JP Fosterson is the fiction-writing persona of a fifty-ish machine learning engineer and computer scientist. In recent past lives I've been a software engineer, computational neuroscience researcher, rock guitarist and songwriter.

If it seems strange that someone with that background would start writing fiction in middle age, imagine instead a kid with two musicians and music teachers as parents. The house was always full of music; at Christmas they hosted a holiday party full of their musician and music school friends. The kid was good at his music classes at school, and he loved music, but especially in the teenage years, he saw nothing particularly romantic about being a musician. After all, it was just his parents' job, and not an especially lucrative one.

Computers, on the other hand, were new and cool. The kid was good at math and programming computers was something that he understood and his parents didn't. After college he was surprised that people would pay well for him to do something that was just fun, and he made it his career.

Then, in his late forties, with a house and a family and a stable career, he starts to hear themes in his head: musical ideas that come to him, over and over, when he showers, walks the dog, drives to work. At some point he thinks, maybe I should start writing these down. So he gets some books on composition, to fill in the gaps in what he learned from his parents growing up, and starts composing, with no expectations for fame and fortune, but just because it needs to be done.

Replace music in that story with writing and literature, and that kid is me.