Let's talk a little bit about rejection.

A few days ago I received my first rejection letter and, while I'm not planning on jumping off a bridge any time soon, I'm a little disappointed. But I'll get over it. At first, I wasn't sure if a form rejection letter, all printed up on rather impressive agency letterhead, made me a bonafide writer or if it just made me a very bad one. I have since decided that it takes more than one agent's opinion to confirm, beyond a reasonable doubt, that I am absolute crap, so I will reserve judgement until at least ten reputable agencies have told me to sod off. To give credit to the agency, the letter was nice. It didn't come right out and say 'You're absolute crap, Shearer, but we hear that McDonald's is hiring, so all is not lost.' It just said something along the lines of 'We certainly don't want you, but keep on trying.' Which I suppose is standard, but it made my first rejection that much easier to take. I'm thinking that literary agencies should offer courses in tactful rejection to teenage boys. It might help to reduce the instances of low self-esteem in teenage girls, but that's another topic altogether.

My next step is to send my manuscript to more agents. Submitting a manuscript, if the agents' websites are to be believed, is moronically simple. Send a cover letter (easy peasy - If you can't write a decent cover letter you have no business trying to write a novel), a short synopsis (one page - think blurb), the first three chapters, unbound, double-spaced, printed on one side of the paper, and include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Straight forward.

I decided to go with a British agent because, while I have lived in Canada for most of my life, I am still a British citizen. I wrote the cover letter and synopsis, printed the entire package and stuffed it all into the envelope. A quick visit to Canada Post and it would be off to London where, after reading it, the agent would be so impressed that he'd offer me a multi-book deal and a sizeable enough advance that I could quit my office job and stay home to write, in my jammies, full-time. I know, I know, that sort of thing rarely happens, but if you can't have your self-indulgent little fantasies, is life really worth living? I think perhaps not.

It turns out that Canada Post doesn't carry foreign postage. I went to their website, the postal outlet down the road and their corporate headquarters. No dice. So I went to the Royal Mail website to order UK postage straight from the source. You can order stamps from their site quickly and easily, but only in enormous quantities, and although I understand that postal costs are always rising, I was quite sure I would never get through hundreds of pounds' worth of stamps. I was happy to discover that they offer a print-your-own postage option. You figure out how much you need, place your order, type in your credit card number and print. Perfect!

Or not. Printed postage must be used within two days. No good. By the time my manuscript travelled to London, sat in the slush pile, got read and sent back, four to six weeks would have elapsed, and although I'm quite certain the Royal Mail staff are lovely people, expecting them to extend the deadline for printed postage usage by several weeks hardly seemed realistic. In desperation, I rang the British High Commission. Their slogan is 'Britain In Canada' but it should really be 'Everything From Britain In Canada Except Bloody Stamps'. Finally I phoned Royal Mail and spoke to a splendid young man called Ryan (if I remember correctly), who assured me that I could order a small quantity of stamps but they would take several weeks to arrive. Defeated, I ordered them and settled in for the wait. I decided it was a perfect opportunity to proofread my first forty-six pages yet again.

Here's what I don't quite understand. We can put a man on the moon, break the sound barrier and send text messages to the farthest reaches of Outer Mongolia in a fraction of a second but getting a few quids' worth of stamps from the motherland in a reasonable amount of time seems beyond the realm of possibility. How can that be? Some authors will tell you that slogging through the middle third of their novel is the most difficult part of getting a book published. Others will tell you it's finding an agent. I'm inclined to believe it's actually procuring the postage for the self-addressed, stamped effing envelope!