After five years of Penguin wishes and Harper Collins dreams, I have finally come to the conclusion that my memoir manuscript about working as a model in Japan may never be published.
According to the most recent rejection, this one from Scholastic, there just isn’t much of demand for life stories in the young adult market—unless of course you’re Justin Beiber—which is a flaw no amount of rewriting can fix.
*Sigh*
Having put so much energy, time and ultimately hope into this project I can tell you that this is a pretty disappointing realization. Disappointing, and yet, not as crushing as I would have thought.
Sure, I still hope that someday my manuscript gets out there, but for the moment the one thing that has saved my heart from crumbling like a Starbucks cinnamon straw is this: writing.
Since finishing the manuscript in question, I have kept writing and have created new projects and with each completed draft I know that my chances of getting published expand and grow. Sure there’s no guarantee that any of them will be published, but the more I write, the higher the probability is that one will.
What matters most, I realize as a writer, is not any single project, but the practice of writing that you nurture. And that is something that no rejection letter can stop.
