There are moments in a life when the destination you thought you missed quietly reveals itself beneath your feet. For as long as I can remember, I had my sights set on Praeger Publishing. It was not just a publisher to me. It was the summit. The place where serious thought lived, where ideas carried weight, where I imagined my voice might one day belong. In 2008, I caught my first spark. Some of my work was picked up by Greenwood Publishing Group. I was young, ambitious, and certain this was the beginning of a climb. I didn’t know where each step would land, only that I was moving forward.
Then life gave me something far greater than any publication. In 2017, I met the most amazing woman. She would later become my wife.
Years passed. In 2019, another door opened. I was published through ABC-CLIO. At the time, I didn’t recognize the magnitude. It was simply another opportunity, another chance to write, to contribute, to keep going. So I did. Together, we dreamed bigger. I wrote, I refined, and eventually I set my sights, once again, on Praeger. This time, I was ready. Or at least, I thought I was.
When I learned that Praeger had been acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing, something in me sank. It felt like arriving at a door I had chased for years, only to find it gone. I remember the weight of that moment. The quiet kind of disappointment that doesn’t shout, but settles. My wife, as she so often does, refused to let the story end there. She began researching, calmly, methodically. Then came that unmistakable smile. The kind that means she has found something important.
“Amber,” she said gently, “you wrote for Greenwood… and ABC-CLIO, right?”
“Yes,” I answered, not yet understanding.
She laughed softly, leaned in, and changed everything with a single sentence: “You’ve been writing for Praeger all along.”
I stared at her, certain I had misunderstood. But she showed me. Years earlier, Praeger had become an imprint within ABC-CLIO. The very platforms I had been writing for, the ones I had treated as steps along the way, were already part of the place I believed I had missed. And just like that, the narrative rewrote itself. I had not failed to reach the summit.
I had been standing on it. And what I felt in that moment is difficult to name. It was not just relief. It was something deeper. A recognition that persistence has a quiet intelligence of its own. That sometimes, the path knows before you do.
Since then, the journey has continued. New chapters opened with Springer Publishing and Springer Nature. My words found homes on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium. And even now, another adventure is unfolding, one I am holding close until the time is right.
But through every step, every turn I thought was a detour, every moment I believed I had fallen short, there has been one constant. My wife.
Steady. Insightful. Unwavering. Helping me see not just where I am going, but where I have already been. And perhaps that is the quiet truth beneath all of it: Sometimes, we do not realize we’ve achieved our dreams because we are too busy continuing to build them.
