Tag Archives: submissions

Thinking About Doing Something

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Nothing happens, they say, until somebody sells something.

It’s one of those glib one-liners they use in sales training. However, it’s true. Nothing happens until you do something. Whether it’s the glorious poetry career that is waiting, (if you can manage to send off that first submission), or one of those numismatic articles I keep meaning to write, it’s true. Nothing will happen until you do something.

So I wrote a paragraph about doing things.

Then I looked at details of a number of poetry magazines. It started as a list of possible places for submission, and ended with a half-formed rant in my head.

There is so much detail in some of the submission guidelines. Some 10 point, some 12 point and quite a few don’t mind. Some Times New Roman, one I hadn’t heard of and quite a few don’t mind. Several are still only accepting postal submissions. One explains why it is easier for them to read and digest. What they mean, I think, is that it cuts down on submissions. Or they hate trees.

Generally I avoid these as I still don’t have my printer set up. I really should do that, but I would probably still avoid these magazines. One has published me in the past, but email submissions are so much easier.

I realise that poetry editors are unpaid, and that they are snowed under with submissions, but are they missing something good by making their submission procedures overly complex?

One of the coaches at Newark RUFC, an excellent club that Number One Son played for briefly, once expounded a theory of recruitment to me. It was in relation to one of their age-groups, which was led by an ambitious coach who tried to relive his imagined past glories by bossing kids about. He poached players from surrounding teams and then decided to stop signing new players.

How, the other coach asked, did you know that you weren’t turning away the next Dusty Hare?

That’s a good point, Make it difficult and you might put off a nervous genius. Even if you don’t, is it (rugby or poetry) about finding talent, or about helping people be the best they can be?

Looking For a Rest

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I had a look at Contemporary Haibun Online (CHO) yesterday. It is always worth a read, and I make a brief appearance. Regular readers may recognise the events from last year when Julia’s stumble in the garden became the subject of legends at the hospital, with one of the junior staff saying “Yes, I’ve heard about you.”

This month I only have one submission marked. Sometimes the calendar falls like that. I intend using the time writing and catching up with myself.  The journal in question only accepts one poem as a submission so the pressure is on to produce something really good. It always feels like only having one chance makes acceptance less likely, as does their policy of using guest editors.

Old habits die hard, and I am still inclined to write for an editor to increase my chances of acceptance. It’s hard if you don’t really know them, or their work. It often worries me when I search and can’t find anything they have written. I can normally find something online but not always.

The other problem, and the one which meant I missed submitting last time, is that the submission window is only two weeks long 1st April to 15th April. Last time I forgot that and switched on about a week too late. I’d better get on with some work.

Tomorrow I have blood tests. I hope they do them this time as taxi fares aren’t cheap.

Meanwhile, having let my hair grow for a couple of weeks I couldn’t decide on a trim, an electric shave or a wet shave. I went for electric shave. Bad choice. I really must go back to a regime of two or three shaves a week.

 

A Hamster Analogy

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In the car park at Carsington Water – storm clouds

Today I have blogged. I have been to the doctor. I have lunched on homemade soup (the last of the butternut and sage soup) and I have watched quizzes. I have also, to be fair, watched a bit of TV, snoozed, eaten tea and stared at a screen hoping for a miracle after wiping out 300 words in one of those glitches that sometimes occurs. It can’t be my fault entirely. I clearly delete my work with some random selection of key strokes, but WP really should have a better way to stop me doing it. Even Open Office, which is free, stops me destroying my own work.

In between all this I have also got to grips with sorting out submissions for the end of the month. That is tomorrow. Even as I group the poems for final transmission, I find I am still tinkering with them. I am now down to changing the odd word – the finest of fine tuning.

 

On Wednesday, when all the dust has settled I am going to rethink my life. There must be a beter way to work.

The poetry is going quite well, if I am honest, and I am happy to continue with hat.

The society web pages and newsletter, I am less happy with. It seems a lot of effort for little result and the bulk of the work seems to rest on just two people. As nobody is helping it seems fair to deduce that the bulk of the members aren’t bothered and won’t notice if I stop.

And, of course, I really do need to get myself better organised. However, saving a day a week by cutting out some of the work is a quicker fix than saving twenty minutes here and there by sorting myself out and not looking at Wikipedia.

Daffodils in Nottingham

After all, I’m retired, and I don’t want to replace one lot of work with another lot of work.

First reorganisation – buy a new keyboard, it’s taking me ages every day just checking all the t’s are where they are supposed to be.

And it just took me ten minutes to check that t’s is correct in that context – more time wasted, but it looked wrong when I did it.

Photos will just be random. I have run out of ideas. I selected April 2018.

Robin

Progress . . .

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My Orange Parker Pen

An hour ago I sat down to write a short blog post. It started by saying that I made good progress yesterday and had high hopes of solving many of my writing problems by he end of today.

Then it became introspective, which is not good. I was unable o break out of the cycle of introspection and successive rewrites put me in mind of something circling round a plughole.

And that is why it has taken me the best part of an hour and around a thousand words to come up with the ninety words I have here. Dull, I admit. Unproductive too. But at least, by cutting them severely I have avoided introspection, self-indulgence and whiney.

That’s all OK as far as it goes, but it leaves me with half a blog to write and needing something interesting to say. That’s only 125 words so that’s not a problem. I can fill that with a few sentences about the ease with which I can fill the space – look, the word count is already up to 176 and I’ve managed to keep you reading without actually saying anything.

Today I intend writing a second post in the evening to detail what I have actually done. Yesterday was quite productive but didn’t come up with many results. By the end of today I want to have made at least three submissions, maybe more.

I have a list of finished items, and a list of almost finished items. I have a list of submissions I want to make. All I need to do is match them up, but at hat point I sar to worry about whether I* am sending the right things to the right people. I got hat wrong lat month and ended up with a rejection that should not have happened.

Writing poetry is only part of the art of getting published.

 

I thought I’d go for pen photos again, as the subject is writing. I’m surprised how few I seem to have.

As part of my ongoing commitment to procrastination I have already added another post when I should have been finishing off 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.