Today, the 19th of September 2021, I had pleasant surprise. I opened up Drifting Sands Haibun and found my haibun on the front page. I added the date because it will change over time. We are due for a new issue soon and it will change. But for a short while, I was there. Forgive my unseemly glee, but after being accepted a number of times it is difficult to set a new target, and getting to the front page of Drifting Sands was one that I had set myself.
For those of you reading this too late to see it on the front page, you can try here. Don’t get too excited, I think I posted the link before. It’s just the one about the crow and the ants.
Now, I know you are all wondering what I have done in the matter of Senior Moments. Well, some months ago, I had trouble with my emails, and nearly missed some emails from an editor. We managed to sort that out, but didn’t actually find the cause. Last week I finally started looking at my submission diary (remember I have been ill/lazy for a month) and realised that I should have had some contact from editors. I checked up and found that I had a haiku in a magazine. This was a surprise, but more evidence of the fact that I wasn’t getting emails, or I would have known it was being published.
This set up a panic reaction, because I don’t want to miss the chance of publication, or have editors think that I am rude or inefficient. I am both, but I don’t want people to think it . . .
I have just spent my afternoon writing to the editors who may have emailed me, explaining what happened. It’s a tricky email to write (three times) because there is always the chance that they may not have thought me worth responding to.
Earlier in the week I started to realise what I had done but, prodding around with my email controls in an unstructured and ill-informed way, managed to make it worse. Anyway, I have finally found the answer and corrected it.
I had reset my spam controls a couple of months ago to block a particularly irritating advertiser. In doing so, I had also added gmail to my list of blocked domains. This was clearly a bad move. However, it is unblocked now, explanations have been sent and I am a wiser man.
Excellent. Is it really true about ants cleaning birds?!
Yes – Green Woodpeckers do it a lot.
Well, I’ve learnt something this evening.
That’s good. I often learn from your posts too – the power of WP!
Yes, the power of WP!
Wonderful Haibun – educational, too. Congratulations
Thank you Derrick.
Well done on the publication 😀 I think I have seen that one before, it’s difficult as my head must be full and so there’s no room to retain new stuff 😂
We seem to just get technology nailed and they change it again 🤔
One of my mates describes his brain as a bookshelf – he forces a new book in and an old one drops off the end . . . 🙂
I like that idea but I think in my case it’s the new one that falls off the shelf 😂
🙂
Lordy – so all of your gmail was going to spam? would have noticed that in half a day. Big congrats on another publication!
It wasn’t going to Spam – just being blocked. I’m not very quick on the uptake . . .
Well…it happens…
Too often!
It is exceptionally easy to make a mess of inscrutable technical things when you are trying to make things better so you have my complete sympathy.
Even after I found the instructions on how to undo the destruction it took me ten minutes to find where they had hidden the “Settings” tab.
They just do these things to annoy.
That would seem to be a fair assessment of the situation. 🙂
I remember that haibun about ants and crows. I enjoyed the car radio and memory one, too. Keep writing!
I am a bit slow at the moment but it is coming back to me. 🙂