How Rejection (and Taylor Swift) Inspired My Publishing Success Story

The path to publication is rarely a tidy, linear story, and I’m no exception. I entered the query trenches with my first project full of the kind of optimism that comes with a heaping dose of naiveté, and sent it out to agents confident that I’d be getting an offer of representation within six months.

(I Got 8 Agent Offers; Then, My Book Died on Sub.)

There were no offers. Not for that first book, and not for the second one either. At the risk of being annoyingly woo woo, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m glad those projects didn’t make it. I was still figuring out my voice as an author, and though I’d been writing my entire life, I still had a lot to learn about craft to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell.

By the time I queried Christina Miller at Nancy Yost Literary with my third project, a storm chaser romance, I wasn’t sure what to expect. She’d sent me a very kind pass on my second project, one that boiled down to liking my work but it just wasn’t a good fit. I hoped for a better outcome this time, while also quietly making plans to self-publish if this third round of querying didn’t work out for me.

Thankfully, querying that first storm chaser romance went much better—and faster—than my first two attempts. I sent my first query out the first week of July 2023 and signed with Christina by October. It was close enough to the holidays that we decided to send the book out on submission in January.

We were both pretty optimistic about my chances with editors, but before long, the passes started rolling in. I was disappointed, of course, though still hopeful. At least until the last Monday of February when four passes, two of which were from houses I desperately wanted to work with, came in back-to-back. I’m not sure who felt worse—Christina, who had to forward those emails along, or me, who opened each one with an increasingly tight knot in my stomach.

By the end of the day, I wanted to simply give up. Two and a half years of querying had already shaken my confidence. The passes were hard to understand—one editor loved the tension, but didn’t like something else, while another editor felt there was no tension at all, but loved the exact thing the other editor felt lacking. It began to feel like searching for a needle somewhere in a thousand different haystacks.

Because I am exactly like other girls, I had recently watched Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana documentary. When I woke up on Tuesday, I was still feeling sorry for myself and frustrated. But there was a moment in that documentary that really stuck with me, the one where she finds out that the reputation album wasn’t getting Grammy nominations. Taylor is obviously upset about the news, but after taking a beat, she gathers herself together and declares the only solution is to make a better album.

I needed to write a better book.

Fueled by that determination, I dusted myself off and started breaking out what ultimately became Chase Me If You Can. I looked at my old emails as I was preparing to write this piece, and though it felt like an eternity at the time, by Wednesday evening I emailed Christina the first pitch. Two and a half weeks after that, I sent her a very messy half-draft to get a gut check on where I was going. That was the middle of March, and by the end of April, I hit send on the finished draft.

I’m usually a pretty fast drafter, but this was fast even for me. I wondered if maybe I was just fooling myself about the book being any good—six weeks from concept to finished draft seemed like it was an impossibly short amount of time. In hindsight, there was a magical alchemy to this book, one of those rare instances where every time I sat down to write, the story was just there in my head, waiting to be transcribed onto the page.

I think that in some ways the crushing disappointment of that first book dying as quickly as it did forced me to get out of my own way. I didn’t overthink it. I just wrote. I added self-indulgent pieces to the book that made me happy, which seems self-evident, but like many authors, the noise of querying and rejection over the years had gotten in my head. There was a certain kind of freedom in the failure of that first book, not that I could have told you that at the time.

Despite how quickly I wrote it, the main story of Chase Me If You Can remains largely unchanged from that original draft. It’s been thoroughly revised, of course, fine-tuned and polished over several rounds of edits to become the book it is today, but the main beats are the same ones I wrote in that fever dream madness of drafting in March and April of 2024.

In the end, much like those two failed rounds of querying, I’m glad that things turned out this way. Chase Me If You Can is a better book, not only in terms of craft, but in giving readers a (mostly) realistic look at what the world of storm chasing is truly like for those of us out on the plains every spring. It’s a love letter to a hobby that’s given me so much, and I’m incredibly proud of it.

As for that first book, the one that I called time of death on back in February 2024? Turns out it’s not actually dead at all. Though it’s been heavily rewritten, that original storm chaser romance featuring a meteorologist burnt out on her broadcasting job will be on shelves in 2027. And if I could go back and do it all over again? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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