Tag Archives: submissions

Cutting it Fine Again

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Ready, set? 250 words here we come. Julia wants me in the kitchen and I want to be in front of the computer so we have compromised. I told her I would go through when I had finished the latest piece of work I am engaged in. As long as I can keep the clatter of keys going I can stay here. If not I will have to go and clean something.

I managed to get . . .

At that point I stopped to look something up and she caught me. I will be back later.

I managed, as I was about to say, twelve submissions sent. The upper limit was twelve, but that would have involved two attempts at forms I’ve never tried and paying to enter a competition. It was a haiku competition and I have trouble writing haiku so I gave it a miss. As I’ve already entered. It was slightly better than last month, because I was a bit more organised, but it could have been better.

So far I have had two acceptances (both incorporating suggestions from the editors) and one enquiry from an editor asking what it was about. I take it that my attempts to incorporate a bit more complication and sophistication have not been entirely successful in this case.

Of course, once you stop, there is always another job, and a meal, and The Great Pottery Throwdown and the relaunch of Mock the Week and a discussion that needs having . . .

The Throwdown had some good stuff on it but Mock the Week, though still better than many things that get on TV, is not quite as good as it was. This may be down to the show being longer or a couple of the comedians they had on, and a bit of bad language. From watching the out-takes of the original series I’m sure there was plenty of swearing, but they used to edit it out.

As Julia said, if she wants to hear swearing she will just turn over to a programme with politicians on and wait for me to start. She doesn’t need to import and comedian who thinks swearing is wit.

23.57. This is becoming a habit . . .

Winnie’s second article in the Nene Valley Railway Newsletter has just been published.

Hard Work and a Sneak Thief at Work

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It was a big day for wring today. My normal bad organisation triumphed in the end and left me in a last-minute panic. Fortunately I was a bit better organised than usual and managed 12 submissions. It won’t be as bad as this all year – there is, for instance, only one planned submission for march.

The upshot was that I ordered pizza for tea as Julia was feeling under the weather and I didn’t have time to stop. We got a good deal and the food will last for two days. I am having salad delivered tomorrow, so we will have it with salad and baked potatoes.

Tonight, however, we had it with garlic bread and onion rings. A piece of garlic bread was missing. I shrugged it off, thinking I must have missed the portion size being reduced on the menu. Shrinkflation is all around us.

However, when the onion rings did not divide equally I knew something was wrong because I’d checked there were ten of them to satisfy myself about value for money.

Turns out we should have had four garlic bread too, so we are one piece of bread and one onion ring down. It’s not ahuge amount but it’s annoying. It also makes me wonder if someone along the line has had his larcenous, and possibly unhygienic fingers in my food. I doubt we will ever get to the bottom of it, as it’s impossible to actually prove we were short but unless I get at least a decent apology I won’t be going back to them.

Modern life is nothing like it was portrayed by Gerry Anderson and Eagle comic, though I don’t actually remember the Tracey brothers having a pizza delivery on the island, and I’m pretty sure dan Dare and Digby never had garlic bread and onion rings. Ah well!

Sorry about the lack of photos today. Julia took some more but by the time I got round to writing this I had only ten minutes to do it and get credit for posting on consecutive days. So I did most of the text, the title, the tags, the category and the single photo and pressed the Publish buton at a minute to midnight.

My paln worked, by the way, I am currently on a six day streak.

A Day of Non-Achievement

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Another day and a rejection. It wasn’t unexpected, because I haven’t been struggling for the last few months. Normally I would not have sent much out this month, but having set myself targets for submissions, and needing to show some self-discipline, I wrote and submitted anyway. In some ways it was a bad idea, but based on past experience I can’t afford to let the momentum fade.

Believe it or not, there was a time when I used to have all my submissions ready for the beginning of the month. I seemed to have so much time in those days. The theory was that if I submitted first, all the subsequent submissions had to do two things – one is that they had to be good enough for publication, but the second was that they had to be good enough to replace the submissions I’d already submitted. This works if editors look at submissions as they come in, but it doesn’t if they wait until the end of the submission period before looking.

There used to be a lot of blogs and internet articles about the science of submissions at one time. I couldn’t find any tonight. There were a few about how to submit (spelling, manners, timeliness, stick to the submissions guidelines etc) but none of the sort I wanted – the ones that used to treat it as pseudo-science and work out ways of increasing your chances by trickery and mind control.

Pictures are from Julia and my sister – they went round the Shaun the Sheep exhibition in Peterborough yesterday. More about that tomorrow. I now have a home made quiche to eat and a wife to talk to. She hasn’t seen much of me today as I have been messing about on the keyboard and achieving very little.

Ah well, time to go. I will add a few photos and talk about them in the next post.

Some Thoughts on Acceptances and Happiness

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Lowestoft

I had a strange acceptance last night. It’s for the autumn. Sometimes it happens – an editor likes two poems, only has room for one, so saves if for later. It’s a little annoying that they only use one at a time, but nice to know it’s good enough to keep for later. I also had a fresh acceptance.

As I’ve said before, it’s tricky counting what is a “submission”. If you count every group of poems I’ve sent off, I have made 10 submissions. Five of them were to one magazine, but they are to individual editors in different forms. The other five sets were sent to three magazines where decisions seem to made jointly, so is that three or five submissions? Anyway, whatever happens, I have had five acceptances, and cannot get more than 5 rejections so I’m going to be 50/50 for the month, at least.

Dolphin – Sutton on Sea

In fact, I am going to make a decision. Different editors and different forms – that’s a submission. Different forms to a single editor or group of editors – that’s one submission.  So I made eight submissions last month and so far have had five acceptances and two rejections, having just one submission waiting for an answer. It reduces my submissions counting towards the 100 a year target, but it makes my percentages look better. Swings and roundabouts.

The two that rejected me have never accepted anything from me in the past, so I wasn’t expecting much. The magazine that hasn’t replied yet is one I’ve never submitted to before so I’m waiting with bated breath . . .

Today I have to start submitting for next month. And so it goes on . . .

I’m feeling quite buoyant today. Maybe it’s the spring. Maybe it’s the acceptances. The answer, I feel, is to keep writing.

Today’s photos are more from the same lot I used yesterday – July 2018.

Plaques on the hand rail – Southwold

Another day, Another Rejection

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I’ve had better starts to the morning. Depending on which system I decide to employ I have either started with a rejection (making it 2 all for the month) or have had two reelections, making it 3-2. It’s one rejection note from one editor regarding submissions of two forms of work. It’s also from a magazine that has never accepted anything from me despite a number of attempts. If I call it one submission/rejection it makes the figures look better. If I call it two, it makes it easier to reach the figure of 100 submissions. Tricky.

This one didn’t free much up, because the two submissions only contained half a dozen pieces. However, the previous one released fifteen pieces. Now that I have let them sit a few days I will look through them, make any changes I spot and send them straight off again. I need to submit 15 haiku for the 15th of the month and another 25 by the end. This gives me the material for 15th and the newly written ones will do for the later requirements.

I am getting back into0 the flow of it. As I may have said, this months submissions include two magazines that have never accepted anything from me and one I have never submitted to before, so the rejections aren’t a surprise. Nor are they accompanied by condescending advice, which, as you know, always annoys me.

As part of the process of getting back into submitting more, I read the comments by a writer who had judged a competition for a magazine I was thinking of submitting to. They had a list of things which, in their opinion, automatically put people out of the running. Looking through the magazine later, I saw several published poems which included these supposedly fatal flaws. Can you work it out? I can’t. That’s another reason why I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. Nobody can really define what makes a good haiku so what’s the point of overthinking it? The only thing that annoys me about it, is the people who declare certain things to be fact, when they are clearly opinion.

Anyway, Julia has just returned from her morning run and it is time for me to make breakfast, so I will leave now and feed her. She already has my day planned (it seems to feature a lot of “tidying” so I want to keep her as happy as possible. Happy wife, happy life, as they say.

Oh dear, just published without adding photos.

Four Minutes to Spare

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A big Bug Hotel

I managed eight submissions this month, one with four minutes to spare. This is slightly better than last month when my final submission went off after midnight my time, and relied on the time zone to get it there on time.

I have been looking at a different way of counting submissions. At the moment I count submissions to editors. If the magazine has two editors and I submit to both, I count it as two submissions. If it has one editor and accepts two forms I count it as one submission. I’m thinking that I may start counting the two forms as two submissions. It seems to me that as I am trying to extend my range, and write more forms, it’s fair to count the different forms as individual submissions. Does this make sense, and does anyone have any thoughts on it?

Yes, I like teasel

I’m also going to have to look at the way |I make submissions. Four minutes makes for a good title, but it’s a poor way to write poetry. As happened last month, some of the poetry is so fresh that if it were paintwork it wouldn’t be dry.

As you can see from the header picture, I was out and about today. The violets are out and I’m regaining my eye for detail. It’s a slow start. It always seems to take a long time to regain a habit once you have lost it.

A very pleasant day

Anyway – nine submissions last month, eight this month. This month will be busy (it’s already twenty minutes into March as I write) – 10 submissions to write, though if I apply the editor rule, I will only be able to count them as six.

This is a Bee Bank – I assume it’s going to feature nesting places, but I’m going to have to find out more.

 

Done!

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A while ago I wrote I wanted to make “submissions to 9 different editors at five magazines, plus three possible competition entries.”

Well, I didn’t bother with the competition entries.  I just ran out of time and inspiration. And one of the magazines caught me out – it has a cut-off date of 25th and I let it pass because I wasn’t concentrating. I also forgot an auction in the same period. Sometimes a brain cannot hold all the infromation you need.

However, I have sent off nine submissions to the nine editors at five magazines. This suggests my original maths was wrong, but that’s the least of my worries.

So far I have had one result – a request to restructure a tanka prose. I can do that. I assume that the next two weeks will hold some mixed news – one of the editors always turns me down and I suspect I will be rejected by several others, as two submissions were written only minutes before I sent them off. This is not the way to write good poetry, but it is the way to meet targets. This month I intend writing everything I need at least two weeks before I need it so I can polish it.

I have ignored Julia and my WP reading over the last week or so, and need to catch up with both. Even as I type, she is cutting fruit for our breakfast. Time, I think, to stop typing for rest of the day and spend time on my Christmas present – a jigsaw of garden birds.

This evening I will start the rewrite and will also try to write a poem about doing jigsaws. In the life of a poet, nothing goes to waste. Then I will tell you the latest squirrel news . . .

My Theory of Timing Submissions

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REsettling the plough

As it turned out, yesterday’s grand plan ground to a halt. With just sixteen days until the end of the month I need to start looking at haibun and tanka prose. I have, as usual, plenty of prose sections, but finding the right words for the haiku and tanka can be tricky. I have just about got enough for four submissions but |I need to get on with it as the final few short lines can end up taking a long time.

Just as I thought it was all coming back the hard facts indicate that I don’t have enough poems, and the ones I have, aren’t far enough advanced. There was a time when I used to have all my submissions queued up at the end of a month, waiting like caged greyhounds to hit the ground running as the new month  My theory was that if I was borderline but got in first, the later poems would have to be better than me to displace me and just being equally good would not be enough. Better, I thought, to be the first poem about getting old than the second, third or fourth. Poets are notorious for churning over the same few subjects, so if you can’t be original, or best, try being first.

Detail of the mouse

Now, as my energy declines, I find it hard enough just to scrape a few poems together by the end of the month. There is an advantage to this – the decisions seem to be faster and you have the rejects back in time to use them again in a timely manner. Using this system I have sometimes had a decision within hours, and the poems have been out again in a similar time span. I once had a poem that was rejected, submitted elsewhere and accepted within a space of days.

However, as things stand, I need twelve poems of usable quality. Time moves on, and those twelve are now my priority. The great recycling project will have to wait. editors often remark on the number of submissions they receive, but it’s also true that there are more editors out there than I can submit to. I just can’t write fast enough. October is a month with no haibun submissions planned, so the recycling can start then, as can the production of the next batch of haibun.

Two sizes of wheatsheaf loaf

Pictures are from September 2016 this time.

Childhood Reading and Other Stories

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A brief surge of activity and some hasty rewriting sees me with nine poems to send off. They were almost ready, they just needed editing and the haiku/tanka adding. That takes me as long, or longer, than writing and editing the prose sections. Haiku, as I have said before, are slippery and elusive. Tanka are easier as they have more words and fewer rules. Here’s another link – to Haibun this time.

In the last post I forgot to mention two things. One was the yell of raucous laughter that escaped me when a serious, rotund and shiny youth (a trainee lawyer) spoke about a class action he was initiating against landlords. Julia thought I was in pain, but I was merely laughing at his description of allowing landlords to do certain things in relation to insuring flats. He described the situation as like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Vivid and amusing in itself, but doubly so when uttered by a well-fed, junior lawyer who clearly lacks self-awareness and does not realise how the general public views lawyers and their bills.

As Burns said:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

I’ll leave you to translate that for yourselves.

You may also like to look up this man, who was also a Scottish poet and is probably the second best writer to come from Langholm. This man is, of course, the best.

I said “two things” a few lines back, but I’ve forgotten the second one. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Ah! The books. I found them when I was clearing out. They are surplus to my requirements. I won’t read them again, they aren’t in collectable condition and, although they are part of the foundations of my reading, I am not particularly fond of them. I also found a number of Biggles books and a set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Those, I will keep.

A Pause, Some Thoughts and a Conclusion

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I just finished making three submissions. I wavered between six submissions and two, so three is a compromise.  The three I sent off involved five poems, which were more or less complete when I started looking for poems earlier in the week. The three I didn’t make would involve fifteen tanka, and I have none written, apart from a few that have already been rejected several times. When I was in this position a few months ago I rushed some into existence and got two rejections from the three. It doesn’t seem worth rushing to submit something that makes it look like you can’t write decent poetry. I will wait and apply myself to gradually getting back up to speed.

The truth is that I prefer writing about collectables, even if the results are only seen by a few members of the Numismatic Society on Facebook.

We had breakfast out yesterday. It was partly to avoid doing something else and partly to establish a pattern of me going out. Julia thinks that I need to go out more. I don’t.

Breakfast at Harvester is not the all you can eat blowout it used to be.  I’d been looking forward to a touch of fruit and cereal, a moderate Full English and several slices of  toast with honey. They don’t do it like that now. The big breakfast option (three sausages, three rashers of bacon, two eggs, half a poorly cooked tomato, one watery mushroom, beans, three hash browns, one tiny slice of black pudding  and a couple of slices of toast, was big and, at £9.99 was reasonable value by today’s standards.

In terms of quality it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Same goes for the experience – it used to be quite a leisurely and relaxing way to eat breakfast but now, wit6h no honey or marmalade and the other changes, it isn’t so relaxing.

I could have done with the smaller breakfast option but the only way to get black pudding was to order the larger breakfast. To pay £2 for an extra sausage, extra rasher of bacon, tiny black pudding slice and, I think, an extra hash brown. I just checked – yes you do get an extra hash brown. You are supposed to get two tomatoes and two mushrooms, which I didn’t get. Cheapskates. Though considering the poor cooking of the mushroom and tomato I may not have wanted more.

The moral of the story is that as prices rise quality,  whether of food or service or relaxation, seems to go down.

Note too how they say the toast is free, as if it is a special bonus offer. Sorely it is a normal part of breakfast, as are the preserves to put on it.

Anyway, there you go. Went to Harvester. had a late breakfast, didn’t need to eat again until we had soup and a sandwich in the evening. Probably good value by modern standards but too much food for me as I try to lose weight, and deficient in far too many ways. Will be giving it a miss in future, unless I am seized by a sudden desire for boiled mushrooms and half a lightly warmed tomato.

I just looked at my emails – I already have an acceptance. It took 34 minutes and is a new record. I am now officially feeling more enthusiastic about writing poetry.

This is Julia’s breakfast – I had scrambled eggs. It is, however, my elbow that you can see across the table.