In the fall of 2009, I never knew when the hives would hit me.

At dinner with friends, my lips would go numb and swell, as if I had been stung by wasps. I sipped ice water, trying to make the puffiness go away and hoping my friends wouldn’t notice.

Or, as I was falling asleep, the skin on my arms and back would start to itch. My scratching raised furious red welts. I bought fragrance-free laundry detergent and jars of moisturizer, but nothing relieved the stress after my first novel was rejected.

The flare-ups would last for years.

For this column and the next, I draw the curtain on my life as a writer. Although devastated that my novel could not find a home, I started other writing projects. But I always came back to my first attempt, unable to stop, driven by the same determination I had when I started writing fiction as a kid.

Still, part of me wondered if I had made a huge mistake in quitting my job in daily journalism. Some days I wanted to throw all my scribbled prints in the recycling bin.

My Chinese immigrant parents were perplexed and worried about my attempted career change. They had sacrificed so much to give me and my siblings stability. But I couldn’t promise them that everything I tried would work.

After the San Francisco literary magazine Zyzzyva published the first chapter of my novel in 2011, my father was so pleased that he bought a two-year subscription; he hoped the publishers would serialize the rest.

He was sick, and every day my novel went out was another day I feared he’d never see it. He never did, in what remains one of my deepest regrets.

After her passing, my husband, toddler twins, and I left Southern California and moved in with my mother, returning to my childhood home in East Bay. I was back in the very room where I had first dreamed of becoming an author.

I kept trying. I joined the Cave of Writers as part of a scholarship for emerging writers. In the lobby of this storied community workspace — in SoMa then, now in the Mission District — framed book covers hung on the wall.

During one of my first lunches, I felt like an impostor. Then a woman sitting next to me mentioned that she also wrote a book that didn’t sell. Casual little conversation, but a revelation for me: every writer’s life has had its ups and downs.

In three years, the year I turned 41, my collection of short stories, “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” was going to be published. That same year, my new agents hatched a strategy to get me a two-book deal for ‘A River of Stars’ and ‘Forbidden City’ – the latter being the one I had written first, rejected but now resurrected.

While my novels were being submitted, I met a friend. Several editors were interested and I hoped the stars would align, but my body remembered its past stress. As I recounted my previous editing troubles, my lips swelled to Donald Duck proportions.

But the swelling subsided as quickly as it appeared – just in time for the big smile I had when I heard my novels had sold out.

Now, nearly a decade and a half after I started writing “Forbidden City,” it will be released on May 10.

I once joked with another aspiring writer that we didn’t need a life coach: we needed a psychic, someone who could tell us that every wrong turn would eventually lead to the publication of a book.

Of course, no one could promise us that. To take the plunge, you must accept this uncertainty and try not to simmer in doubt and envy.

I also realized that even if that first novel ended up stuffed in a drawer, its discarded pages would have helped me become the writer I am now.