The haiku that had been short-listed have now all been turned down. It wasn’t really a surprise as my haiku don’t generally find favour with editors, and certainly not the magazine that had shortlisted these. Simply being short-listed was ana advance on previous attempts.
In a way I feel guilty that I don’t feel worse about it. I haven’t been turned down since April and it should be a shock and a disappointment. Fortunately I have become hardened to such things. This is, I suspect, both good and bad.
It’s good because I no longer feel demotivated by rejection. In this case it’s been modified by being short-listed and by having some helpful comments from one of the editors.
On the other hand, if I am to make progress I really should care about rejection and use it to spur me on to something better.
This part of another train of thought too. I spend time on haiku because I want to write better haiku as it will mean I am writing better haibun. On the other hand, in the time I take to write 10 haiku, knowing that I will generally have them rejected, I can write ten tanka or a haibun/tanka prose. The chances are that I will get at least two out of ten tanka published and one or two out of every batch of three haibun I write will be published too.
Should I concentrate on what is successful? Or should I concentrate on what I find difficult?
Then we have the free verse. It takes me longer to write and it’s quite competitive. I’ve just been told I’ve been longlisted by a magazine that had 2,079 submissions and will be publishing around 24-25 poems. That sort of thing is about average. Several magazines tell you they only publish between 1 and 10% of the submissions they receive. So far I’m not downhearted. I’ve done it before and there’s a chance I can do it again.
Positive thinking.
I started with a descending scale of fruit. Figs are a poetic fruit. Blackberries are a useful shorthand for autumn. And plums are dangerously close to innuendo.
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I’m sorry to hear that.
Time to practice my positive thinking. 🙂
It really does help!
🙂
I dislike competitions that rely on the judgement of others. Simon Cowell comes to mind
Yes, although they try to make entries anonymous judges can still exert a lot of influence.
You pose a good question about what to try. My tendency would be to keep on doing the things that I was good at, I think. I might be motivated to try harder at the other stuff I suppose but actually getting published would be a big attraction.
This is in line with my thinking. I know that I should do the difficult bits but will probably take the easy way. 🙂
I am glad to hear you are no longer demotivated by rejection. My own advice, to be taken with a grain of salt, is to look kindly at your own objectives and work on what you feel you need to work on. You know yourself better than anyone. That is hopefully when success will start to flow like water around the obstacles in its way. You are already experiencing some of that success. To me it sounds like you know what you need to do already. Think water.
As I was saying to TP, I should do the hard stuff but I write for pleasure so will probably mainly do the easy stuff. 🙂
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