It turns out that the approach of story problem, theme, pitch sentence, tagline doesn't work for me. It may work for others and great for them but not for me.
Distilling my story into a story problem and theme wasn't really working so I searched the Web again and found an article that helped me more: What Makes a Good Book Tagline. The article ends by giving a list of 12 tips for writing a good tagline.
What helped me most in the article wasn't the 12 tips but the comments for each of the examples given. It reminded me that my tagline needs to tie into my title, Resurgence. That in turn helped me focus on the element of the story that most ties into that title, and it turns out, the book cover too.
I may not have a final tagline yet but at least I have a few drafts I can work with.
It turns out I indeed learn best by example. Just looking at some of the good (and not so great) taglines helped me figure out what the end result needed to look like. I didn't need a process to get there, the process was getting in the way.
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