You need to get less miserable about things.

I don’t want my posts to be gloomy. But I do want them to be realistic. So I try to be as honest as I can when I post about publishing or what it’s really like to be a writer.

I get messages of thanks for this and I get people unsubscribing in their droves. (If you’re unsubscribing because you don’t want to hear how fucked up UK publishing is, right now, then you’re definitely not ready to be a writer - I know that not everybody here wants to become a writer.) But I was chatting on WhatsApp with a writer friend of mine last week and they sent me this message:

People who aren’t writers don’t always understand the idiosyncrasies of this occupation. I’m okay with that. I don’t expect people to get it. It’s a weird world. My girlfriend couldn’t understand why my former agent would take two weeks to respond to an email. I would say, ‘I think that’s actually pretty good, I know people who wait longer than that.’ She just thought it was rude. Who is so busy that they can’t acknowledge that you’ve just sent them a new book? For two weeks!

Turns out, she was right, on this occasion. That is unacceptable.

But, along with all the latest celebrity ghostwritten novels and same-people-on-the-longlist longlists and six-figure debut deals and an industry that seems afraid of its own shadow, there is one thing that can’t help but make a writer miserable, and that is rejection.