The morning passed fairly quickly, though I’m breaking in new shoes and my bunion was twinging a bit. Julia has treated me to a set of shoe stretchers and they have a special attachment for the bunion area so I’m expecting the problem will be solved tonight.
Because of that I went home when we finished at lunchtime and did a few chores, after removing my shoes. I would have liked to have seen my friends on the other side of town but you can’t really walk into a jeweller and slip your shoes off.
I then set to on the new poetry system I’m developing. I now make files up, named for the relevant magazine and submission date. I then have something to aim at when using the computer, instead of relying on memory and scraps of paper. After I send one tonight I will have four submissions out. This is the most I’ve ever had out at one time, and the next two lots are due to go out in October. As yet, I have nothing good enough to go out, which is very worrying. I don’t like it when that happens.
It’s my fault. I’m just submitting at a higher rate than I can write. It takes me seven to ten minutes to write the prose portion of a haibun when everything is going well. Unfortunately it then takes weeks to hone it and write the haiku. In a few weeks I’m sure I’ll have caught up a bit and everything will be back in balance.
In two to four weeks, I’m guessing, I will start getting things rejected and they can be sent out again.
Generally you are asked for three haibun in a submission, and as a principle most magazines will only accept one as they are short of space and want to give everyone a fair go. I can usually place at least one of the rejects, sometimes both, within a few months. Of the three that were rejected last week, two are already out again and the third piece which accompanies them has been out twice before already. Yes, they’ve all been tightened up but they are all essentially the same pieces.
Recycling, that’s the key.
They are all good pieces, they just weren’t fully finished when I sent them out. That’s what happens when you rush things.
Sometimes, when it’s clear that nobody wants it, I’ll admit defeat. The post Murder Your Darlings was one of my defeats. After four attempts I killed one of my favourites by publishing it myself. Editors don’t like previously published work.
However, what I didn’t tell you at the time was that I’d picked over the corpse and turned it into a poem. It will be submitted with a group of poems later tonight.
Reduce (the work), reuse (resubmit) and recycle (use the bits for something else) – it works in writing just thye same as everything else.
Let’s see what happens next.
I’ll mention no names, but thirty years ago I used to know a man who wrote military history books, and, by the time he’d done three, I started to see a pattern as the research from the previous book formed a good portion of the next one. I reckon he wrote nine books from the research he’d done on the first three, This is smart work and good use of resources.
It is also a contrast with a University professor I know. He’s written five books and they are all more or less the same. That, I feel, is lazy, even by my standards.
Finally, the recycled photographs. The gulls from Llandudno Pier feature in one of the resubmitted haibun, which gives me an excuse to reuse some of them.
