The One

I don't like dating.

I've never liked dating. The thrill, the chase, the excitement, the games: I don't enjoy it. I know a lot of people who do - who get some kind of sick buzz from potential rejection, whether theirs or somebody else's - but it makes me feel nauseous and frightened. I don't like exposing myself, I don't like making myself vulnerable, I don't like asking somebody to like me and I don't like deciding whether or not I like them. And, frankly, the last couple of years of heart carnage have not helped this innate instinct. I'll be honest: if I'm to be in a relationship again, it's going to have to come and bloody get me, because I'm going to be running away in the opposite direction as fast as I can. Love is literally going to have to find me, run me down, pin me to the metaphorical floor kicking and screaming and then spend at least three years sitting on my stomach singing nursery rhymes until I calm down enough to talk to it. I certainly won't be fluttering my eyelashes at it and taking it out for dinner.

For me, therefore, the stakes have been weighed up and thus is my conclusion: love can sod off. My desire to find the perfect man to love and be loved by is significantly less than my fear of the process by which I would do so, and so I have chosen to stay single.

The same, however, cannot be said for finding a literary agent.

While the romantic passions of my heart are easy to ignore, the cerebral passions are not. No fear, however great or paralysing, can stop my desire to write novels and to eventually sell them. Which means that however much I hate it, I have to find a literary agent, even if the process is precisely the same - and every bit as painful - as finding the right boyfriend.

I had one once: a lovely, award winning literary agent. It was a beautiful and promising relationship. She was the first agent I'd ever sent my (extremely incomplete) book to, she rang me within 24 hours of posting it, I went to see her in London, we sat in her office surrounded by best selling novels and talked for hours. There was a meeting of minds; we laughed, I got the pink flush I get all over my neck whenever I'm excited. She told me she hadn't been so excited about a writer in years and I started crying with happiness. It was the kind of date literary dreams are made of.

And then I immediately ran away to Japan, got caught up in the vortex of a soulless man, stopped writing completely, and my lovely literary agent's interest started waning. One month: still incredibly keen. Five months: keen but irritated. One year: less keen, but polite. Eighteen months: one word answers. Two years on, and she doesn't answer my emails, and she doesn't answer my phone calls, and I strongly suspect that she's got an entirely different tone for my number so that she doesn't answer it by accident and get forced into talking to me. And now I've finally finished the goddamn novel - finished it last night - it's too damn late. All I can do is leave a meek little voicemail asking her to call me when she isn't too busy with writers who actually write when they say they're going to write instead of falling in love and running away instead, and then hang up and cry into my pillow.

She won't call, of course, because I blew it. And I've been in the dating game long enough to know a dead duck when I see one.

So now I'm back to the beginning: forced to make an agent fall in love with me all over again. I have to send out manuscripts, I have to wait for them to call me, I have to hope against all hope that they want to see me and that - if they do - they think I'm worth seeing again. I have to check my goddamn email every ten minutes with a sinking feeling in the pitt of my stomach because there's nothing there. And worse, I have to compare them all to the lovely agent who wasn't just objectively one of the best in the business (and who two months ago sold a debut novel for a six figure sum), but who got my novel. Actually got it. Understood the characters, the sense of humour, what I was trying to achieve with it, where exactly in my heart I was writing from. Who gave me advice I worked into the finished mauscript - all of it - and which made it better, and saw all the flaws in my story before I did. Which is rare in any agent, let alone one who actually knows what she's doing.

In essence, I'm going to have to start doing with literary agents exactly what I'll have to start doing with men: looking for one to replace The One. And that is not pleasant at the best of times, let alone when you have to do it twice at the same time.

The difference is, of course, that I've weighed it up and decided that no amount of rejection, no amount of fear, no amount of pain, will ever stop me trying to find the right agent. And if I have to go on a million dates, and check my email a million times, and sit by my unringing phone for a million hours, I'll do it for the sake of my writing. But not for the sake of my heart.

So I may stay single, but unpublished? Not if I can help it.

Let the games begin.