A Map for the Living

Two women. One impossible map.
A second chance at the lives they were meant to live.

Felicity has been following a mysterious, hand-drawn map for decades. When it leads her to a woman she’s never met, it sets them on a journey that changes everything.

Part adventure, part reinvention, A Map for the Living is a story about friendship, courage, and what happens when you choose curiosity over comfort.

An idea that started with an experiment, and wouldn’t let go.

Sneak Peek

For decades, Felicity has followed a map no one else can see.

It has led her across countries and continents, appearing when it has somewhere new for her to go. She stopped questioning it years ago.

Until it gives her a person.

Mari was supposed to be getting married. Instead, she’s trying to figure out what comes after the life she thought she wanted disappears overnight.

When Felicity’s map leads her to Mari, neither woman knows why. But the map is already changing, revealing new places, new possibilities, and a journey neither of them could have planned.

Together, they begin following it across the world—and toward lives neither knew they were allowed to choose.

A Map for the Living is a story of friendship, reinvention, and the strange things that can happen when the life you planned falls apart…and something impossible offers you another way forward.

The Story Behind the Story

This one started as an experiment.

I had a scene in my head.

Not a book. Not an outline. Not a cast of fully formed characters. Just a scene—and a place and a tugging in my creative center that this was something.

So I opened ChatGPT with an experiment in mind: What could this new technology do for my creative process? My prompt was simple:

Help me find a story by asking me questions.

And then we went down the rabbit hole.

One question led to another. Who is this woman? Why is she here? What does she want? What happened before this? What if the map works this way? Then what does that mean? If that’s true, what else has to be true?

I answered. ChatGPT asked another question. I changed my mind. We followed something more interesting. I rejected ideas that didn’t belong. One answer opened three more doors.

And somewhere in the middle of traveling and spending time with family in Mexico City, in less than two days, that one scene became a world.

Felicity and Mari appeared. The map developed rules and a history. Places I’d been—and places I wanted to go—found their way into the story. Characters acquired pasts, relationships, wounds, desires, and reasons for doing what they did. Themes I hadn’t consciously put there started showing themselves.

And eventually, we had the book mapped all the way down to its chapters.

What surprised me

The speed was astonishing.

But that wasn’t the most interesting part.

The interesting part was that I still had to know.

AI could throw possibilities at me all day long, but I was the one who knew when something clicked. I knew when an idea belonged to this story and when it didn’t. I knew when a character suddenly felt real. I knew when an answer was technically plausible but emotionally wrong.

The questions accelerated the process.

They didn’t replace it.

And maybe that’s why I came away from those two days less interested in the question “Can AI write a novel?” and much more interested in another one:

What happens when a writer has someone—or something—willing to keep asking, “Okay. And then what?” until she discovers the story she didn’t know she had?

For me, the answer was A Map for the Living.

One scene.

Less than two days.

And suddenly, I had a novel I couldn’t wait to write.

← Back to Books