I was organizing my writing projects and as I put them into different folders, I could not resist
the urge to flip through some of the pages I put inside the YA folder. I have never had much
success with this genre (as far as I have had success at all in some writing competitions) and
have never managed to get published in any journal or magazine, traditional or online.

What I read made my heart race and then plummet. Neither in a good way.

At first I almost felt proud reading the introductory paragraphs, the intense and descriptive
words, thoroughly enjoying the aura they created.

But as I progressed down the page, the words and sentences started to pull away and any
sense of them being representative of the genre just melted away.

As the story developed, or rather, as the story stalled, I almost felt my blood drain into my
toes. The dialogue was flat, the characters uninspiring (and definitely not young adults), and
the storyline common and boring.

I felt embarrassed that I had actually been ignorant enough to submit something so amateurish
and poor. As I never had any positive responses to my YA stories, I stopped writing YA and
now I focus only on general fiction and literary fiction.

Perhaps not being able to (or work harder to be able to) cross over makes me a bad writer - or
at least an embarrassed one!

Anyone else feel these pangs of literary pain?