What does it take to reinvent your life in your 40s, face down hundreds of rejections, and still come out on top?
Dr. Christina LePort's story is one of radical reinvention. Born in Bologna, Italy, she once dreaded writing assignments in school. Today, she's a published medical thriller author whose books blend authentic medical expertise with heart-pounding suspense.
LePort spent 20 years practicing internal medicine before deciding she needed something more. While waiting to begin cardiology training in her mid-40s, she discovered a small booklet called The Art of Fiction. That discovery changed everything.
"I realized that if you're an author, you create the world, you invent the characters you want to meet," she explains. "You can make anything you want happen."
The revelation was transformative for someone who had always struggled with writing. The medical world, she discovered, provides the perfect backdrop for thrillers, life-or-death stakes, pressure of time, and the constant need to read people, whether for diagnosis or character development.
The Dark Ethics of Heart Transplantation
LePort's latest novel, Change of Heart, explores one of cardiology's most troubling ethical dilemmas: the inherent conflict of interest in heart transplantation. As she puts it, "You have to hope for somebody to die for you to live."
The book follows detective Jack Mulville and FBI cyber expert Charlotte Bloom as they investigate a mystery in New York City. The number of heart transplants is rising, which should be good news, except the increase is driven by a spike in suicides. These aren't ordinary suicides, either. The victims are dying with surgical precision, shooting themselves in the head while avoiding the brain regions that control the heart, and they're dying right in front of hospitals where their hearts can be immediately harvested.
The plot unfolds to reveal something far more sinister than coincidence.
Writing in a Second Language
Like many immigrant authors, LePort faced the challenge of writing in English rather than her native Italian. Surprisingly, she says the language barrier wasn't her biggest obstacle.
"I had other problems. I didn't know the art of writing, how to do tags, how to do dialogue, first person, third person, all the rules," she reflects. Her husband serves as her alpha reader, catching the subtle "italicisms" that give away English as her second language.
Interestingly, after decades in America, LePort says she would have more difficulty writing a book in Italian than in English now.
The Brutal Reality of Publishing
LePort's path to publication was anything but smooth. After working with a writing coach to learn the craft, she faced what she calls "the most difficult thing I've done in my life", finding an agent and publisher.
The numbers tell the story: hundreds of rejections over years of trying. Even after hiring an editor who had worked with Stephen King and John Grisham, the rejections kept coming. It took three years just to find a publisher after securing an agent.
Her advice for dealing with rejection is both simple and profound: "The therapy for rejection is writing more. That's the only thing that helped me feel better."
The Business of Being an Author
LePort is candid about the business side of writing. Marketing a book, she discovered, is a full-time job in itself. The most successful strategy for her has been BookBub, which helped her first novel Dissection reach number one in political thrillers on Amazon.
Her key recommendations for aspiring authors:
Get a professional editor: "It can't be your friend. It has to be someone who will tear it apart. Friends tend to be sympathetic. You need somebody who's ruthless."
Be prepared to invest: Publishing requires financial investment in editing, marketing, and publicity.
Build a platform: Even established authors need to be active on social media and maintain mailing lists.
Focus on word of mouth: "The best way to spread your book is word of mouth. Readers are going to make it or break it."
The Immigrant Resilience Factor
When asked about her remarkable persistence, LePort reflects on a lifetime of not giving up. She earned a black belt in martial arts in her 30s, completed cardiology training in her 40s while sleeping in hospital beds during calls, and moved from Italy to America when international communication was expensive and difficult.
"Everything I have, I had to fight for it," she says. "I always wanted to do the most I could with what I had."
What's Next
LePort has fully retired from medicine to focus on writing full-time. Her next book, Defrosted, coming in October, explores cryogenics through the story of a doctor who gets defrosted in the future to solve a problem only he can solve. She's also working on a prequel to her current series, explaining the backstory of her recurring character, a private investigator with mysterious medical knowledge.
The Author's Advice
For writers facing their own mountain of rejections, LePort's message is clear: "Don't give up. If that's your passion, focus on the good thing, focus on what you feel when you're writing. If writing gives you that satisfaction, that feeling that you are in your own world and you can make everything you want happen, and you really like that, then don't give up."
She adds: "Maybe the book you're writing now is the one that's going to make it."
Success doesn't come easily or quickly, but for those willing to persist through the rejections and invest in their craft, will reap the rewards (yes, as cliche as this imight sound!).
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