The Year Sue Grafton Accidentally Became My Writing Mentor (By Mail. In Slow Motion.)

I’ve had a lot of improbable moments in my creative life — photographing a football team without knowing any football, creating a book because my best friend and a community theater play conspired to hit me with inspiration at the exact right moment, discovering I’m autistic at 50-something and finally understanding why my brain feels like a kaleidoscope with a caffeine habit — but nothing tops the year I accidentally had Sue Grafton as a pen-pal writing mentor.

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.