My debut novel—Lovers & Leavers—is about to go out on submission. It’s taken me nearly a decade to get here. My own personal odyssey to publication.

And frankly, I’m glad it’s taken so long.

Early versions of this manuscript merely scratched the surface when there was always meant to be caverns to this story—caverns I never would’ve discovered if I didn’t spend so long learning from the many rejections I received along the way. There’s a complexity to the story as it exists today that my twenty-year-old brain couldn’t have conjured. A nuance that has me so excited for the right editor to discover what I’ve created—frame narrative, three points of view, dual timelines, a book within a book, shifting attachment styles personified, all broken out by the three stages of limerence—and bet their career on it.

It’s that mountain of rejections that made me, and it’s my hope that in sharing my story, other authors will come to see that rejections are sometimes just an indication that the story has not yet reached its full potential.

And so, without further ado, I’d love to introduce you to the evolution of Lovers & Leavers through the years so you can see for yourself why it’s a good thing—great thing, even—it’s taken me this long.

Modern Day Gentleman—2016

I was a junior at Santa Clara University when I was hired by a Stanford senior who had just launched an app aimed at getting college students to read more. Given that I’d be paid eleven cents per subscriber, I decided I needed to write a story that would resonate with college-aged students. An anti-love story sounded intriguing to me. One of my friends had been getting dragged around by the same guy for years, and it wasn’t until she left that he realized what he had in her. It was all so predictable, the modern day tragedy of love stories.

Thus came the inspiration for Charlie and Harrison.

It was a shallow story. My prose was confident but half-baked, naive in a way. My storytelling was based purely on instinct, which was fine for a short story series but not at all fine for a novel. The bones of the plot remain much the same though it’s a small piece of the overarching puzzle.

The story opened with an epigraph that gave readers a glimpse into Charlie’s perspective:

To you, I was an afterthought. But to me, you were the only meaning of the word. Those three universal letters were solely dedicated to you. 

All I can say is—the drama.

Lovers & Leavers—2020

I had recently moved to Austin, Texas, thus was newly awakened to the beauty of a long, drawn-out morning of writing before my nine to five. I’d been dabbling with short stories, slowly finding my voice again after taking time off writing while I lived in San Francisco, when the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, I had a lot more time.

I returned to the lore of Charlie and Harrison, their relationship strangely prophetic to one I was newly recovering from. It was a relationship my twenty-five-year-old brain could not understand, and so I turned to writing to try to make sense of why I was so distraught over its demise. The book became my therapy, and so the book was full of emotional darlings I refused to cut because they somehow explained my pain.

I started querying the novel. Full requests instantly came in. I felt like some sort of goddess, that I’d chronicled my heartbreak and turned it into something sellable. Looking back, my pitch was unbelievably cringe, filled with a confidence I shouldn’t have had.

LOVERS & LEAVERS isn’t a romance; it’s a reality. It will appeal to all fans of NORMAL PEOPLE looking for a story that feels just as heartbreakingly real as their own. Familiar with the trials of modern romance, I always wanted a story that fit my lived experiences. That story didn’t exist, so I created it. 

Reader, that story very much existed in many, many forms already.

Slowly the rejections started coming in, all relaying iterations of essentially the same thing: there was no plot, no propulsion, no reason to care about what happened to these characters. He was a jerk—he didn’t deserve her longing. She was so lost, so sad—but why? And why was her fiance’s perspective included? He didn’t have any stakes in the story.

I didn’t have the answers to any of these questions, and after twelve full requests and twelve full rejections, I shelved the manuscript.

Validated—2023

I’d queried and shelved a separate manuscript and was in the in-between stages, trying to figure out what to write next, when several new ideas for how to revive Lovers & Leavers struck me like lightning (a lame cliche, but it’s the only one that feels accurate).

  • Idea #1: I’d been thinking about attachment styles when I suddenly wondered, what if I could shape each perspective to highlight how attachment styles can shift based on treatment?
  • Idea #2: The fiance had always been a major darling—there was never any point to his inclusion. But then I thought—what if Charlie dedicated her debut novel to her ex in secret, claiming it was fiction when it was anything but? What if her fiance encountered the ex, and realized her novel was based on her past?
  • Idea #3: I’d recently discovered the concept of limerence, and that it’s broken out into three stages—infatuation, crystallization and deterioration. Each stage perfectly mirrored the trajectory of their relationship. What if I could break the book out into the three stages of limerence?

Each of these “what ifs” became the crux of the novel as it exists today, but I took my time implementing them. I knew what I was trying to achieve was complex, and I wanted to get it right.

Lovers & Leavers—2025

The story as I intended it was complete. I was ready to query the novel once again, and my pitch, I thought, was sure to hook agents.

Charlie’s fiancé, Noah, thought her debut novel was fiction—until a stranger reveals it mirrors a love story she’d long tried to bury. At the start of college, Charlie feels lost until she’s drawn into an all-consuming romance with Harrison, whose charm and confidence mask his struggles with his mother’s terminal illness. Bound by trauma, their non-relationship deepens but eventually fractures, leaving Charlie to face a devastating choice alone—one that reshapes her identity and lingers long after Harrison is gone. Harrison doesn’t realize the gravity of what he abandoned—until he reads Charlie’s novel.

I sent out a few queries. Received a few full requests almost straight away. Then, just as quickly, a few full rejections. The plot wasn’t propulsive—as you can see from my pitch, I didn’t really know where it was going or why. And the fiance’s perspective was devastating, but agents weren’t convinced readers would care enough about his stakes to continue reading the novel.

The rejections were clear in what they communicated: I’d queried the story before it was ready.

I took a four month break and once I dove back into edits, the errors in my manuscript were glaring. I did a complete rewrite, plotted the entire thing according to the Save the Cat story beats, and dedicated my weekends to nothing but coffee shops, chiseling away at edits.

When I dove back into querying, the results were immediate. After all, this time I knew what I was selling. And I wasn’t over promising.

Charlie Lane’s debut novel is climbing the bestseller list, yet with each new book reading, she feels herself fraying. After all, the climax of her story mirrors the trauma from her past relationship with Harrison. A trauma she’s never shared with anyone, not even her fiancé Noah. 

Not only was I getting full request after full request, I was getting follow-ups from agents reading the book, saying they were loving it and they’d be in touch soon. After less than a month of querying, I’d secured three offers of representation and on December 19, 2025, I signed with my dream literary agent.

The way it happened felt cosmic in nature—like the universe was rewarding me for so many years of perseverance. For not giving up on this story I inexplicably couldn’t shake. And my agent, on my offer call, confirmed this suspicion. She’d rejected a version of this story twice before, and she was glad to see I hadn’t given up.

Lovers & Leavers—2026

My agent didn’t have very much feedback, but she did think we could change the ending to give my main character a little bit more agency. I spent all of January working through those changes to the story, and now we’re onto the final polish before we begin submitting to publishers.

It’s been a journey to get here, and it’s by no means complete, but I can say with sincere gratitude that I’m happy it has taken me this long. The story, if I do say so myself, is pretty sweet. But it never would’ve existed if I didn’t listen to the years and years of rejections shaping my story along the way.