Easily one of the most popular sections of The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) is called How to Get Rejected. This week, though, I had forcible reminders of how useful my own good advice is – seriously, is that a bit creepy, complimenting my own advice just because it’s in paperback? – and a new situation.

Shame I can’t tell you about the new situation. Haven’t the nerve, sorry. But ask me in a year, okay? Wink. (I’ve just told Siri to remind me to tell you on 17 July 2015.)

I can tell you the rest of it, the reminders and the reinforcement.

Because I had three things on this week where two of them had the definite potential to be rejections. They were the closest thing to actual interviews I’ve had in years. Actually, one of them was without question a full-on job interview. The whole thing. Me in a chair facing four people behind a table. I’m honestly not sure how I managed to talk for all the flashbacks I was getting.

That was a clear project where it was going to be a yes or it was going to be a no. Also a quick yes or no, which is so useful. A second thing was far less formal and it became the kind of thing I am more used to now, a meeting to see if my face fit and whether the work was what I could do and what I wanted to do.

The third turned out to be a yes or no, I just hadn’t a clue it would work that way. But more on this in 2015. I know it seems a long time, but that’s what I thought when the Veronica Mars movie was announced in March 2013 and the next thing you knew, I was watching it in the cinema, so.

The remind/reinforcement, right. I didn’t get the work for the interview one. I am disappointed: I won’t pretend I’m not. Rejection is normal, it’s practically my only form of social interaction, and most of the time the rejection is trivial. Genuinely, I have read emails and letters where I’ve been told that, gosh, the standard was just so high and I’ve spent longer trying to remember what this is all about than I did pitching for it.

Mind you, get enough of those trivial ones in a row and you feel it.

So the interview one was bigger, I really wanted that and it is a help that I understand why they went for someone else. Two someone elses, in fact. And as I read their names, I just thought yes. Perfect. They’re who I’d have hired too.

But what really made that rejection hurt the less is that at the time the email was sent, I was in that second thing, that sort-of interview, and I was finding out that the work was mine if I wanted it. (Literally, that’s what they said. I’m not being cocky about it and overestimating how good I was, they said those very words in that very order. I like them.)

If I’d not been doing that, I’d have got the email when it was sent and that would’ve been a punch. As it was, I came to the email during a marathon session as I caught up with all the messages I’d missed that day. The volume of them plus the success at getting a gig I really fancy, that made failing to get this other one okay.

Okay enough.

So get over your problems with rejection by being rejected – and by never waiting to hear the result, by going on to the next thing. The worst that can happen is that you get both and if that genuinely is a problem, worry about it when it happens.