When I turned 63, I decided it was time to start a new career. I had been a university professor for twenty-five years and had been thinking about a change for a while. The plan wasn’t to stop being a professor, at least not immediately. Instead, I committed to a timeline for ramping up to the new career as I wound down the old one. I gave myself five years, or until I turn 68, to become a middle grade fiction writer.

Detractors might pass off a five-year career transition at 63 as a phased retirement. “New career, baloney. You’re really talking retirement with a hobby.” I get it. After all, at 68 I will probably start drawing from my 401k. I’ll already be on Medicare. That smells like retirement. My goal, though, is to work like my life depends on it and keep making a living. While it might look like a retirement, I won’t be acting like it is.

 So why middle grade and young adult fiction writing and why now?

 I’ve been a teacher in some capacity for upwards of thirty-five years. I’ve run the education gamut, from substitute to part-time to full-time gigs, in elementary, middle grade, and high schools, and now universities. I love teaching literature and writing. In teaching literature, genre or age level doesn’t matter. The opportunity to immerse myself and others in the vicarious experiences of a story world has appealed to me since I took my first literature course as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s.

 Ironically, though, it has been only in the last twelve years that I’ve fallen in love with how people read and talk about literature. Before my daughter was born (I know, I’m an old dad), I loved teaching literature and helping youth connect to worlds familiar and unfamiliar. However, I had never given much thought to why I loved it beyond the conversations we had about story worlds.

 Talking with youth always left me hopeful about the future. Once they understood what was possible with reading and discussing literature, their levels of engagement, empathy, and critical thinking skyrocketed. Rest assured; the world will be a better place in the hands of youth who have rich reading lives.

 My daughter added an exclamation point to these feelings. She made how I felt more resonant. She was born when I was 52. For her first eight years, I read to her every day, often multiple time a day. Oftentimes, I read the same book over and over and for days on end. Kids find what they like, and they want only that.

 For a while, I did these repetitive reads out of love for my daughter. Bored stiff with what she wanted, I trudged on for her sake, the words locked in memory, my reading of them choreographed for maximum effect. In not engaging the words in ways we do the first or even a few subsequent times we read a story, I was free to attend to my daughter’s real-time engagement.

 For her, each reading was an act of creation. She was not recreating the story nor affirming what she already knew so much as hearing it anew. She and I may have been reading the same story again—for the hundredth time even—but because of who she was at that moment and the immediacy of young people’s lives, the narrative was a new discovery to her. She was in it as full participant and not some outside, pseudo-objective reader. Each reading offered deeper and even newer insight into the story world and the language at work in it. For me, it offered insight into her and her relationship to narrative.

 Story took on a whole new meaning as I sat alongside my daughter and read picture books, followed by chapter books, then book series, and finally middle grade novels. When it ended with her choosing to read on her own, it was more of a loss for me than her.

 Having lost that experience, I yearned for ways to continue to engage my daughter around narrative. I have always written for one reason or another, whether it was journals, poetry, short stories, essays, or what have you. But I never got enough of a foothold in a writing life to describe myself as a writer. Teaching and then the pursuit of a doctorate changed that. I became a researcher and by default an academic writer. I loved the writing part of scholarship more than the data collection. Still, I never described myself as a writer.

 When I began to write middle grade fiction a few years ago, I still didn’t see myself as a writer. I knew, though, I wanted to be one. The more I wrote the more the moniker fit. When I turned 63, I knew it was time to confess who I was or had become and where I was going.

 So, there you have it, my second career origin story. I suspect it would or could be the same for many people closing out a career. It might be only a matter of homing in on something tangential to what you already do or something for which you’ve always had a love and then pursuing it methodically and consciously with a level of intensity like what you did with a first career. Only this time around, you’ll have the experience and wisdom of that first career to guide you.

 For me, what does it mean to embark on a new career? It’s exciting. Like any career, though, I expect to earn money doing it, which means career success hinges, to some degree, on getting published. That’s why I’m giving myself until I’m 68.

 Like any career, there is and will be a learning curve, whether it comes via formal education, apprenticeship, or on-the-job training. I’ve had enough education—even taught what I’m striving to do. As a teacher, I’ve apprenticed myself into the larger world of what I want to do by getting to know my reading audience (kids!) extremely well and having had many years of reading those novels I wish to emulate or not. Now, I’m onto on-the-job training for the next few years.

 I suspect there are other, possibly many, retirees who approach retirement not with the desire to slow down but with the hope of doing something different. Aiming for a new career might be a bit extreme, but the motivation is the same. There’s more to life than what we retired from and more to do that we couldn’t do before.

 Often, though, whatever the more is is not as clearly defined as it should be. It’s cast in ad homilies about slowing down, traveling more, spending time with the grandkids, picking up or renewing a hobby, and so on. And it is always the flip side of retirement or no longer making a living.

 Maybe, though, we would be better served by thinking less about retirement and more about career transition? Ideally, and maybe for the first time, it’s a transition of our choosing, where the stakes aren’t as high, but still definitive of who we want to be.

 I have five years to hone my transition and hopefully launch myself into possibilities post-68. At the moment, this is how I see it—this is my template: I was a teacher. Now I’m going to be a middle grade fiction writer. How can having been a teacher help me become a middle grade fiction writer? As a template, we can all fill in the blanks: I was ________. Now I’m going to be ___________. How can being a ________ help me become a _________. It may or may not lead to a new career, but it should lead to something as purposeful and compelling as a career should be.