Leonardo Trait is no longer just a book. It’s a space. A conversation. A permission slip.
Here at Profound Creativity, we’ll talk about what it really means to live a profoundly creative life — with humor, honesty, and the occasional caffeinated tangent.

You’ll find essays, experiments, musings, and maybe even a few unfinished projects (because let’s be real, that’s our brand).

So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re too much, too scattered, too passionate, too you — pull up a metaphorical chair. You’re not too much. You’re exactly enough.

Welcome home, Leonardo. Let’s make something extraordinary, and then maybe take a nap.