I approached an agent in the US recently, the first time I’ve ever done this.  Perhaps, I thought wildly, my contemporary/portal fantasy novel will have greater appeal to the American public.  As I’m not very good at pretending to be English and feel like a fraud setting my novel in a “quirky village in England” (you can’t believe the research I had to do to get a feel for non-clichéd village life), I thought perhaps my “quirkiness” would be entertaining rather than, well, researched.
The rejection arrived less than a week later. 
I have approached a total twelve literary agents this year.  In the previous two years, I approached 21 (just for this novel, you understand).  Of the 33 total, only 18 bothered to reply, all with bog-standard rejections, their emails almost identical (do they learn how to write these at Literary Agent School?)  I’ve run out of agents in the UK who don’t sneer at fantasy.  Sadly, my novel (or proposed series of novels) isn’t really Big Fantasy, which makes it even harder.  It’s set in the modern world.  The magical realm is separate and reached by what is traditionally called a portal (like Narnia).  There’s a bit of magic in our world but not much.  It’s very character-driven and heavy on relationship building.  There are a large number of strong female characters.
Is this all so unappealing?
It’s been over two and a half years since I approached the first agent.  I’ve already written the second in the series, though haven’t edited it yet.  I had hoped to write the third this year but it has begun to dawn on me that I probably won’t get to it.  A year that I had greatly looked forward to, filled with exciting projects, has been crushed by so many outside factors that I can barely get up in the morning.  I hardly need mention the pandemic.  Then there’s the realisation that I no longer feel able to work in my Real World job.  And on top of that, I’ve just been told I may have to have an eye operation for a possible torn retina.
I mean, fuck.  How do I respond to this?  I don’t know how to keep going.  The two efforts I’ve made this year at actual writing have produced absolute rubbish.  The immense amount of editing I have to do (which I usually enjoy) has been left to gather dust because I haven’t got the energy, crushed as I am by the events of 2020, not just globally but in my life.  I may have felt a smidgen of hope recently, when I got into gear and approached the US agent and did a whole bunch of other “writing career” stuff but the eye operation threat has destroyed it all.  There I was, trying to remain positive, trying to stay busy and productive, making an effort, DOING something, when I got steamrollered.  And it was a big steamroller. 
 
I recently tweeted:
I'm not sure I can do this writing thing anymore. I've been trying to find an agent for over thirty years now. I've been trying to get people to read my books for a decade. Nothing I do works. I am a droplet lost in a tidal wave.
 
I didn’t expect much of a response, the word “droplet” being the clue.  But someone replied with this:
I think your years of experience show a resilience and strength that the rest of us aspire to! I was feeling this way for the last couple of weeks... And reading your post makes me feel like such a lightweight. You are truly badass!
 
Me?  A badass?  According to Google, this means:
A tough, uncompromising, or intimidating person.
 
I was quite touched to be viewed this way!
 
While “perseverance” may be my middle name, the other side of the coin is, I’m afraid to say, total despair.  And as for the answer to the question I posed in the title of this blog, I don’t have one.  People may admire me for persisting and persevering on a difficult path, but for me, that path just looks like the ashes of my life, with all hope lost, a road that goes forever on and on in a talentless void.  And I only keep on walking because I haven’t spotted a turn-off.

I’ve been regaling my daughter with tales from The Olden Days, in other words, the eighties and nineties.  And a bit of the seventies.
 
First memory of a computer:  my mother’s boyfriend’s twin brother worked with computers (I think) and I seem to recall visiting his office one Sunday and the computers were HUGE.  I must have been about ten, which means that, yes, there were computers in the 1970’s, just not in everyone’s home.  I had my daughter in hysterics as I described the dot matrix printer.
Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (ten seconds one way)
Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (ten seconds the other way).
Yep.  They were that slow.
 
And as for fanzines:  I actually CREATED one in the early 1980’s.  There were two of us and I did all the typing on a manual typewriter.  The headings and stuff were done with LETRASET!  I included a short story called The Abominable Snowman which was about, well, a snowman, except he was tall and thin and had lost his head and instead of a head, he had the glittering lights of a city.  Yes.  Well.  It’s possible my writing was even more surreal and incomprehensible then than it is now.  I also drew (while chained to my civil service job) a comic strip called Deartha’s Double Breast.  She went out at night and FLASHED people with her DOUBLE BREAST.  It was SHOCKING.  Well.  It made my daughter laugh.  The fanzine was called King Ink because the other creator and I were huge Nick Cave fans.  I really wanted to review The Cure’s Pornography but was told by the other creator (okay, okay, he was my bloody boyfriend) that it was old hat.  I eventually came to England with that boyfriend, who then proceeded to coercively control me.  It took me eighteen months to escape him.  Arsehole.
 
Without thinking, I said to my daughter that we had “printed out” the fanzine.  Well, of course we didn’t PRINT OUT the fanzine!  There was nothing to print it out from!  We photocopied it! 
“You had photocopiers back then?”  my daughter asked me.
Yes.  And televisions, telephones and fridges.  We were really advanced, you know.  (This was the point that I told her about the computers of the 1970’s, the ones as big as a cupboard).

I also told her about the old branch of Forbidden Planet before it moved from New Oxford Street to its current location, about finding it for the first time, going into a room the size of my kitchen and going, “wow, look at all the Star Trek shit!”  Around the back of Forbidden Planet was a shop that sold ONLY fan magazines.  I realise, now, that this was what we had before websites.  There was a magazine for every single TV show that ever existed.  And pictures.  You could buy glossy pictures of your heroes.  You don’t want to know who I smothered my walls with (blush).  Needless to say, he had a lot of muscles.  I seem to be quite partial to those.
 
How did we ever live without the internet?  Was life any better?  Could we have stayed sane throughout the pandemic without online contact?  The past is hysterically funny.  I hope one day we can laugh about the present.  I can imagine my daughter telling future generations how we used to TYPE onto tiny screens to people we’d never met and those future generations falling about with hysterical laughter.  Because you know what, it’s bloody nuts.