Tag Archives: editors

The Mystery of Editors and Some Thoughts on Writer’s Block

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I had my first acceptance from the July submissions on Monday. It was a tanka that had actually been rejected in June, but after a quick check I decided that it was ready to go again.  It was part of a group of nine that had been returned after the tenth was accepted, so I only needed to write one to make the submission up to ten.

It’s one of the age-old questions writers have. I send out ten poems, one is accepted, does that mean the other nine are not good enough?

Sometimes I’ve had an editor ask if they can hold one over for the next edition. I always say yes to that – it saves me work and I assume it saves them work too. If it wasn’t for editors there wouldn’t be any magazines. And if there were no editors and magazines there would be no competition for publication. That’s why I mainly only blog poems that have been published – it means that someone who knows more about it than I do has decided that it merits space.

I’ve also had editors select two or three poems (very, very rarely) and a couple of times they have told me the rest weren’t bad, just not what they wanted for the moment, and I could submit them again at the next submission window. This is very rare – remember we are talking about something in the region of 400 submissions and this sort of thing has happened a handful of times.

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It all tends to indicate that several of the ten are publishable, and that they can all be recycled. That’s why I like editors who give quick decisions. If they reject something in the first few weeks, I can use them for another submissions and don’t need to write as much.

This may be a bad attitude, and more akin to the approach of a  worker on a production line than an artist but  this month I’ve just had an article on collectables published in a magazine, plus four Facebook articles for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire and  a couple of longer articles  for the Peterborough Military History Group. If I waited for aesthetics and inspiration to align I’d struggle. Dawn comes, I drag myself from bed, I make tea, then I start writing. I hate mornings. I like tea and I like writing. I have no time for Writer’s Block and curlicues. And I’m more likely to suffer from dehydration than a shortage of words. I have no time for the introspection in the article behind the link. It’s very interesting, and more than slightly familiar, but I can’t afford to let such thoughts take root.

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Poetry and Robins

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Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

One Door Opens as Another Door Closes

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I’ve just being going through my spam box. I am expecting an email which hasn’t arrived, and was checking it hadn’t been rejected in error. It hadn’t. It’s a depressing place – I have won several prizes in competitions I haven’t entered, have numerous parcels needing to be collected, have to step in to stop various things being cancelled and have had to ignore several requests for sexual favours from women with exotic names.

Julia says they are all actually likely to be from sweaty men working in distant call centres, including the ones from the “women”. It’s a relief  in a way – I really don’t need a car care kit or an electric drill, or a mystery package, and my days of exotic women are definitely in the past. Apart from being married, I’m entering that phase of my life where Pointless and a nice cup of tea hold more attractions than erotic adventures. Anyway, as I may have mentioned, getting my trousers on and off is something of a trial these days.

It’s going to be a tough month. Having done my  submissions I sat back and reflected on the likely success rate as many of them had been out before and some of them were rushed.  One was going to an editor who has never accepted a haibun off me in six years. Derrick asked why I sent things to him. It’s a good question. There are several answers to this. One is that rejection keeps my feet on the ground. I have had some very successful runs of acceptances, but it’s always good to remember that it’s nor assured. A second is that you need constant rejections to stay immune from their demoralising effects. And third is the need to have targets – I’ve set 100 submissions as this year’s target, and I have minor targets like wearing down certain editors who constantly reject me.

I have already had one reply, as I mentioned, asking for a few alterations to one piece. I have now had a second reply rejecting a second lot. It’s one of “those” rejections, he ones that seem helpful but close with the comment that you should read XYZ for more pointers. I’ve had several like that over the years and always wonder why they think I haven’t read XYZ, particularly when it’s been a fixture on the website for the last five years.

Anyway, it was good news in a way. After slightly polishing two of them I am now in a position to submit all three rejected pieces to another magazine this month. It’s a system that has worked before. It’s important to remember that a rejection is only a sign of one editor’s opinion and other editors may have different opinions.

My Orange Parker Pen

The Pitfalls of Contentment

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Although I have a lot to look forward to and a lot to be grateful for – a new house, someone paying me not to work (or a pension as it is also known) and the ability to see Julia all day rather than just for a rushed breakfast and an evening of preparing for the next day, I am at a low ebb in other ways.

I am, for instance, just days away from the end of several submission windows, with nothing ready and, currently, no interest in writing poetry. It’s actually worse than it sounds, because I haven’t even done my list of planned submissions for the year. I’m sure it was only about a month since I said I was going to aim higher this year. So far I have done nothing.

Contentment, it seems, takes its toll.

My Orange Parker Pen

My plan is to improve by writing more. And to write more I have to submit more, because it doesn’t count as writing unless somebody judges it. For instance – my first paragraph uncoiled as one sentence. And that sentence is 65 words. Now, it’s well known that sentences over 30 words are difficult for most people to understand, the British Government style guide specifies a 25 word maximum and many authorities on writing suggest 15-20 words as being ideal, though James Joyce, who was probably a better writer than most Civil Servants, once wrote a sentence that was 4,391 words long (I knew I had a good reason for avoiding Joyce), so it’s fair to suggest that one of the benefits of submitting writing to editors is that they will curb these tendencies (though note how J K Rowling’s books got longer as she became more successful and no editor dared tell her to cut out half the words). I think that was 113   I am a mere amateur compared to Joyce. But you probably already knew that.

I’ve been getting complacent recently – submitting pieces for the Numismatic Society Facebook page does not involve a lot of competition as there are only two of us writing the posts, and that fell to one for a while over Christmas because the other writer was ill.

Time to start testing myself, I think. The only way to improve is to get a few rejections. That will wake me up.

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Poetry and Puffins

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Puffin at Bempton Cliffs

On a good day, when I’m concentrating and moderately free from distraction, I can do a couple of thousand words a day without thinking. Actually, if you’ve read the blog before, you will know that I don’t think.

Recently I have been having a problem trying to write some factual pieces about medallions and sweetheart brooches and that hasn’t been going so well. It takes a lot more planning and fact checking than just rattling off opinions, and I’ve been going very slowly.

Even writing poetry takes less effort than writing a short article. There is, after all, little fact checking to do when writing from imagination.

Strangely, I had a knock back recently from an editor who said something didn’t make logical sense to him. I’d referred to a fire, and also to something happening later, and he couldn’t square the two ideas as he thought the fire would have burnt out. To me, the two thoughts were not linked, and I wondered why a poem had to make logical sense. I’m not sure, for instance, that Dylan Thomas intended us to believe that his father could speak words that literally caused lightning flashes, or that he actually caught the sun in flight. Logically this is nonsense of a high degree. Not quite as nonsensical as Lear and his mimsy borogoves, but nonsense all the same.

Would the same editor, I wonder, have turned down Do not go gentle into that good night for being illogical, or Jabberwocky for not making sense?

You never know. A different editor making decisions and it’s possible that the poetry in the UK could have developed in a completely different way.

And there you go. Twenty minutes. A idea. And a distinct lack of heavyweight thinking. It will be 300 words by the time I have finished and there are plenty more where they came from.

Calling Puffin – Bempton Cliffs

In fact, have some more. Do you remember my trips to see Puffins? They rely on sand eels to feed their young. They are suffering from the lack of sand eels, as are Kittiwakes, and numbers of birds, already hit by bird flu, are falling seriously. Puffins and Kittiwakes are now on the Red List, which is a list of threatened species. They are classed as Vulnerable, due to rapid population decline. It’s not as bad as being Endangered, but it’s far from comfortable.

So to help them, the British Government has banned sand eel fishing in our waters in the North Sea, The EU and, particularly the Danes, have challenged this, It seems they don’t think we should be able to do what we like within out territorial waters. Despite the picture you may have of Danes, from listening to Sandi Toksvig on TV (and notice how she actually lives in the UK, not in Denmark), and all this talk of hygge, they aren’t as nice as they seem.

Puffin

I don’t just base this on their attitude to our territorial waters and their hatred of Puffins. They have had a poor attitude to our seas for over a thousand years, after all. Remember, today’s smiling Dane in a shell of knitwear is just a Viking in disguise. The sand eels that they catch end up in fish meal which is used in factory farming. I’m not necessarily against the Danes and their intensive pig production, as I do like a bacon sandwich, but it has to be said that the Danish bacon industry is morally ambiguous, as is my consumption of bacon sandwiches. However, I’m not intent on wiping out Puffins, and would give up bacon in an instant if I thought it would help.

That’s 600 words. Sometimes I surprise myself.

Puffins at Bempton

 

The Promised Second Post of the Day

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Several years ago I was a member of the Poetry Society. The poetry in The Poetry Review was a bit highbrow for me, and I’m not very sociable so the constant emails from the local group were a bit irritating. This was particularly so as they circulated my email address to every other member of the group, which resulted in some spam. It wasn’t a massive problem but I could have done without it.

Eventually, after disappearing without trace when I entered the National Competition (members got a second entry free), I sent some submissions to the magazine. Well, you have to try, don’t you? I was rejected. I didn’t mind that, I’ve been rejected plenty of times. I did slightly mind the tone of the rejection, though I’ve been rejected in a patronising manner more than once. I’m sure it will happen again, particularity in a field where many practitioners have two or three degrees.

What I did mind was the suggestion, contained in a link, that I might like to make use of the Poetry Society’s  editing service. I can’t remember how much it used to cost, but it wasn’t the cost that annoyed me – it was the inappropriate nature of rejecting poems and then trying to sell the services of the society.

Much the same thing happened today. A magazine that turned me down a few weeks ago has just written. I can, it seems, send them £3 and they will send me the title of the poem they were interested in. And next month, if I send another £12 they will tell me why it was better than my other poems, give me their thoughts on it and, possibly, advice on developing it. They left the £12 until the end.

It may well be that I need to take advice, but it’s the manner in which it’s offered. Plus, to be honest, I have had some good advice on haibun from various editors, who have done it all free of charge. Some of them are very successful and have multiple collections published, so it’s good advice.

And that’s what I want to moan about.

Sorry if it seems ungracious to editors, but after one from a haibun magazine spent several emails on suggesting improvements (two major and several smaller ones) the other one suggesting that I should pay £3 just to find out which was their preferred poem, followed by £12 more for a few thoughts, hit a raw nerve.

I know they have costs to cover. I’m in three societies, have subscriptions to five magazine regularly buy single issues of others and buy about half a dozen poetry books a year, so I’m trying to spread a little money around. However, I’m sure that haibun magazines have just the same costs as the ones trying to charge for advice.

My Orange Parker Pen

Lost in Modern Life

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Daffodils in Nottingham

Number Two Son has just been promoted, he is now a senior analyst in something I don’t understand. He doesn’t understand it either, so I don’t feel too bad. He’s hoping to pick it up once he starts . . .

Number One Son has been doing jobs I don’t understand for years.

This, I suppose, is the way of things in modern life. We didn’t have computers in my day. We barely had calculators. I used to keep track of millions of vaccinations and the necessary monitoring using a ledger and sheets of squared paper which we used to tape together to give us the required length. Today I suppose I would use a spread sheet and be done with it, though I suspect the accuracy might not be as good. Pressing a button has inbuilt hazards, making a mark on paper is a more thoughtful process.

Daffodils

On the poetry front, I have just been informed that my long-listed poems at Butcher’s Dog have failed to progress to the next stage. Unusually, the editor has written a note to explain the selection process. The main stumbling block is, it seems, that poems don’t always fit together to produce a harmonious whole with other poems within an issue. Seems fair enough, and it’s nice to have another excuse for failure. Not that I need another one, because I already have enough and, as previously mentioned, it tends not to worry me too much.

However, it was nice of them to do it, and it’s in distinct contrast to a couple of others that I deal with, who seem to go out of their way to be gruff, or even unpleasant. That of course, is wasted on me. I’m old enough, and gruff enough to take it in my stride. I think this is because I have a balanced outlook on life. Julia thinks it’s because I am ruder than most people who are rude to me.

Daffodils

Ducks and Stuff

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Mandarin Duck – Arnot Hill Park

I’ve just been tidying up my email box. Deleting 100 emails on top of the hundreds that I do as they come in, makes me realise how many I get and how much I have let things get out of hand. Recently I red how part of you can be contained in another person (the example in my case being that without Julia I would lose all memory of family addresses and dates. It’s a bit like that with emails. Much of my life is contained within the email system and if I lost access to that I would find aspects of my personality disappearing too.

But enough philosophical rambling . . .

I’m just about to start writing poetry again (having been derailed by my recent arthritis outbreak), and I was looking up an email from an editor. I wanted information about the next submission period but was hooked by his comments on rejecting my previous submission. I thought I had passed the point of being annoyed by rejection, but it appears I’m not. I don’t want to give too much information because it’s not fair to discuss editorial comments in public, but he editor in question said that the poem didn’t make sense on a literal basis.

Duck – Arnot Hill Park

If I was aiming for writing that made sense on a literal basis i would write travel guides or text books. I’d actually have a chance of making money if I did that. But I write poetry, which is supposed to be full of imagination, allusion and layers of meaning. I don’t recall ever reading that it had to make sense. It’s hard enough to write as it is, without needing it to make sense too.

That email is stored two spaces below another that complains the haiku in one of the haibun I submitted “isn’t a haiku at all”. When I look back at it, I see his point. It was written in haste as I struggled to make a deadline and I wasn’t as sharp at editing as I should have been. This comment I have no problem with, just in case you were thinking I was being unfair to editors. It is, after all, the job of the writer to write poetry of such stunning beauty that an editor cannot resist it.

And with that in mind, I am off to write a poem about ducks. I like ducks and they are fun to feed. They aren’t quite as multi-faceted as swans, but if you are writing limericks they are easier to rhyme.

Floating Feathers – Arnot Hill Park

The Devil drives ’til the hearse arrives . . .

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First post of Sunday. I’m planning several more today – let’s see if the result lives up to the planning. (I’ll give you a clue – it’s not working well at the moment).

So, poetry news. I had an email from Butcher’s Dog this morning  They have decided not to select my work for publication this time (as they put it), and have sent a very pleasant and upbeat email to tell me that. As you know, I have become slightly blase about rejection over the years, but even if you have become immune to it, it’s still nice to be rejected in a cheery manner, rather than the way some people do it.

It also makes commercial sense, as everyone needs to sell magazines, and one of your best markets is the people who want to write for you. I have twice stopped subscriptions to magazines on the basis of the quality of their rejections. There are always plenty of poetry magazines out there who need the money.There are no such worries for Butcher’s Dog,  they are doing a good job and I will be there in the queue next time they have a submission window open.

The other one wasn’t actually a rejection. It was worse than that, it tells me that they like the prose but they think I should rewrite or drop the first haiku and that the title needs work. Some magazines accept or reject without alteration, some ask for, or suggest, small changes. Others always seem to ask for more work. In this case, they ask for the work to be done and the only commitment they make is to look at it again. Most editors either accept and suggest edits or tell you that they would be happy to accept if you make the changes.

I’ve actually been thinking about this for a day or two. In these circumstances it’s sometimes easier just to thank the editor and withdraw the poem. With this one I’m going to give it a go. The opening haiku will be cut. I can’t guarantee writing a better one in the next few weeks so I may as well take the easy way out. The title had been developed after extensive thinking. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the original, and it had several features which were obviously too subtle. The new one is much more in your face and I’ve added a couple of lines to the prose to connect it to the title.

And now it’s time to throw it back and see what happens. If it is accepted it’s just a number, if it’s rejected, it’s no big deal. Regardless of the decision, next time it goes out, it will have the first haiku restored.

Now I just need to decide on whether I add a footnote about the title or not. I hate them, but sometimes you just need to drive the point home.

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Yet Another Acceptance and a Lot of Fruit

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Sunday’s Second Post.

The good thing about one of the acceptances I had earlier in the month was the nine rejections. I think I’ve explained before that editors generally want a batch of ten tanka, and normally only select one. I have had more selected sometimes, but it always seems greedy when you are taking a space someone else would be happy to use. The nine returns were recycled – one being removed. Two were then added to the batch, which was sent out and, shortly after, provided the next acceptance (which was one of the ones that had been rejected by the previous editor). The second editor also named several they would like to see again in a few months if they are still available. They will be, because it seems  good thing to do. That means I have to wite four more to add to the batch and it can be my next submission.

In a similar vein, I have just received news of a Haibun acceptance. It’s the third time this particular Haibun has been out and it’s another slow burner as it seems to have been round for years. I worked on it for about a year and kept it back for a competition entry. It disappeared without trace, as most of my competition entries do, but I sent it out a couple more times and it has found a home. Sorry if this makes it sound like an adorable homeless kitten, but I do get attached to some of my poems.

In the past i have managed to place poems which have been turned down by as many as four editors, sometimes without even making changes. Once I even had one accepted within days of it being returned. And, in case you should think I am boasting, sometimes I haven’t. Sometimes I’ve had something returned two or three times, lost faith in it and allowed it to fade away.

I’ve read blogs by other poets who say they had things accepted after a dozen refusals, or that they are still trying years after they wrote something. I don’t have that level of confidence or fortitude. Or, to be honest, organisation.

Meanwhile, the fruit pictures are part of our harvest. The plums are doing well, the blackberries ditto, and the tomatoes are just coming into their own. We really must get a greenhouse when we move. The figs are a gift – not sure about the variety, but they aren’t Brown Turkey like the last lot. They are very sweet and so ripe you can just suck the contents out.  Photos are via Julia’s phone.