How My Book Came to Be (Or, the Day I Asked Routledge for Copyediting Work and Was Invited to Write Instead)
The story behind Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss (Routledge, October 2026) — the first book I have written on my own — begins not with a proposal, but with a request for freelance editing work.
In the spring of 2025, I sent an email cold to a Routledge editor.
I wrote to offer my services as a freelance copyeditor. Editing other people’s scholarship is what I do — dissertations, journal articles, book manuscripts — and I wanted to do that work for a publisher I admire, in the fields I care about most: trauma, expressive therapies, mental health. I had already coached two authors through their process from proposal to acceptance and knew their internal workings better than the average person. I introduced myself, described what I could offer, and asked to be kept in mind for editing projects.
I was not writing to pitch a book. I did not have a book in mind at all.
The reply came the next day. The editor was gracious. She said she would share my note and CV with her senior publisher so I would be kept in mind for editing work. And then, almost in passing, she asked the question that reshaped my year:
Had I ever considered writing a book for them?
My areas of interest, she wrote, aligned well with the kind of work they publish. Would I consider sending a proposal, or talking through any ideas I had?
I read it twice.
Here is the part I still find amazing and so apt for a book about synchronicity. The book that grew out of that question — Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss — is about these moments of meaningful coincidence. It is about the moments in grief when something unlikely, yet profoundly meaningful happens during bereavement: the person’s favorite bird at a door, a song on the radio, a timing too apt to explain away. The book about those moments began with a synchronicity too, in many ways.
The book reaches back much further than that email — to years of listening to bereaved people describe coincidences they could not explain and did not want explained away, and to a study I had already published on how those moments help people rebuild meaning after loss. The editor’s request that day did not create the work the book was based on, but it did open a door for the book to become a reality. I get teary when I think about what she said to me that day, and how this was something I needed to do, even if it meant taking the huge risk of putting my editing business on the back burner for a year.
I want to be careful here, because the book itself argues against telling people what their experiences must mean, and I do not want to over-read my own. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was an editor who read a short introductory email more generously than she had to. What I know is this: I would not have written a proposal if she had not asked, and she would not have asked if I had not sent the email I almost did not send.
I have thought about why that small exchange became a book, and a few plain things stay with me.
Ask for the smaller thing.
I asked for editing work. You cannot always predict what an honest, modest request will return.
Say yes to the larger thing when it comes, even before you feel ready.
I did not feel like an author. I felt like an editor who helps authors. The proposal, the sample chapters, the long months of production were all things I did not feel ready for, but coached myself through anyway.
And no book is one person’s.
This one exists because of the scholarship I built on, the bereaved people who trusted me with their stories, an editor who asked a generous question, and a production team I may never meet in person. It takes a village to raise a book. I am one small part of mine.
Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss — the first book I have written on my own — comes out with Routledge on October 19, 2026, with pre-orders opening September 15. It began, improbably, with a request to copyedit.
I am glad I sent the email.
— Jennifer
The patience of publishing
Follow the book to print
Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss comes out with Routledge on October 19, 2026, and pre-orders open September 15. I am writing this whole journey as it happens — proposal, peer review, copyedit, proofs, index — one honest post at a time.
The monthly long-form version lives on my newsletter, The Patience of Publishing.
See the book →