​In a letter to his brother, Theo, Vincent Van Gogh described the challenge of the blank canvas staring back at the artist and making them feel inadequate.
I believe his words were much more colorful!
His solution? Just ‘slap something on it’ and break the spell of perfectionism.
After the novel is finished, and the editing and proofreading have been put to bed, and the book has been sent out into the world, the daunting prospect of marketing stares back at the author.
Imposter Syndrome.
Is my book as good as I think it is? Will anyone ever want to read it? What if no one likes it?
The most debilitating effect of these rambling thoughts is they can stand in the way of the next important step in the author’s journey.
The next book.
In a perfect world, the writer would sit back, watch for his first book to succeed (or fail as his imposter syndrome warns), then begin work on the next book.
But writers don’t live in perfect worlds.
So, here’s that first brushstroke on the blank canvas.
YOU LED ME HOME is in the works, with hundreds of pages of notes being translated into a manuscript.
And for this writer’s inspiration, the cover hangs on the board over his desk.
Grace’s story may not be finished after all!
Stay tuned!

In YOU FOUND ME, One of the characters says “Tu m’as trouvé,” which means “You found me” in French.
n the story, these three simple words carry different meanings for each character.

It seems that everyone is always searching for something: love, peace, companionship, answers. Sometimes the search is a major part of a person’s life.

Other times, it’s just something missing in our life that lives at the edge of our awareness, rising up at an inconvenient moment asking to be addressed.

As authors, I think the thing we are most often searching for is answers.

Why do people make the choice they do? Why do they act the way they do? Hurt each other, and love each other?

As authors, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we are in control of our characters and the things they do. Trouble is, if our characters are well-crafted, they’ll take on a life of their own, make their own choices and their own mistakes.

And you’ll find more questions than answers.

What are you searching for?

​YOU FOUND ME
September 22, 2026And
Some memories never fade. Some lead you home.

Writing your debut novel is the hardest part of the process.

So I thought.

Turns out writing a terrific book and building a great audience are two completely different things!

Does being a writer also require you to become an influencer? Do I have the skills to create a marketable brand?

Yikes!

The next three weeks promise to be an exciting time for my debut novel, YOU FOUND ME.

I’ve learned how to navigate Instagram posts and reels, created a landing page on my personal website, updated Facebook, and shared blog entries (now called journal entries apparently)! I’ve worked with a graphic designer for my cover design and interior layout, and learned how to design a custom bookmark.

Now I’m being told I should post daily TikTok videos.

Yikes!

For the past few months, I’ve been closely following two women I know who are marketing their own debut novels; one with a traditional publisher, and one self-publishing. Both are inspirations with their tireless promoting. Somehow they manage to make it look tireless without making it feel tiresome.

One lesson I’ve learned is that it marketing seems to require just as much effort from the traditionally published author as it does from the self-published author.

So, look for TikTok videos from me very soon.

Unless the option to have a wisdom tooth pulled comes along first!

In the meantime, check out my debut novel at www.kennethlemm.com.

YOU FOUND ME
09.22.2026

In the blockbuster film TITANIC, Jack tells Rose, “Promise me you’ll survive. That you won’t give up, no matter what happens.”

We all know what happened when the “unsinkable” ship collided with the iceberg on that calm, moonless night.

But what happens when your dreams collide with family expectations?

In YOU FOUND ME, several of the characters face dealing with family expectations that stand in the way of their dreams. Both Scooter and Marina were expected to surrender their dreams for their parents’ plans for their futures. Pursing their own paths came at great cost to each of them.

For Grace and Jimmy, the absence of family expectations for their futures had a quite different effect.

Have the expectations of family or friends ever gotten in the way of your dreams, or led you to make decisions you otherwise might never had made?

After college, the dreams I had for my future were counter to my parents’ carefully-tuned plans for the path my life should take. At the time, the conflict was overwhelming, and the decision of which path to take threatened to crush my spirit.
Because of this experience, the conflict between expectations and dreams became a major theme weaving through YOU FOUND ME and the decisions each character makes.

YOU FOUND ME explores memory, first love, family expectations, and the choices that shape our lives.

It will be released September 22, 2026.
​

The best stories don't always give every reader the same answer. Sometimes they give us better questions.

We want to know if another reader understood a character’s decisions differently that we did, if they saw the story ending differently, or if their personal experiences caused them to see the themes of the story in a different light.

Emotional complexity and identifiable (or not) human choices sometimes leads to different conclusions.

Finishing a good novel is often just the beginning. If themes have been subtly explored and breadcrumbs gently planted, book club questions will invite different interpretations.

The best discussion questions don’t have simple answers.

In the case of YOU FOUND ME, themes of love, memory, family expectations, secrets and belonging naturally create conversations after the novel is read. I wrote this story with those conversations in mind.

Here are two of the questions included at the end of YOU FOUND ME:

1. One recurring theme in YOU FOUND ME is how the secrets we keep affect our lives. Iris, Albert, Jimmy, and Scooter all keep secrets they end up sharing when they feel safe. Have you ever found that keeping a secret protected someone or hurt them?
2. Several of the characters in YOU FOUND ME believe that keeping painful truths from the people they love is a way of protecting them. Do you think love is better expressed through honesty or protection? Which character changed the way you think about love?

YOU FOUND ME will be released on 09.22.26 and will include a complete set of discussion questions for book clubs and individual readers to consider.

​If your book club is interested in reading YOU FOUND ME, I'd love to hear from you!
 

As I was telling the story of Grace Cochran in YOU FOUND ME, I kept coming back to the idea of being an outsider, about what it meant to not fit in.

It occurred to me that writers are prone to watching the world as an outsider: catching bits of conversation in a crowded airport, imaging the story between a couple at the next table at a restaurant, or wondering why a young girls sat alone in the crowded cafeteria.

As Scooter escorted her to his car, Grace realized she’d spent her whole life learning how to belong. Tonight, she would discover what it meant to choose herself instead.

By the time I started sixth grade, I’d already lived in five states and two foreign countries. During fifth grade alone, I attended five different schools.

My father was a pilot in the US Air Force, and being transferred from place to place came with the territory. Being the new kid in school, it seemed to me there were two ways to adapt; take on the role of class clown, or disappear into books and schoolwork.

I usually chose the latter.

Books became my steadfast friends.

Things settled down for a bit, and I stayed in the same school from sixth through tenth grade. Then, in my Junior year in high school, my parents enrolled me in an Episcopal prep school. Once again, you guessed it, I was the new kid in a world where the majority of my classmates were boarders and I was an outsider.

A day student, just like Teddy DeMarco in YOU FOUND ME.

Teddy exhaled. “Is it weird that I’m kinda glad that you don’t get it?” He stared down at his hands. “I’m a day student on scholarship. My mom’s a housekeeper, and my dad’s a custodian. They scrimp and save to pay for the things the scholarship doesn’t cover.” His voice softened. “They just wouldn’t fit in.”

That school became the model for the Anderson Academy in my debut novel, YOU FOUND ME, and offered me a world of swim team, art history lectures, and philosophy and religion classes.

And several ways to fit in.

Being able to sit back and quietly observe the world around you is a valuable skill for a writer: listening to natural speech patterns, watching people’s gestures and movements when they think no one is watching, and noting how friends greet each other on the sidewalk. All around you are the dimensions of the human experience which can be molded into your characters to make them real. To make them understandable.  

Of the many themes that found their way onto the pages of YOU FOUND ME, one theme kept repeating in the lives of the characters; the idea of finding your place in a world that doesn’t always find space for you.

Grace, Jimmy, Davis, Marina, Teddy, and even Scooter and Iris, navigate worlds that don’t always know which shelf they belong on.

Some say it was Jorge Luis Borges who said, “All writing is, finally autobiographical.”

Reading back over YOU FOUND ME as I ready it for release, I admit that I see parts of me in each of my characters.

I hope readers will recognize parts of themselves in Grace, Scooter, and each of the other characters, and perhaps finish the novel understanding themselves a bit better.

This is, after all, one of the reasons we tell stories?

To understand why we do the things we do.  

Recently, art has played an important role in several popular novels. In some cases, the pieces of art are real; in others, products of the author’s imagination.

In Jojo Moyes’s The Girl You Left Behind, a dual timeline historical fiction novel, a woman’s portrait becomes an object of desire for a World War I German soldier and later the centerpiece of a modern-day battle over its rightful ownership.

In Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi, a stranger purchases portraits in a small-town coffee shop, returning them to their subjects. In the process, the man becomes a part of the fabric of the small town and changes lives.

Mona’s Eyes, by Thomas Schlesser and Hildegarde Serle, an elderly man introduces his ill granddaughter to fifty-two of the world’s greatest masterpieces before she loses her sight forever.

You Found Me uses art in ways completely different from each of these other stories.
In my soon-to-be-released novel, art is the love language that first draws Scooter and Grace together. On their first date, Scooter gives Grace a portrait he’s painted of her and shares his dreams of a life of painting.

A dream that will both bind them together and break them apart.

In Iris’s room in a Greenwich assisted living facility, a reproduction of Camille Pisarro’s The Marketplace, Gisors hangs over the settee.

The painting serves many purposes.

It reminds Grace of a morning she spent in a market in St. Rémy de Provence, a morning when she discovered a painting that would change her life forever. It illustrates Iris’s attachment to valuable things, a need that will affect her relationship with her son. Lastly, it quietly reveals that Scooter has lived a life surrounded by art, something that shapes his future and the decisions he makes.

I remember reading James Michner’s Kent State: What Happened and Why as a teenager. In the book, Michner recounts the story of a behind student photographer, John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a young woman described as “the girl with the Delacroix face.”

​That phrase not only inspired me to learn more about Eugène Delacroix, but also fascinated me with the idea that the style a classical artist could so perfectly describe a contemporary emotion.

Perhaps that’s what art does best. A painting can preserve a memory, expose a truth, or express an emotion there seems to be no words for.

In You Found Me, Professor Whitman tells Grace, “Art often does that. It remembers for us.”

You Found Me  is an upmarket book-club novel about memory, loss, second chances, and the way art can shape our lives.​

​We’ve all heard the expression “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
 
When it came time to choose a cover for my debut book club fiction novel YOU FOUND ME, that phrase kept echoing in my mind. I researched the balance between visual appeal, thematic depth, engagement, and invitation to discussion. I read about the importance of thumbnails on Amazon listings.
 
I wandered bookshops like Books on Third in Naples, Florida and Hills & Hamlets in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. I checked out the display tables in my local Barnes & Noble. I wanted to understand that certain something that makes someone want to pick up a book and turn it over to read the blurb on the back cover.
 
Readers, I’ve learned, judge books by their covers all the time.
 
I first thought about images directly reminiscent of the events in the novel: a woman floating peacefully in water, a field of lavender in Provence, a high school swimmer on the starting blocks, or even a crumpled towel on the edge of a pool. Any of these images might have been good choices for their connections to the story.
 
Then I studied the covers of some of my favorite recent novels, the books I imagined YOU FOUND ME might one day sit alongside on bookstore shelves. Books like Broken Country, The Paper Palace, Tom Lake, and The Last Letter from Your Lover. These covers don’t illustrate the story as much as they create curiosity.
 
This is what I wanted for YOU FOUND ME.
 
Because painting is such an important part of the story, I started looking for a piece of art that might fit all criteria.

That’s when I found HELD LIGHT.
 
Held Light, an original painting by Georgia artist Gwen Sears Bullock, immediately reminded me of the kind of painting Grace Cochran would have chosen for the walls of her Manhattan gallery, The Cochran Gallery.
 
Grace believed the best paintings didn’t answer questions, they invited the viewer to linger, remember, and discover something every time they saw the painting. As a gallery owner, she sought mystery, beauty, and vulnerability.
 
Most of all, Grace believed every viewer brought their own story to the painting.
 
In the painting, the woman appears caught in a private moment, suspended somewhere between waiting, dreaming, and grieving. There’s something both vulnerable and self-contained about the woman, and because she isn’t looking directly at us, she seems caught up in a contemplative pose, a personal memory.
 
Is she remembering someone? Waiting for someone? Or is she merely allowing herself to disappear inside a memory she’s tried to outrun for so long?
 
Like Grace’s story in YOU FOUND ME, Bullock’s piece Held Light seems to ask us to think about how memory, longing, and hope shapes our lives.
 
Isn’t that what the right book cover should do?
 
Not tell us what’s inside, but make us want to find out.
 
My deepest thanks to Gwen Sears Bullock for graciously allowing me to share her beautiful work on the cover of YOU FOUND ME.
 
I shared the painting with Danna Mathias Steele, the graphic artist designing both the cover and interior layout for my debut novel. The cover she created from Bullock’s painting feels exactly right for Grace’s story.
 
I hope one day soon, you will be perusing the shelves of your favorite bookshop and come across YOU FOUND ME and feel the urge to turn it over and read the back cover!
 
And yes, I hope you’ll judge the book by its cover!

​Some memories never fade. Some lead you home.
Kenneth Lemm
Author - Screenwriter
​

My life as an author took a rather circuitous route. One that began as an avid reader, alone in my room, on the steps of the Bookmobile, or on the bench before swim team practice.
In sixth grade, our English Arts teacher assigned us with the task of writing a novella. At the time, the class had been reading A SEPARATE PEACE, KON TIKI, and NATIVE SON. I was in heaven.
As far as I know, no copy of my novella survives, but I remember being profoundly proud of my story. DEAR and THE  was a story about a prisoner of war in Vietnam and the increasingly heavily redacted letters of home that kept his spirits alive until he was freed.
Heavy stuff for an eleven-year-old, right?
Without any role models, I had no idea what a life as an author might look like. So when I went to college, I turned to my second love, architecture. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in Landscape Architecture, and, in a tough job market, landed in Atlanta where I later cofounded Land Plus Associates, a nationally-recognized design firm specializing in high-end residential design.
The idea of telling stories nagged at me, though, demanding attention.
One year, my mother gave me a creative writing course at a local community arts center. There, we focused on short stories, and after having three stories published in literary magazines, I was reminded how important writing was to me.
I bought a copy of Final Draft software and taught myself the art of screenwriting.
I entered my first screenplay, DRUM, in a contest sponsored by The Writers Store and judged by Simon Kinberg (X-Men, Mr. and Mrs. Smith).
DRUM won second place!
I went on to earn over two dozen screenwriting awards, including WRITER OF THE YEAR, BEST SCREENPLAY, BEST DRAMA, and others. What followed were six produced award-winning feature films, and two more currently in pre-production.
Since buying that first copy of Final Draft, my writing focused on stories meant to be seen.
As a screenwriter, you learn to think visually, to reveal character through movement and dialogue, trusting only what an audience can see and hear, and trusting them to understand what is left unsaid.
I still love that kind of storytelling.
But I started wondering what it would be like to follow a character where a camera couldn’t go, where a microphone couldn’t record.
Inside.
There was an image I kept coming back to. A woman discovering a painting that illustrated a private moment from her own life. A moment the artist couldn’t possibly have witnessed.
Who painted it? How could it possibly exist?
And, more importantly, what if finding the answer forced her to reexamine everything she believed about her past?
These questions eventually became YOU FOUND ME.
In the novel, I met Grace Cochran, a successful Manhattan gallery owner who discovers a mysterious painting that seems to tell a story about her life and connect to the first love she believed belonged to another lifetime.
Writing the story changed the way I thought about storytelling.
As a screenwriter, I would have relied on Grace’s physical reaction to finding the painting, and trusted the director, actress, and cameraman to reveal the meaning of the discovery.
In the novel, I could be there.
I could hear her thoughts. I could remember the loss the way Grace did. I could understand why her past could unsettle the life she built for herself after the devastating loss.
I loved that connection.
On September 22, 2026, YOU FOUND ME will become my first published novel.
With this blog, I invite you to share this journey with me. Share in the experience of moving from screenwriting to fiction, the books and authors I admire, the places and relationships that inspire my stories, and news about what I’m working on next.
I hope this becomes a place to talk about the stories that stay with us long after we’ve turned the last page.
I hope YOU FOUND ME might become one of those stories for you.
Some memories never fade. Some lead you home.
Kenneth Lemm
Author - Screenwriter
​