The story was good. I knew it was good. People I trusted told me it was good. The problem was not the story. The problem was me trying to do something I had no real training for, which is turning a story into a novel that works on the page for someone who is not me. Those are genuinely different skills, and I had one of them and not the other. Finding a professional novel writer changed the whole situation. Not immediately. Not without some awkward early conversations about what I actually wanted. But eventually, yes, completely.