GARDNER — MJ Fleming had always wanted to be an author, but life was always in the way. Now, the Gardner native has put her mind and pen onto paper and will be releasing her first novel soon, independently published and on her own terms.

At one point you probably had a dream project, whether it was building a car of your own, learning to paint or learning how to play guitar and becoming a musician. Regardless of what it was, life may have moved on, and the next thing you know you have an unrelated career that helped pay the bills but you never had the time or took the effort to make that project happen. That was the story for Fleming up until two years ago, when she left her career in event planning and set down to write her first book.

“I went to college to get my bachelor’s in English, but I didn’t have an interest in much else and didn’t know what to do,” Fleming said. “Like a lot of people do, you get a degree, you get out, you start working and the job isn’t what you thought you would be doing but it’s a job and you have bills to pay.”

Fleming, who is from Gardner and currently lives in Grafton, always loved writing, but with a family and children and her career the time never came, until she left her career after having her third child with her husband. The couple thought that with three kids, event planning was too much. Still, the opportunity presented itself and Fleming became open with some spare time at home to write.

“I loved writing, I wrote in college at the newspaper there, but making a living at it, it’s hard,” Fleming said. “When I left my job, I said, ‘If you are ever going to write the book you always wanted to write, it is now, you have to do it now, otherwise you get into the humdrum of your new life and you won’t do it.’”

After some hard work, Fleming finished her new fiction novel “My Only Sunshine,” a culmination of two years of hard work and a lifelong desire to be a novelist.

The novel is a story of trauma and healing, following the tale of a senior in high school who is forced to come to terms with her abduction and sexual assault as a child after her captor is suspected of kidnapping another young girl. Through her healing and work with therapists, the main character hopes that she can help law enforcement close in on the captor with her newly recovered memories and save the missing young girl. While all of this is going on, the senior in high school is also trying to balance her life and have a fulfilling childhood not barred by past trauma.

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