The Breaking Point

Part Three

My book made her fall debut, and by January, it happened.
Deadly Deception hit the bestseller list.

Number four.
Right beneath the Divergent series—damn them.
But still… I was there. I was a bestselling author.

The dream I’d carried since childhood had come true. I shouted it from the rooftops. My heart couldn’t contain the joy. I’d done it.

Montlake wanted the next book quickly, and I was already deep in the sequel. The plan was to wrap the series, maybe three books, maybe two, maybe more if I spun off the side characters I loved. I was full of ideas and drive.

The publishing world was evolving fast. Genres were shifting, categories exploding, and “hybrid authors”—those who both self-published and traditionally published—were becoming stars. Readers were hungry for certain tropes, certain formulas, certain heat levels. My books were psychological thrillers, emotional, dark, messy, and I started to feel like the walls were moving around me.

I was naïve.
I thought I was keeping up, but I wasn’t.
I was thirty-three, homeschooling Logan, and trying to balance a family, a book deal, and the chaos of an industry that never stopped spinning.

Then everything changed.

Just as I reached that mountaintop moment, my Grandpa Buresh passed away. His death gutted me; it felt like someone had cut the oxygen out of the air. I was grieving, overwhelmed, and then… the reviews started.

At first, I brushed them off.
You tell yourself not to read reviews; almost every author says that. But it’s nearly impossible not to look. You want to know what readers think. You crave connection. But these weren’t just critical reviews. They were cruel.

One woman emailed me to say she “hated me and my books more than rotten meat.”
I’ll never forget that line. Not because it hurt—though it did—but because it was so bizarrely specific. Rotten meat?

Then came more. Vile emails. One-star reviews piling up. Whole threads tearing me apart. Every day, I opened my laptop to a new hit. It wasn’t feedback. It was a campaign.

I reached out to my publisher, desperate for guidance.
They told me it was normal.
Normal for rival authors to send their “street teams” to tank other writers’ ratings. Normal to be targeted.
Normal.

I found out who started it, another author who had sent their readers after me, but there was nothing I could do. I was advised to “ride out the storm.”

But the storm didn’t pass.
It just grew louder.

Each cruel comment chipped away at my confidence until there was almost nothing left. I began to believe the words they wrote. That I was unworthy. Untalented. That my success had been a fluke.

The second book stalled.
The words stopped coming.
The characters stopped talking to me.

And then came the final blow—the one that shattered whatever strength I had left—and that was the moment I stopped writing altogether.

The silence that followed was deafening.