”Your manuscript doesn’t fit in our publishing program.

With kind regards,

Mr./Mrs. This/That Ltd. Something”

There are books in the world no-one will ever read. They are written on napkins at cafés, on crumbled up receipts at gas stations, in the secret diary of a teenage girl. They keep disappearing as the teenage girl grows up,  as heartbreak heals and new ones are about to happen.

I wrote my first rejected manuscript at the age of 17. I actually wrote it just to impress the boy next door. I wrote poems about semantics, golden ecstatic summer nights and eating strawberries. The script still is packed up in a cardboard box where old diaries go to die.

Long before packing up the script, I mailed it to a poetry competition. No-one ever got back to me. Maybe it wasn’t any good, I thought. But I waited for weeks and months. 

I never stopped writing. Since then, around three of my scripts have been rejected by publishers. Nothing drastic, just wasted work hours. I had big dreams about the scripts – one of which was even about to be my debut novel. Some were not judged worthy to even be honourably declined. But I guess no reply is a reply in the art and literature world too.

Some have not been worthy to even be honourably declined. The thrill is that you never know if Mr./Ms. This/That from Ltd. Something is going to read it at all. Regardless of the rejection or failure, writing will never leave me. It is the purest form of love.

Every time, even as a professional writer now, I have zero guarantees the script is going to print. That a book will happen. Not when I am writing it. It is always a gamble. I just have become better at playing that game.