Go read Malcolm Gladwell's article on Late Bloomers in The New Yorker. (gakked from the Philippine Genre Stories blog).

I read that and leaned over to give my husband a hug.

"What was that for?" hubby asks.

"Thanks for being my patron," I said.


This is just beautiful:

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.