In 2010, during a particularly directionless time in my life, I wrote a short story about two lonely people whose lives briefly intersect. It was called They Just Find It Comforting and it was a quiet idea with a soft optimism: we are all in sync, connected to one another through the spaces we share and the things we touch. It was rejected by a string of famous publications and competitions, before receiving a personalised rejection from a literary magazine. I continued to write new stories, and it joined the legion of not-quite-good-enough-for-publication work languishing in my unpublished folder.
In 2016, I was chairing a short story salon at Waterstones Gower Street, and I asked short story writer and novelist Courttia Newland, ‘When do you decide it’s time to let go of an unpublished story? How many rejections before you decide to shelve it?’ He looked baffled. ‘Never. If I still like it, I’ll just keep submitting it.’
Over the next few years, I wrote and published far spikier stories, but I kept returning to They Just Find It Comforting and thinking of Courttia’s words. I never stopped liking it. I kept submitting it and kept collecting rejections. I also continued to tweak it, and eventually added a penultimate scene that brought the themes of the story together: loss, nostalgia, a sense of connection that quells a rising tide of grief and loneliness. I changed the name to He Just Finds It Comforting, which felt like a better fit. The story was better, but it had already been rejected so many times from so many publications, I felt like I was running out of options and figured it just wasn’t meant to be.
In 2020, Cunning Folk, an independent magazine covering magic, mythology, folklore and the occult, was commissioning work for a forthcoming edition on the theme of synchronicity. I thought of He Just Finds It Comforting, my sweet little nomadic story with nowhere to call home. The fee for published work was modest, but I liked Cunning Folk, understood producing beautifully illustrated magazines is an expensive endeavour, and at this point I’d run out of more lucrative places to try to place the story anyway, so I sent it through. Much to my surprise, it was accepted. As an extra boon, it was also chosen for Cunning Folk’s print anthology Spiritus Mundi, pushing my fee to a more robust figure. I considered it a win, shared the link on Twitter when the piece dropped and carried on working on the novel I’d had on the boil for the last four years, an arch thriller about two booksellers, true crime and retail hell.
In the late summer, I received an email. It was from an editor at a big four publisher. She’d read He Just Finds It Comforting via Cunning Folk, couldn’t stop thinking about it and wanted to speak to my agent. I didn’t have an agent, but I was over the moon. I explained I was still working on my debut novel, and she said when I was ready to query agents, feel free to mention her name as an interested party.
I spent the next two months hammering away at Death of a Bookseller with a renewed sense of purpose, and then in November I received another email. It was from another editor at another big four publisher. She’d also read He Just Finds It Comforting and was “bowled over” by it. She wanted to meet for a coffee over Zoom (cos that’s how we rolled in 2020) and discuss a writing project she had in mind. I can’t disclose the details as I signed an NDA, but it was an IP project – a book idea that had been developed in-house, and they needed a writer to complete the work. It was a very on-brand concept for me, but if I went ahead with the project, I’d lose my debut status to a book that wasn’t truly mine. On the other hand, at this point, Death of a Bookseller was only forty thousand words long and it had taken four years to write. I wasn’t sure if the idea had legs, wasn’t sure if I’d ever finish it. I was torn.
I met with a good friend, a literary editor with impeccable taste in both fashion and fiction. It was a chilly afternoon in late November. We bought takeaway pints in plastic cups, and drank them in the street in our winter coats, standing the regulation six feet apart. Without giving away any details covered by the NDA, I shared my predicament: should I stick with Death of a Bookseller, or twist and write the IP project? My friend offered some advice: don’t make this decision alone. Reach out to agents, share the first three chapters of my incomplete manuscript and the nature of the IP project, as if I went ahead with it I’d need representation anyway. She suggested the name of an agent she thought might be a good fit, and I went straight home and followed her instructions. I sent the same email to ten agents in total, explaining I had to make a decision regarding the IP project by January. ‘I have to say, I *love* the sound of DEATH OF THE BOOKSELLER,’ one wrote. ‘Will you give me a beat to read your sample chapters, and then perhaps we could have a chat?’
Within a week, I’d signed with Zoe Ross at United Agents. She felt Death of a Bookseller showed promise, and we declined the IP project. ‘If you motored hard,’ she wrote, ‘could you get me a full first draft in a month’s time – or is that mad?’
It was mad, but burning with ambition, I knuckled down and smashed out 20k in a month. In early 2021, we completed a round or two of edits, and the novel was ready for submission by March of that same year. After a small but terrifying auction, it sold to Hodder and was published two years later as an instant Sunday Times bestseller.
As I approach forty, He Just Finds It Comforting isn’t quite the story I’d write now, but I still like it. It reminds me of a certain period of my life, the aimlessness of being in my mid-twenties, reading graphic novels in beer gardens, writing short stories late into the night sitting on my mother’s living room floor, healing a grieving heart, and finding comfort in small pockets of happiness: a hot day, a cold drink, a good book, a brief inconsequential connection with a stranger. It’s soft and sentimental, but I suppose it’s my own softness and sentimentality that kept the story on the backburner, waiting for that perfect opportunity to change the course of my life forever.
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You can read He Just Finds It Comforting is on Cunning Folk here.
Alice’s second novel Let The Bad Times Roll was published in April 2026. You can find it here.