JAMYE DOERFLER | CONTRIBUTOR Behind every book, there’s a story. When I tell the short version of the story behind my book The Advent Investigator, it goes like this: no one else had written an advent devotional geared toward middle and high schoolers, so I did. That sounds nice and tidy, but it’s not even close to the full story.  Before this book, there were others. Those books were pretty far removed from an advent devotional for teens. Before this book, there were literary novels. One, I wrote when my three boys were young, waking up every morning before they did to work. For six years, I wrote and revised based on feedback from friends and professionals. I submitted to literary agents and had close calls but no offers of representation. I filed away the “I think you’re a wonderful writer but…” emails. I took the “almost” phone call with an agent and put my head back down and continued working and submitting. I am nothing if not persistent. Then, one day, it broke me. I woke to another rejection in my inbox. This was nothing new, but for some reason, it was the one that crushed me. I sat in the rocking chair and wept with my husband. “I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself.”  I had to stop. Except that I couldn’t stop.  I’d been writing more or less daily since high school. I’d always had a sense that writing was a gift God created me with, that it was a key part of my identity and purpose on earth. How could I give up on that? With my children now in school, I wrote another novel and submitted it to literary agents again. Requests for the manuscript poured in. Later, so did the rejections. “As with your first novel, there’s much to be admired in your writing, but…”  I swallowed those bitter little pills like they were nothing; everyone knows rejection is inherent in art. A couple dozen went down easily. Then, like before, one of them made me choke.  I pulled on my sneakers and went for a run. Tears streamed down my face as I pushed my body until I could barely breathe, attempting to eclipse the emotional pain with bodily pain. I pleaded with God as I ran. Why did you give me a desire only to thwart it? Why did you make me like this?  By this point, I had put over ten years and thousands of hours into my novels. I’d eschewed other career paths and had pinned my hopes on this single outcome. I’m not being melodramatic when I say that this failure is the greatest disappointment in my life. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Prov. 13:12)...