Hey y’all! My name is Abbott Jones Downs. Fix yourself a lemonade (or a mimosa) and let’s get acquainted!

I contain multitudes. I am an:

⚖️ attorney, by profession

💞 Mama, by vocation

📚🧶🎶 avid reader, crocheter (is that a word?), and singer, by avocation

📝 writer and author, by aspiration

I grew up in Alabama, with a childhood steeped in swim meets and Mardi Gras parades and teenage years filled with show choir performances and youth service projects. And always, voracious reading. (Though I hated English in school, because we read things too slowly!)

I studied philosophy and French in college (RIP Birmingham Southern College) then went on to study law in New Orleans. I thought I would pair my love of music and the arts with a legal career in the entertainment industry. To that end, I won a writing competition held by the GRAMMY Foundation and passed the California bar exam! Then the economic downturn of 2008 hit, I fell in love with legal writing and appellate advocacy, and the rest is history. I’ve been practicing law in Birmingham, AL, ever since.

Personally, I took a gamble with online dating and hit the jackpot with the love of my life, Deidre Downs, whom I married in 2018. I have one bonus son and we had two children together; our youngest, Luke, was born with a heart defect and had open heart surgery at 5 days old. We lost him in May 2025 at just 8 months old due to complications of the flu.

No mother should experience the loss of a child. I can think of nothing more devastating, truly.

But through it all, I have learned that life is so short and nothing is guaranteed. I have long aspired to turn my love of storytelling and my skill for writing into a career writing novels. No time like the present; I know this all too well.

So here I am. Working on my first novel, which I hope to begin querying later this year. Stick around and see how it goes!