My first publisher’s rejection. I was eighteen years old, and had just started studying Fine Arts at properly—fantasies and fairytales are still some of my favourite stories, and… I have evidence that magic does exist! I diverge… back to my first rejection. I decided to write and illustrate (now that I was officially on the way to being an artist) a children’s story. Unfortunately, in one of the many moves during my period of living abroad, I lost the manuscript, but I can still picture some of the pen and ink drawings. The story—handwritten, there were no computers yet—was about …