From Boardrooms to Bookstores: The Real-World Story Behind Planted

For more than thirty years, I lived in a world of power, pressure, and billion-dollar decisions. My career in banking and technology took me deep inside the machinery of global finance — boardrooms where fortunes were made and lost, where ambition and ego collided, and where the line between right and wrong was often more suggestion than rule. It was challenging, often exhilarating — and at times deeply frustrating. But behind all the spreadsheets and strategy decks, there was always another world quietly taking shape in my mind.
Planted has lived in my head for more than fifteen years. The characters, the conflicts, the moral gray zones — they’ve all been there, whispering for attention, waiting for me to stop making excuses. I always told myself I was too busy. Or that writing a novel was something other people did. Or that no one would care what I had to say. The truth is, I just didn’t have the confidence.
Retirement changed that. Stepping away from corporate life created the space — and maybe the courage — to finally give this story the attention it deserved. And once I started, I realised something surprising: writing isn’t about being fearless. It’s about showing up every day, word by word, even when you’re convinced it’s not good enough. Somewhere along the way, the doubts grew quieter, and the story that had been sitting in my head for years began to take shape on the page.
At its heart, Planted is a corporate-finance thriller — but it’s also about people. It’s about loyalty and betrayal, ambition and fear, power and the ways it’s abused. It’s about what happens when the lines between right and wrong blur, and when doing the “right” thing might cost you everything. The story is fiction, but it was very much inspired by my decades in the financial world. Many of the situations, power struggles, and ethical dilemmas that shape the narrative are composites of experiences I’ve lived through, witnessed firsthand, or encountered along the way. It’s not a memoir — but it’s definitely grounded in reality.
This book is deeply personal to me because it represents much more than a story. It’s proof that it’s never too late to try something new — to chase the creative dreams you once dismissed as unrealistic. And it’s a reminder that the stories we carry with us, no matter how long they’ve been tucked away, deserve to be told.
So, to anyone reading this: thank you for being here. If you decide to pick up Planted, I hope it grips you from the first page. I hope it makes you think, makes you question, and maybe even makes you see the corporate world a little differently. But more than anything, I hope it reminds you that even the stories buried deepest inside us can find their way to the surface — if we’re willing to let them.