Rejection is a funny thing. It can feel bad in the moment, but in time it can be among the best experiences you've ever had. This has been mine during what turned out to be a 38-year journey to the completion and publication of my novel Revel In Fire. As it turned out, rejection was just what I needed.

Thirty-eight years ago at 16, I was idealistic and fired up. I thought seeing a dead man by the side of a rural Nigerian road, so covered in dust the black body had turned white, and coupled with outrage about the world, was good enough. And it was energy enough to pound out an entire novel over a single summer month. I shopped it around and at last a vanity press in, I think, Tennessee, said they'd work with it. I turned it down.

My manuscript lay dormant for another 25 years or so. I worked on other things and was distracted by other passions, including other manuscripts. But I'm not afraid to call it procrastination all the same and thank God it happened.

When I returned to it, seriously, over the last 10 years, it was the first time I was glad I'd had no real takers way back in 1987. Revel In Fire was the voice and experience--or lack thereof--of a 16-year-old, who thought he knew a fair bit, but didn't really. And it seemed to me that in the earnestness and brashness and grandiosity of my words, it showed.

But since then? Life, love, death--all of the necessary experiences that impart some additional and crucial level of wisdom. Eventually, it shows up in the words.

So in the last 10 years, something serious, more measured, changes big and small (and the title it has now, which was originally Stentoria).

But what didn't change was rejection.

I got many of them when I shopped it around on this second expedition (which, unlike the first, was fully computerized--that's how much time has passed and how much patience has been required). On occasion close, but ultimately still rejection.

And each time some new experience or encounter with something or someone led to some change in the manuscript or my ideas about it that caused me to feel a great sense of relief--including for those "close occasions" on which I'd ultimately been rejected.

Only with the benefit of hindsight, which is a collection of experiences you haven't had until you've had them, did I realize I wasn't as ready not only as I thought I was, but also as I would have liked.

All this time I'd been searching for my true voice, but the pressures and expectations of youth constantly misled me. So it took a while--38 years, evidently--for me to grow out of all that and accept that things are ready when they're ready and not a moment sooner. Which is the specific assessment I made in the acknowledgments section of the book--and which, tellingly, I think, I wrote in a single take and never looked back.

I was honest with myself and accepted how good rejection had been for me. The drafts that could have been published had something here or there broken a different way are works I would now look back on with deep regret, if not embarrassment and even horror.

Instead, what I've put out in the world now as a self-published author is what I wanted to put out. And that doesn't mean success is guaranteed. It isn't and I accept that, too. But I need to be happy and at peace with it. And I am. Finally.