I love a good stock photo. Look at this guy, he has evidently been turned down by the Arts Council for the seventh time and now has to find a way to fund the project he’s been planning for a year. Or perhaps he’s just had the manuscript he’s spent six years writing turned down by the publisher he felt it was a perfect fit for. Or maybe the poems he thought were his best, his absolute best, the best thing he’s ever written, have been turned down and returned to him with generic rejection in which they got his name wrong and called him Farty rather than Marty.

Oh, the pain.

I have now been rejected more times than I can shake a stick at, and readers, I can really shake a stick.

People will tell you that rejection is just part and parcel of being a writer…