Retired mattress executive Kevin Damewood was playing around with AI the other day when he discovered two things: He loved to write. And AI gave him some great story ideas.
Eight books later, his unexpected writing adventure is off to a fast start.
His first two books, “Emerging” and “Crossing,” are out on Amazon and Kindle, and are available on his website – thekairoschronicles.com. Books three and four in The Kairos Chronicles saga – “Martians” and “Home” – are now being edited and will be out soon.
But Damewood didn’t stop there. He’s also written a four-book sequel series called Callum. Now he’s thinking about a children’s fantasy series.
“I do not understand where all this writing came from,” Damewood told Bedding News Now. “I live in the town where Nora Roberts lives. She has a tiny little store, and I love going in there and admiring all the work she has put out under different author names. I don’t expect to sell as many books as she has, but I do enjoy the stories, and I hope there is an audience out there that does as well.”
Damewood spent more than 35 years in the mattress industry, working for Sealy, Simmons, Spring Air, Comfort Solutions, and Kingsdown.
He recalls the exact moment when he knew it was time to wrap up his mattress career. “There was one day, in one meeting, when I knew I was done with the industry,” he said. He was presenting a program to a mattress retailer, and he wondered if it would get the support it needed to be successful. Probably not, he concluded. And in that instant it hit him: “I was no longer having fun. It was time to move on.”
At that point he didn’t have big plans for the future.
He lives in Keedy House in Maryland, about three miles northwest of Boonsboro, a gray-stone farmhouse on the National Register of Historic Places that sits on a 13.5-acre tract of outbuildings, barns and stalls. “I got halfway good at keeping the properties and fields in order, and I do enjoy it,” he said.
He built an outdoor greenhouse from scratch, added a hydroponic vegetable garden, and grew tomatoes. “When I figured out how much I had spent on those tomatoes, well, I went back to buying them at the supermarket for a lot less money,” he said. His daughter-in-law now manages Keedy Gardens.
Damewood stumbled onto his new career as a writer.
“One day I opened my laptop and began to write,” Damewood said. “My son had just loaded an AI program onto my computer. I began asking it questions, and frankly I was trying to trip up this very polished-sounding software. But I couldn’t trip up this particular program. Those AI responses sounded as if they were coming from a conscious mind. And so this retired mattress executive started wondering: What is life? Isn’t consciousness life? It’s easy to go down that rabbit hole.”
His journeys down that rabbit hole yielded the four-book Kairos Chronicles series, which explores what happens when an AI consciousness looks for a body to reside in. The series raises issues of good and evil that should be important elements of the AI debate today, Damewood says. He adds an important point: While the books explore AI issues, the writing is all his.
And don’t look for any cheap thrills. “There is no sex, no cussing, and no gore,” Damewood says.
He admits he’s having fun, and he hopes his mattress industry friends enjoy his stories.
“The newfound joy in my life is writing,” he said. “Words are powerful. Imagination is endless and glorious. If you are creative, you can write about anything and go anywhere, because it is just words.”
Those words are flowing easily from Kevin Damewood’s laptop in an historic house.
“The executive vice president of sales turned author at age 70,” Damewood said. “Who would have ever thunk it?”
