I had a surprise this afternoon when I switched the computer on and it worked. Sorry, only joking, but based on yesterday’s post I expect some of you heaved a sigh of relief. I did have a surprise, but it wasn’t that. I had been sent an email by Country Life, which happens regularly, and in it they were running a number of articles about Northamptonshire, which is becoming known as the new Cotswolds. Strange, I thought, I’m sure I mentioned that several years ago in a post titled Cotswolds or Notswolds?
Looks like I’m in the forefront of modern trends and thinking. That was a surprise as I’m not usually a trendsetter. However, as usual, I am at the back of the queue when it comes to getting paid for my prescient brilliance. I just hope it doesn’t lead to the ruination of Northamptonshire as it fills up with Londoners.
Then I turned on my emails. I had an email from Failed Haiku. They have accepted a haibun for next month. Out of the submissions I’ve sent out i the last couple of months that now means numbers two and four have now accepted haibun. One and three have yet to reply. Five and six are just submissions of haiku and I don’t hold out much hope for them, but I won’t get better if I don’t try.
I am, as I have said before, not good at haiku, and try to disguise the fact by writing a bit of prose to dress it up, thus creating a haibun.
I once read an article on how you should set yourself up to fail because you learn more from failure than you do from success. Unfortunately I have also seen articles saying you learn more from success than from failure. The only thing I know about failure is that the more you fail, the more you get used to it. It’s all very well telling yourself it isn’t personal or that it’s just an editor’s preference. You can even make a book of your successes so that you can leaf through it to buoy yourself up when things get tough (and I confess that I have done this). But the best thing of all is just toughening yourself up by practicing being rejected.
I am currently employing the same theory that I used when I was a salesman. If you have to make twenty calls to get one sale you need to get the nineteen calls out of the way. So I’ve decided to submit more and see if it results in more acceptances. If it doesn’t I will have to have a serious look at the quality of my output.
Only one photo tonight.A combination of the old editor and an old computer meant it took seventeen minutes to load the featured image. Life is too short to load a second. In fact the day is too short to load another.