But that’s only a starting point for a writer. Finn’s journey to success has been a long ride, but worth every turn. Considering  her achievement in the modern world of literature – a first-time book comprising fictional short stories published by a major international book publisher, Simon & Schuster, without major change to the content or style – her humility is admirable.

The Port Stephens-based writer, who will launch her book, Watermark, on April 7 at the Newcastle Writers Festival in the company of esteemed Australian writer Robert Drewe, came to writing much later than planned. Perhaps, greater powers meant for it turn out that way, as the book is full of rich characters and places who have faced turmoil, immersed themselves in life, taken detours and made hard calls.

When Finn graduated from high school in the northern suburbs of Sydney, she deferred entry into Macquarie University, where she was going to study communications, for a year.

She never got there.

Instead, she travelled abroad in her gap year, then had a child and moved to Newcastle when her then-partner was transferred to the area.

“My 20s were a very transitional time, a very challenging time,” she says.

“Writing wasn’t really on the cards. Work was purely to earn an income.

“I had deferred uni at a young age. I had a young child. I came to the area in what I think were quite unique and difficult circumstances.”

Finn ended up finding work in the employment services industry, where she worked for over 15 years, and eventually entered the University of Newcastle as a mature age student.

Despite the unplanned route of her life, that small seed of an idea about writing and communications stayed alive in her mind. “I knew it was in me somewhere,” she says.

“My circumstances altered after a gap year,” she says.

“I would have enrolled at Macquarie Uni in communications, I would never had moved to Newcastle. The sliding doors moment would have never occurred. So I think I always wanted to get back to that path, so as a mature age student I enrolled in a communications degree at Newcastle University. I took creative writing as an elective because there were night classes and they fitted in with my work. I could do it on my way home to Port Stephens.

“I loved the creative writing. It was a release, it felt real, an exploration of other people’s worlds, other people’s stories, and it was something that I’d always had an interest in as a young child, reading and writing.”

After completing her communications degree, she was offered a scholarship to study for her doctorate. “I resisted, which seems silly,” she says. “They pay you to write. It was a really valuable opportunity.”

Her hesitation was based on her belief that doing research for the doctorate would be a distraction from her creativity (writing). But that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Most of the stories in Watermark came from the three-and-a-half years she spent getting her doctorate.

“The great thing about it, was being allowed to write and given the space to write,” Finn says. “Not trying to fit it in around everything else and not having to steal moments to write …”

With children and a husband at home in Port Stephens, time was always going to be a valuable commodity.

“I have certainly spent a lot of time writing in my head, and I  think writers can look a bit mad, always talking to themselves, in the car … to sit down and say, ‘this is my work, I’m not rushing off to another job’, validated it I suppose. It gave me the space and freedom.”

The 11 stories in the book explore intergenerational and personal relationships in coastal communities. There is plenty of dialogue, and kids are integral.

While Finn admits to her own real fear of the ocean, she’s always been drawn to it, from a childhood where trips to the northern beaches of Sydney were a treat, to her present life where she frequently walks on One Mile Beach, to her husband Greg’s occupation as an abalone diver, the coast is an intrinsic part of her world.

Finn considers herself an “observer” of beach culture.

“As an outsider [growing up], then moving into that culture, maybe that’s why I feel observant about the coastal environment,” she says. “When I did move from suburbs to the coast, it felt unstable and foreign to me …”

Her parents were teachers and it was their dream to be transferred to a beachside suburb, and that’s what happened. But it wasn’t that easy for Finn.

“It was hard for me, my grandparents were close to me, but they were left behind [in the suburbs]. I felt removed, and then removed to Newcastle,” she says. “It hasn’t always been a desired relocation, hence the uncertainty …

“People associate the coast with freedom, lack of inhibition, a place to relax, a place to shed layers, an equalling … beneath all of that, the margin between land and sea is always changing, in flux and chaos. It is that duality that interests me, it comes through in characters. They are thrown into confronting situations …

“To me, the coast is never just a setting. It is part of the story, like a character …”

As a writer, she knows what she wants, and what she doesn’t want.

There is only one mention of social media in the short stories in Watermark – she deliberately avoided it.

She does not like characters who are polished or perfect.  “They don’t interest me as people and they don’t particularly interest me as a characters,” she says. 

“If I was at a dinner party and there was James Bond in one corner and Rake in the other, I’d make a beeline for Rake,” she laughs. “I really like to know what makes people tick. I think a certain level of uncertainty and dysfunction and instability are really endearing traits …”

Spending the last two decades working and raising a family in Newcastle and Port Stephens has kept her grounded. “I found people in Newcastle pretty salt of the earth, pretty down to earth,” she says.

As for characters and real life comparisons, there is truth and there are limits.

“Some of the stories have been inspired by people I know,” Finn says “Some of the stories have been inspired by experiences I’ve had myself. But at some point in the story, you go from the impetus to a fictional situation, the original impetus fades away and the fiction takes over. So I no longer see any of the characters in those stories as people I once knew, but as characters with their own unique personalities and their own unique take on things.”

Finn loves holding on to characters, developing them, and that helps explain how the stories in Watermark are interwoven – characters reappear. 

“I guess a lot of them are about transitional times,” she says of the stories. “So many of them deal with events that may have occurred during someone’s childhood, events that have had some sort of ripple effect, later in life.

“As  you read through the collection, you will note many of the stories are interlinked. Look at a 12-year-old and a 40-year-old, and see how those initial events have unfolded in their lives, and how it has resulted in the character they now are and their reaction to different circumstances.”

The format allows the reader a sense of resolution with the stories  – as Finn says: “I think you have to have a certain level of satisfaction at the end of a story”.

It also makes for an intriguing book – short stories that are linked, more like a novel, but not a novel.

Finn is working on a novel now, about the NSW abalone industry. She has a good working knowledge of the subject, but promises the book will be fiction. Characters and the coast meet again.