Tag Archives: poetry acceptances

50!

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So, last time I mentioned acceptances, I was on 48 and saying that 50 was no big deal as it was just a number and didn’t reflect on the quality of the poetry. Fifty is still just a number, but after two more acceptances, it’s now a number I have reached. I’m now looking at the list and wondering what the chances are of me hitting 55. It won’t make me a better writer, but it will be a bigger number. What makes it even better was that the two acceptances were from a magazine that has previously been  a bit hard to get into. I won’t count too many chickens before they hatch – an acceptance is a momentary thing. In a couple of months they may well be hard to get into again. However, it does give me faith in the power of practice and persistence.

The downside is that I have looked at the haibun they accepted and I can see a major flaw in it. I hate it when that happens. However, when I tried to think of ways to get rid of the flaw I introduced others, so it will have to do.

I’m currently looking for someone to put a new roof on the conservatory. It was built by a company who went conveniently bankrupt and it has never really been satisfactory. They say that things like bereavement, divorce and moving house are stressful life events. Is it a coincidence that they all involve the legal profession? I wonder. Anyway, they never seem to include finding decent builders in these lists, and I can tell you I find that quite stressful. We will have to see how that goes.

My new batteries arrived yesterday so I can start baking again. That’s a new problem for me. We had multiple sets of scales on the farm so always had a set available. Now, on my own, a flat battery (and inability to find the spare which I know is somewhere around, renders me unable to weigh things. I’m sure I still have the old set somewhere around. They aren’t quite as accurate or convenient, but they work without batteries. This is something I should have considered before moving over to technology.

Thirty! Forty six!

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Something strange happened this afternoon. The day, having started as Friday (I even wrote about it being Friday) but by lunchtime it had become Saturday. I even started planning for “tomorrow” thinking it was Sunday. This has never happened before. I have sometimes struggled with what day it is, and have needed to gather my thoughts, but I do not remember changing days in mid flow.

This would be just another amusing anecdote, but after the cabbage episode I am beginning to have some serious doubts regarding my mental capacity. The advantage is that after having one “Saturday” I am now able to have an extra day at the weekend. The disadvantage is that, being retired, the concepts of “weekend” and “extra day” now have little meaning.

On a more fun note, I tried a pickled egg today. They have been in the fridge for two weeks now, which is the minimum time suggested by the Hairy Bikers in the recipe. They are OK. I will check again in two more weeks, as they did say a month was better. The vinegar is diluted with water in the recipe, and has some sugar in it. Currently, the taste is slightly sweet and the vinegar lacks bite. I will do another lot without water or sugar and see how they go. After that I may need to look at the quality of vinegar. I’m currently using the cheapest, and it may be false economy. However, it does cut the grease effectively when wiping down the hob.

I’ve had two acceptances today, so I’m quite cheerful. One needed a minor edit and a discussion on quotation marks. I was cheery and cooperative and pretended to care about punctuation. This brings the number of acceptances up to 46 for the year and I’m happy that I will probably make it to 50. In artistic terms this doesn’t matter. Forty nine or 51 are much of a muchness, but 60 has a psychological value. Total submissions are 70 so far with another 10 planned. It is significantly short of my  target of 100 submissions. There are several reasons for this, including a patchy work rate, a number of magazines cutting back on publication frequency and the fact that I haven’t written any non-Japanese style poetry this year. I may not make it next year either, as I am doing more numismatic writing. If you take them into consideration I’m on target to do about 70 more, but as they are all for societies there is actually no quality threshold and I have a 100% acceptance rate – that’s not really proper writing.

Finally – food. I made a mushroom biriyani tonight. Well, I used a spice kit for biriyani. The actual ingredients and outcome were non-traditional. However, I used sweet potato, onions, peas, rice and mushrooms, so it was healthy. Of those, the red onions, sweet potato and peas were making their first appearance this week. That makes 30. I have the veg prepared for tomorrow, with swede and cabbage, so look likely to manage 32, possibly more if I eat some nuts.  I am happy with that, and happy I was able to source over 30 plant-based ingredients in the house without doing any special shopping.

And that is that for today. Pictures will be from October 2018. Many are from Clumber park in the days when they weren’t charging fro entry and I could actually walk.

 

Have You Ever Heard of an Aplustre?

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If yes, you are very well read, and a Roman scholar. If, like me, you haven’t, you are about to be educated. It’s the stern decoration of a Roman ship. It’s not a word I’ve ever had a use for before, and, apart from using it as a subject for a post, I have little use for it now.

It appears on the design of a coin of the Roman Republic that is featured on the Facebook page of the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire, which is where I saw it. This is the reason that collecting coins, or indeed anything, can be so educational.  If you have nothing better to do, go and have a look. If you can, push a few “Like” buttons – it encourages Steve who does all the work loading things up. He also writes the bits on ancient coins while I try my best to bring the quality threshold down with 300 word pieces on plastic bus tokens, aluminium medallions and things from the junk box.

Admiral Vernon and Commodore Brown. See previous post.

The next talk is Olympic coins – it’s given by one of our more polished speakers, so there will be no equipment failure this time. We have some good speakers this season, including someone talking about the legendary Fishpool Hoard in November. I’m not sure if I will be at that or not as Julia would like to move before the cold weather starts.

Meanwhile, I have just had an email from the final editor of the month. One tanka and one tanka prose accepted. So that’s four submissions sent and four acceptances. I will not lie, it feels good. However, it could be better. There is always the chance of having two accepted, as I have sometimes done, so there is still room for improvement.

My Orange Parker Pen

Poetry, Proverbs and Poppies

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I’m feeling a bit like the proverbial full bookshelf. It’s the one where you force another book into it and something falls off the end . . .

I’ve been writing more about coins and medals recently – the three short articles for the Numismatic Society’s Facebook page are the thin end of the wedge, I’m preparing others too – and I seem to have stopped writing poetry, as if it just fell off the end of the shelf. One minute it was there, now it’s gone. I have three unopened poetry magazines and nothing in the pipeline.

 

This has coincided with doing more reading again (which is a bit like recharging my batteries after so much poetry writing), more research and more retirement planning.

Little Gidding

I’ve just had three poems published, while I’m on the subject. Not sure if I’ve posted the link before (my memory is getting worse). The magazine is Contemporary Haibun Online, which is always worth a read and I am here, here and here. Sorry, I suppose I could be more subtle or inventive with the links, but I’m not.

 

In themselves, they are a great indicator of time passing. Poetic time is very distorted. One poem actually started five or six years ago. It has changed substantially since I started it, and been rejected four times. Two others were written last autumn after I went to a couple of family funerals. One harks back to a time when I was 16. That is now 50 years ago. That thought is hard to grasp. I have let 50 years slip by and would be hard pressed to tell you anything I have done in that time.

Maybe that’s the theme for my next poem.

It’s poppy time again

Steak Pie and Idle Chat

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I went out for  meal last night – Steak and Ale Pie at a local pub. Since I last had it either the portions have grown larger or my capacity for food has ben reduced. I’m hoping, after  over a month of losing weight, it is the latter. I hve to get my portion size down, it’s the only way to do it. Experiences like last night are worrying, because it’s an example of how you cn start eating too much again.

Newstead Abbey Again

Work was dull in parts, interesting in others. I ate my sandwiches far too early. This has always been the case. When I worked on farms I ate at lunchtime but as soon as I had a job driving between farms to do blood tests and monitoring I started eating my sandwiches about half an hour after leaving home.

I had an email last night, two tanka accepted to go with the tanka prose I previously had accepted. Some editors are very quick. One of the others tells me they don’t send out rejections, but if you haven’t heard from them within 12 weeks you can assume it’s safe to send the poems to other people. This isn’t satisfactory and I don’t usually submit to editors with similar policies, but I fancied a change this month.

For January I sent out 11 submissions. I missed one out because they wanted poems to a theme I didn’t feel like writing and two because they were competitions and I’m not altogether in favour of competitions. You tie up the poems for months, pay for the privilege, and then when you read the winning entries you wonder what idiot picked them. Sometimes I optimistically enter a competition but am usually brought down to earth when I read the results.

Next month I just have five. I may look for a few more, or I may just take a rest.

 

Newstead Abbey again

Thanks to Julia for the photos again.

On Balance, a Good Day

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When she went to the Narnia show just before Christmas this tree was still standing.

It was a slightly mixed day. I had a thousand Churchill crowns to pack. It is the 150th anniversary of his birth and various people are making plans to celebrate it. We got rid of the accumulated crowns about a year ago, but we are offered so many we had managed to build the stock up again. It’s remarkable how often they crop up, even sixty years after they were issued. This was not the most interesting aspect of the day, I have to admit. In the end I only packed 500, but the other 500 are part done. With phone calls and visitors I didn’t have enough time, which seems strange as you wouldn’t think that it would take so much time.

Snowdrops are out

I did take pictures, but decided to use some that Julia took when she went to Newstead Abbey with her group today. Several people didn’t turn up, and the gardens were cold. That meant they were able to fit everyone in the minibus and go out for a trip. One of the group managed to get a wet foot using the stepping stones but apart from that it all seems to have gone smoothly.

I also had an email. One of the submissions I sent a few days ago has met with success, the editor in question accepting two of the three tanka prose I submitted. This was a bit of a boost as I have felt under the cosh recently, being too tired to write after my various illnesses. I don’t often get two out of three accepted so it feels like a step up from my normal performance.

Fungus lurks in the stump of a felled tree – a suitable morbid subject for poetry perhaps.