Finnian Burnett

Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with Lena Gibson.

So many writers think it’s “too late” to become a published author. Can you help dispel that myth?

If you’re alive and want to write a book, it’s not too late. You might have to make changes to your life to carve out time, but if you want it, you’ll do it
I dabbled in writing for many years but didn’t take workshops or writing classes until late in 2017. That fall, I attended an author’s panel with five wonderful writers who talked about their books. Listening to them made me want to do something with my writing. Maybe even publish a book. Since then, I’ve devoted my “spare” time to writing whenever I can. I attend local workshops and always attend the Surrey International Writer’s Conference in October.
My first book was published in 2023, just before my 51st birthday. Since then, I have four more published books (including one this December) and four more in various stages of production with my publisher, Black Rose Writing.
I think being older is an advantage because I have time to write, attend workshops, and sell books that I never would have had when my children were young. Besides having more time, I have more patience and I’m less likely to let stray comments or negative feedback discourage me because I’ve lived through a lot of ups and downs. I appreciate that life experience has made me more resilient and have perseverance.

You have a new book coming out in December. Can you tell me about that book?

I’m excited and proud of the book coming out in December, so thank you for asking. It’s an apocalypse romance, stand-alone sequel to my first published book from 2023, called Aftermath: Into the Unknown. It is set three years after the asteroid impact from the first book. Though second in the series, the characters are new, so if you haven’t read the first, it won’t affect your enjoyment or understanding of the story.
Aftermath opens with twenty-year old Robin scavenging for supplies to share with her grandfather. They live in a hideaway inside an underground parking garage underneath a mall in Boise, Idaho. When a lawless gang of bikers move to town for the winter, her freedom becomes limited. Her grandfather is dying of cancer, and he encourages her to leave and find the rest of their family who headed to a bunker complex in South Dakota three years earlier. She teams up with a disillusioned biker to travel across the country.
The story is their treacherous journey. I wanted to show how similar people could be with their need of love and their will to survive, even if on the surface they seemed like opposites.

Like so many women, you were diagnosed on the spectrum late in life. How has that changed your writing life?

I didn’t find out I was on the spectrum until 2021, when I was 49 and a few months before I signed my first publishing contract. Since learning I was on the spectrum, a giant weight lifted from my shoulders, and I’ve felt less alone. I also felt like it gave me permission to write neurodivergent characters in a way that hadn’t been done much, from my lived experience. In many of my books, ASD isn’t mentioned. My characters just show some of the aspects of autism that I’ve lived with and coped with my entire life.
I didn’t change the characters from books I’d already written, it just became clear that some of their struggle to connect and find love and acceptance was because of their autism. This has always been the case for me. I hadn’t realized how much energy goes to masking and coping in everyday situations and has for my whole life. It has been a profound relief to give myself permission to just be who I am…which I hope comes across for some of my characters as well.
I’ve also discovered that autism and my special interests/hyper focus are my superpower. I am extremely focused, disciplined, and productive with my writing. Despite coming to this late and working full time as an elementary school teacher, I write a new book every 4-6 months.

What advice would you give to authors wanting to blend genres in their works?

The short answer? Do it! I’ll read your stories.
The longer version is to go about it deliberately. Many of my books (maybe all) are blended genre books because with the way my brain works, things are connected. I’ve also been an avid reader forever and like so many types of books. When I wrote The Edge of Life: Love and Survival During the Apocalypse and Aftermath: Into the Unknown, I set out to write romance/love stories in an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting. They were always mixed genre from the beginning.
I made sure the romance was about connecting, intimacy, and feelings between the characters while the setting was the post-apocalyptic world they interacted with. The purpose was to show that beauty, hope, and things worth living for exist, even when civilization and the world as we know it is crashing around us.
In another book, The Wish, I combined a time slip and other speculative elements with women’s fiction. It is a story of a woman reclaiming her voice (literally because she is selectively mute due to trauma). It is also a thriller and has aspects of psychological horror. I sat down and wrote down the important attributes or elements of these genre and braided them together.
This works for me, because I like when stories are complicated and have lots of moving parts. My advice is then to make sure you satisfactorily wrap up each genre within the story.

What are you working on now?

I am at the three-quarter mark of the draft of a new motorcycle-racing romance. It’s the second in my Love on Track series (the first will be published in August 2025 and is called Racing Towards Destiny). I am a MotoGP fanatic and have followed MotoGP since 2010. My husband and I have an online pass to the MotoGP site, and ALL of their races (all 18-20 races per year of lightweight, intermediate, and the premier class) are archived so I can watch and rewatch them whenever I want. This means I often write to the sound of motorcycles racing-sort of like hanging out in a swarm of bees.
MotoGP is considered the top league in the world with the best riders. It includes several sets of brothers. In each set, one is more successful than the other and it got me thinking… so Racing Towards Destiny was the story of the younger brother who has always lived in the shadow. It is also the story of a woman with autism who drops everything in her life to move to Europe and write. To make ends meet, she takes a job as an umbrella girl in MotoGP.
The second book revolves around the older brother, the legend.
I’m also in the planning stage of the third Love and Survival book, being published July 2026. This was the first time I have a contract for a book that is not yet written. If I have not finished Racing Hearts: All In by the new year, I will switch to the post-apocalyptic story to ensure it is ready for my due date to submit it for publication.

Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?

I’m sure I have, but when I searched for some of the cool heron pictures I’ve taken, all I could find were nine million pictures of my cat and my daughter’s cat.

Lena Gibson can be found on the web here and pre-orders for Aftermath: Into the Unknown can be ordered here.