Wordsmiths' Weekly Writing Prompts

Nine Lives

Susan Brearley started writing thrillers at 67, bringing Buddhist wisdom, grandmother insights, and enough life experience to make Stephen King nervous

Susan Brearley started writing thrillers at 67, which gives her a slight advantage over Stephen King, who only had youth, hunger, and cocaine. She has arthritis, meditation practice, and enough life experience to make her fiction feel like documentation. A practicing Buddhist and grandmother living in Poughkeepsie, New York, Susan spent 27 years at IBM before founding the Garden of Neuro Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to developing voice, agency, and leadership skills. She's Editor-in-Chief for eleven publications on Medium.com, where her 5,024 followers come for writing advice delivered with the kind of dark humor that only comes from having lived through enough material to fill several novels. Susan reads nearly 200 books a year, which explains why she knows exactly how betrayal tastes at 3 AM and why her serial killers feel more authentic than those crafted from podcasts. A graduate of Scott Dikkers' Comedy Business School, she specializes in using humor as a tension-release device—a skill essential for any writer brave enough to balance Buddhist wisdom with bodies dropping in Jersey shore towns. Her debut mystery, Bellweather, book 1 in the Boardwalk Detective series, features crimes that only someone with pattern recognition honed by decades of corporate life and meditation practice could solve. Like Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, these are mysteries about community, family, and finding grace in broken places—with significantly more profanity and a protagonist who solves murders while navigating his own neurodiversity. Susan believes the best thriller writers are those who've made enough mistakes to become their own material. At 67, she doesn't write about fear—she transcribes it. Her stories emerge from the particular silence at breakfast when you both know the marriage is over, the specific weight of a twenty-year grudge, and the sound betrayal makes when it finally lands. When not plotting fictional murders during guided meditation, Susan coaches writers who want to move beyond "good enough" toward the kind of commercial and critical success that gets Netflix interested. She's seeking representation for The Boardwalk Detective series and proving that wisdom writes better than youth. Contact: Susan.Brearley@gardenofneuro.org