A week ago today, I stayed up all night only to fall asleep at about 9am. This is not a surprising set of hours for someone who’s unemployed. But rather than spending it watching as many episodes of Boohbah on Youtube that my sense of sanity could withstand, I was in fact working on something. As it turned out, it was not without the usual irony of fate or hubris.

I woke up again at about half 12. In what is now an almost autonomic response, I reached down beside the bed for my laptop to check my email. There was one new message waiting for me. It was accompanied by a sense of deja vu, largely because I’d frequently dreamt of waking to find such a particular email from a specific sender. The sender’s name was the most recent prospective agent I’d sent my novel to, the title of my novel was the subject. I closed my eyes and clicked on it.

I didn’t close my eyes fast enough. The first word I saw, soon tattooed in negative on my inner eye lid: ‘rejection’. At the time I didn’t feel rejection. I certainly wasn’t surprised. I suppose I didn’t really feel anything at all. Like my apparently futile attempts to find work, I’m used to finding myself unceremoniously dolloped back at square one after each effort and attempt. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes to read more, specifically the words before it - “Please do not be disheartened by this or other rejections.” ‘Excellent,’ I thought. ‘I have succeeded already in not being disheartened.’ It’s not exactly a new experience after all, and anyone with the insanity to call themselves a writer should expect it more often than not.

I was about to read on when sudden panic immediately hit me as the words “other rejections” reverberated inside my skull. Surely this means she anticipated I’m going to be rejected again for this story. Perhaps again and again. Suddenly “do not be disheartened by this or other rejctions” became “expect other rejections”, which instantly evolved into “your novel is not publishable” that condensed into “you’re not good enough”. In no time at all a vinyl loop was scratching into my brain’s soft, vulnerable tissue “you’re not good enoughyou’re not good enoughyou’re not good enoughyou’re not good enough…”

Once I’d calmed down and my neuroses had deflated a little, I could see the same good advice offered in her letter as that of the late Pat Kavanagh. More importantly, she too had evidently actually read what I’d sent her, and I was grateful for that. It felt like I’d been given a fair chance, rather than just wasted money, time and good quality anxiety in sending something to be merely left on the corner of an unused desk for three months before returning it to me with a template “no, ta.”

This is what I started work on early that morning - a microsite for the aforementioned novel, Beasts of the Field. It’s not the slickest site ever designed, nor is it now the most original way to promote a book (other lucky souls have now not only the resources to produce sites twice as visually impressive and in half the time, but get paid for doing so). However, it is original to me, and it’s a labour of love. It was an idea I came up with some time ago after reflecting on something I’m proud of - a novel that took me two and a half years to write. And it’s one of the most satisfying feelings known to anyone who writes to read back over old scrawl and become excited by what you’ve created.

Such things become your children. You can worry about them, fuss over them, you can go through all the usual unnecessary self-blame and guilt when they somehow don’t turn out how you expected. But no real parent can never truly abandon them.

Of course you get disheartened, but of course you keep on going, no matter what. These things are givens - what else can you do? It’s staying excited that’s the struggle - remaining enthusiastic about the creation you’ve invested years of thought, energy, feeling and hard work in.

Enthusiasm is everything. You must remain enthusiastic about your own work. You have to keep faith in yourself, not lose it. You can be a good writer, you can be a bad one - it doesn’t really matter which. Being a good writer has nothing to do with being able to get a book published. In the end, what does is all down to self-belief and a lot of bloody-minded persistence.

Like most writers, I balance the endless joy of soliciting rejection slips with the demands of a daily occupation. My current one is desperately dull. It has some benefits - working from home for one, which means I don’t have to wear a suit and tie, I save money on travel and can take a tea break whenever I want. But it’s also stressful, soul-destroying and mentally exhausting. I’m effectively at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if not physically then mentally, and with very few holidays.

It’s called terminal unemployment.

Don’t ever think that looking for work isn’t a full time occupation. It is, just with 100% more daily dissatisfaction and 100% less salary. Don’t for one minute think that being (apparently devoutly) unemployed is all fun and laughter. I really wish it was. I wish it’s as depicted on TV or in books - eating Sugar Puffs from the packet, watching Boohbah and devising disturbing new forms of self-abuse. Sure, there may be some people who indeed do live that dizzying lifestyle, but I’m one of the hapless idiots who are actually, perhaps foolishly, trying get a job.

And I’m pretty good at it. I’m an expert in fact at bookmarking jobs I don’t want to do. That said, it does take all day and usually yields nothing. Occasionally some days even offer one or two vacancies you could apply for without the likely prospect of suicide in a few weeks. If you’re especially lucky that is.

Unemployment is not as easy a life as some might think - and it’s usually thought of as such by those with either the good fortune or intellectual vasectomy that enables them to enjoy what they do to earn money, day in, day out. You’re still always tired. You still have to take phone calls. Mostly these are from recruitment consultancy agents. People who think that estate agents are the most devious, duplicitious and downright demoralising form of life have clearly never before encountered this flavour.

The typical recruitment agent will more than happily respond via telephone to your initial application to one of their vacancies (or bait, as I’ve come to call them). However, this is merely an expert tactic to break you down, ultimately so you become so scared/depressed/desperate that you’ll accept any old rubbish they couldn’t pass off to anyone with an ounce of self-respect. They can, and will, go to ridiculous lengths to shatter your own bravado of self-confidence, just so that they can stuff your limp broken form into any box they want. Say no to what they offer you, and they’ll never contact you again, regardless of how well a job fits your own concept of your abilities, or the new ill-fitting suit they’ve stitched for you.

Buzzards, circling.                      Image by Conlawprof

Here’s an idea of what you’re dealing with: one agent called me back within minutes of applying for a vacancy. With predictable idiocy, the speed and directness of her reply foolishly raised my hopes, or at least until she very quickly informed me that I wasn’t remotely qualified. She then commented on the fact that the last few jobs listed on my CV were very brief. I replied that they were short term assignments. She said that I should state that on my CV. I replied that I had, in the (evidently) pointless description of said position beneath its title. In the very first sentence. The first few words in fact. She said that I’d need to make it more clear. She then asked what I’d been doing for the last six months. I told her that I’d been looking for work. She replied that prospective employers wouldn’t like that - that they’d prefer you to be working at the time of application. At this point the conversation essentially went out of the window, having realised I was talking to someone who couldn’t grasp the basic concept of cause and effect. Unsurprisingly, she then proceeded to put me forward for a job that even I could see I wasn’t remotely qualified for or experienced in at all, which surprisingly offered £5000 less than the one I had applied for. I said I’d get back to her. I didn’t.

Most of the time, this is the best you can hope for. It’s rare enough for a job agency to even acknowledge your applications. One particular media agency has to date not answered a single one, in a variety of roles including trying to register for temp work. Still I continue to apply, like a fool, every time. What choice do I have?

Another agency similarly denied my existence until one happy day when they called me in to register after applying for a full time job. To cut a very long story short, it turned out they’d mixed my CV up with another applicant with the same name. Someone eight years younger than me with a degree in Sports Science. Now I’m not an intellectual snob, but I don’t understand why someone with no experience of any description and a degree in Sports Science is better qualified for a junior editorial role than someone with an English degree and over four years’ varied work experience. They felt sorry for me, apparently, for dragging me all the way out there for no reason at all, and put me on their temping books by way of consolation - something I’d been writing to them about for months. I never heard a peep from them after that.

I don’t know which is worse for your confidence - recruitment agents breaking you down, or the mere glaring fact of your own evident unemployability - your four year degree and four years of work experience worth little more than a quick template rejection email, if at all, over and over. You’re even touched when they go to the trouble of doing a mail merge first - a personally addressed rejection adds that little special touch, but you’re always back to square one, again and again, a little more tired, bewildered and less yourself every time.

It’s not a big pool, especially now, but on my daily scan through the ludicrous amount of websites and email digests I’m registered with I’m much less inclined now to apply for a job if it’s with an agency, particularly if it’s advertised by an agency who have never once replied to me. It’s not as if they’re out of my league - I’d never apply for something I didn’t have a chance at getting. I just appear to be completely unemployable.

Maybe I should just stick to writing novels and short stories - an area in which I’m already more than experienced in not getting off the bottom rung. That and cut out the middle man: always apply direct if you can.

Whenever I ask this question, or anything similar that concerns that quite fundamental aspect of my life, the following cards always appear: Knight of Swords, Justice, the Devil. I’ve even started affectionately terming them ‘the triplets’.

Pat Kavanagh, the noted UK literary agent, has died aged 68 from a brain tumour.

There are a great number of authors currently paying tribute to her no-nonsense, informal and direct manner. I encountered this first hand when I submitted my novel to her earlier this year, kindly referred by my university tutor who she had represented for several years. She responded within a matter of weeks, praising the submission having evidently actually read it, and though she did not take it on, explained quite clearly why and recommended in a not at all general way how I could proceed.

For a first time author trying to get published I can’t tell you how surprising it was to encounter a prospective agent who had not only demonstrably read at least most of what you’d sent them, but congratulated you on it as well, taking the time to write to you personally. Her advice and encouraging tone, in only a brief letter, gave me a huge confidence boost for something I was increasingly losing all hope and interest in. It was enough to carry on, refreshingly different from the usual nameless template rejection letters, exactly three months since submitting each and every time, my manuscript always returned as pristine as I had sent it without so much as a dogeared page.

I find it an uncomfortable thought that at the time she replied to me, she was entirely unaware of the condition that would take her life in only six months time. It’s very sad to think that there is one less individual in the world of that character, and particularly in an ‘industry’ more and more orientated towards its ‘market’ and less towards the individual people that make that market up.