There is something strange about finishing a book.

You spend months—or years—with these people in your head. You know why they make the choices they make. You know what scares them, what they want, and all the things they aren’t quite capable of saying out loud. You know which pieces of the story matter most to you.

And then you publish it.

Suddenly, it isn’t entirely yours anymore.

Readers bring their own experiences to a story. They notice things you didn’t expect them to notice. They love characters you thought they might hate and get irritated with characters you adore. Sometimes they see themes you didn’t consciously know you had written.

That’s part of the magic of books.

But every once in a while, a reader sees exactly what you hoped was there.

That happened to me this week.

A reader named Matt left a review for The Space Between Songs. It was a wonderful five-star review, and of course I was thrilled about that. I’m an indie author. Five stars will always make my day.

But it wasn’t the stars that stayed with me.

It was the fact that he got Jessi.

Jessi was never supposed to be an action hero.

When I started writing her, I didn’t want her to suddenly discover that she was fearless or extraordinarily capable because terrible things happened to her. She’s a graduate geology student. She’s smart. She’s observant. She knows rocks and mountains and landscapes. She’s stubborn as hell.

She’s also frightened.

Sometimes she’s exhausted. Sometimes she makes bad decisions. Sometimes she needs help.

Matt wrote that Jessi survives through “sheer determination, her knowledge of the land, and the unexpected kindness of strangers-turned-family.”

And I sat there looking at those words thinking:

Yes.

That’s her.

He also described the landscape as an active part of Jessi’s fight for survival.

That mattered to me just as much.

Place has always mattered in my writing. I don’t think I know how to write a story where it doesn’t.

The mountains of Colorado aren’t interchangeable with the open spaces of Wyoming or the vastness of Montana. New Mexico isn’t simply where Jessi starts her journey. The landscape changes around her as she changes, and what she knows about the land matters.

I’ve spent a lot of my life driving through these places, hiking in them, photographing them, and occasionally pulling over on the side of the road because the light hit a mountain in a way that made it impossible not to stop.

I wanted some of that to live on the page.

Apparently, it did.

But there was one more piece of Matt’s review that got me.

Home.

At its heart, The Space Between Songs is a story about a woman trying to figure out where—and with whom—she belongs.

Jessi spends a lot of the book moving. She leaves Albuquerque for Colorado. Circumstances push her farther and farther from everything familiar. She crosses state lines and landscapes and finds herself relying on people she never expected to need.

Somewhere in all that movement, her definition of home begins to change.

Home isn’t necessarily where you started.

Sometimes it’s the people who refuse to let you stand alone.

That’s the story I hoped I had written.

And a stranger read my book and found it.

I don’t think readers always realize what that feels like from this side of the page.

Reviews matter to indie authors for all the practical reasons we’re always talking about. They help other readers decide whether to take a chance on a book. They provide credibility. They help a book slowly find its audience.

But sometimes they do something much more personal.

Sometimes you’re sitting at home on an ordinary Saturday, checking Amazon, and you discover that somebody you’ve never met spent hours with the people who once existed only inside your head.

And they saw them.

Not exactly as you see them. No two readers ever will.

But they saw the things you most hoped would survive the journey from your imagination, through all those drafts and revisions, onto the page, and finally into someone else’s hands.

Writing can be a surprisingly solitary thing.

Publishing can sometimes feel even more so.

You send a story out into the world and hope that somewhere, eventually, it reaches the person who was meant to find it.

And every once in a while, someone reaches back.

Thank you, Matt.

You got her.