I’d lived for four months in hope. But no is as much a part of the publishing process as yes. She gave me incredible gifts in the three hours of our meeting. The meeting itself—rejecting publishers never meet the writers of their rejected manuscripts—was a gift. I don’t drive. She picked me up. That was…

It was something I said I’d never do—I’d never pay a reading fee, never pay a publisher money, inevitably, to reject a manuscript I’d submitted. In the no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes—which is what my path to publication has looked like—that’s a lot of thrown-away $10s and…