Tag Archives: submissions

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.

More Ups and Downs

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The rate of improvement in my hands has slowed down today – one is almost cured but the other is still hanging on. Tonight is my night for more anti-arthritis drugs so I’m hoping this will help. If not I may hve to ring the specialist next week and see if they can help.

On the poetry front I had another rejection today, but it was from someone I expected to reject it, so it wasn’t a surprise. I am going to mount a concentrated effort to wear him down over the next year.

The shop was quiet all morning, then picked up for the last hour. In the end it was a successful week, but it can be quite wearing on the nerves to wait until the last hour of the last day of the week to achieve this. Someone rang and made an appointment for next week, telling me that he’d avoided Saturday as we were probably too busy. I laughed.

Yes, I read a lot of low-brow books…

As a result of today’s refusal, I now have three more haibun to send out. I will prod them round a bit to (possibly) improve them and that means I don’t need to write anything else to make this month’s submissions.

I’m feeling a bit like our garden plum tree this month. If you don’t prune properly and thin out the fruit you end up with a tree that only fruits in alternate years, known as a biennial bearer. I’m much the same. I submitted so much last month that I don’t feel like writing at the moment. It’s a pattern I need to address. Part of it is down to my hands, but a lot of it is due to the amount I submitted last month.

This month’s submissions are now all taken care of and I need to start on the poems for March. It’s a reasonably light month, as is April so I’m hoping to relax a bit and build up a depth of material. At one time I was organised enough to send my submissions in the first few days of the month, instead of the last few. The disadvantage is that you wait longer for a reply, but the advantage is that you are generally more relaxed and make better quality submissions.

Soon we will have a new garden

 

Wednesday? Already?

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Another outing for this photo

Somehow, I missed Tuesday. It wasn’t much of a day and we had rain falling audibly on the flat roof above us as we worked.

The only good thing was that when I switched on my emails to check them before going to bed, was that I have had another acceptance.

It my look, to someone just reading the blog for the first time, as if my life is one long acceptance, but this isn’t the case. Due to the erratic nature of my submissions I hadn’t submitted anything since October. My October submissions produced one acceptance and two rejections. It ws a poor month, everything considered, but sometimes there are months where nobody is open for submissions. I appear to have made twelve submissions in September, but they were better spread than my efforts in January and I didn’t notice them.

I have noticed that editors tend to select the first haibun or tanka prose from the selection when I submit the required three. This might be because I naturally order them from bad to worse. It’s definitely true that the third is often not as good as the others. Then I looked again. My last six successful submissions all resulted in the first one being picked. However, I then had a run of six where the first was only picked once, so I may be wrong.

This is known as clutching at straws. Tuesday produced little to write about and Wednesday has been little better (a blood test and a Shingles booster vaccination)  so I’ve written about submissions.

Snowy Detail

The alternative was to tell you about my nosebleed (I’m currently typing with a piece of kitchen roll shoved up one nostril) but I thought a couple of hundred words on submissions might be less disturbing than the word picture of a gory keyboard warrior and the resulting discussion.  So I won’t discuss it.

No photographs on this one because WP seems to have stopped working. I can select photos but the button to load them seems to have stopped working. This applies to headers and photos in the text.

I suspect interference from foreign governments. I’m having problems with eBay photos at work too. It’s state-sponsored hackers. Has to be. I mean, WP and eBay never have problems . . .

Magpie in the snow

There is a warning out for snow tomorrow, though it is hedged round with provisos. It may not actually arrive. Or it may be sleet. None of the scenarios engages my enthusiasm. Even if there is no snow I won’t feel happy until it’s Friday and there is definitely no snow.

Yes, later in the evening I was able to add photos.

2023 – The Last Post

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Yes, I know it’s slipped round to 2024, but these things happen.

Somehow, with my frequent slippages of time and my good intentions about punctuality never quite working out, it is appropriate that I am late. I have just, as usual, fallen asleep in front of the TV, woken and made a decision about whether or not to blog. Really I should go to sleep, but he urge to write is strong.

I am finally beginning to feel like I am recovering from my chest problem, It’s far from a full recovery, but I am at least starting to feel like I am making progress. It took a while at the beginning as there were symptoms from several things to unravel and I spent at least a week getting worse. Even yesterday, I felt very weak. Today I have begun to feel a little better. It’s surprising that you can sleep for 8 hours at night, then snooze through a lot of the day, and still end up feeling tired, but that’s how I am at the moment. While you are sleeping, you are healing.

Yesterday I decided I wouldn’t make any submissions for December. There seems little point in rushing work which can be left to mature. There are plenty of opportunities for submissions in the next few months – better to do something decent than rush into doing something badly. It always seems slightly rude not to support an editor who has accepted work in the past, but it also seems slightly rude to send something when you know it isn’t your best. There is so much more to making a submission than merely writing it and sending it off.

Photos are mainly Julia.

Too Cold to Work

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s been a bit chilly this afternoon, so I spent it in front of the fire in the front room. Winter, I’m afraid, tends to depress my productivity. I have up to ten submissions to make this month and so far I’ve not made much impact. Being laid up for two weeks with the infection took some of the wind out of my sails and laziness did the rest. Really, I should be doing better than this and getting ahead.

I’ve had several bits published, including this. I’m near the foot of the list of contributors and you  can click the Simon Wilson link, or you can scroll down to page 53. I’ve also had a magazine with me in it, but no internet version. As usual I will let them have it for a month or so before quoting the poems. Or I may just forget about them – they are only average. The one I’ve supplied the link for is only average too, so don’t get your hopes up – just another tale of middle aged people (who am I kidding? we are elderly people) emptying out a garage (which, to be fair, is more a plan than an actual achievement).

Some people get out into nature, or world events. I write poems that take place in my back garden. I could probably produce a chapbook of poems from the garden.

A new book arrived today, which I am enjoying. I’m reading bits at random – it’s not the sort of book to go from beginning to end. It’s the Oxford Dictionary of Allusions in case you are wondering – a book of limited interest to most people, I admit.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

A Very Quick Blog Post

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When I switched TV off I had 20 minutes between programmes, which is often enough to write a short blog post. By the time I’d had a drink, a slice of olive bread and a quick read/reply session, this has fallen to 5 minutes.

I’m going to write as much as I can and come back to it later. Unless I fall asleep in front of the TV. Or unless I write so fast I finish my 250 words in 5 minutes.

I’ve done eighty words in three minutes so you never know.

Today was marked by a slight feeling of not being as well as yesterday. It’s almost undefinable, but it was definitely there for the first few hours. Apart from that we passed a pleasant day chatting and watching TV. Well, I did, Julia sometimes replied and sometimes watched TV but mainly she wrote a grant application for the MENCAP Gardens.

She won’t, of course, be paid for it, and probably won’t be thanked for it, but that’s how she’s always worked. And a willing worker will always find an employer willing to take advantage.

183 words – six minutes. I will come back to this later.

In fact, I won’t. It’s close enough to the end to keep going. I also managed to write the outlines of two good poems this afternoon. It’s hard at the moment because I’n not quite sharp enough yet, and because I don’t have anything to aim for this month. After a quiet month in October, I have a quiet month in November, then one fo those months that come round every quarter, when everyone seems to be open for submissions. I think I have twelve submission opportunities in December. And Christmas.

Wollaton Hall, Nottingham. AKA Wayne Manor in one of the Batman Films.

284 words done. Self-imposed target reached. Ten minutes.

 

The Story So Far

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I’m not quite sure what to write about now. Covid is passing, I slept well last night and am feeling better today, though still have a streaming cold. Also still a little vague, having lost two pairs of glasses, a box of pills and all my spare handkerchiefs.

The main topic is that WP is still playing up after three days. I will answer comments then, sometimes (annoyingly not every time) an answer will refuse to load. At one point I lost all the replies from that session. It was about twenty minutes work – not a tragedy, but still a matter of great irritation. Experience shows that this heralds a new, and inaccurately named,  “improvement”.

I’m currently stuck again. Pressing the button to send a reply to Derrick resulted in a small circle going endlessly round and round. I reloaded, I switched off and started again, I pressed various random things and now it is still sitting there circling. That’s been about an hour now.

If there was a serious alternative I would use it, but as nothing seems quite as good there’s no point changing. Although I enjoy it, I sometimes wish I’d never started.

Meanwhile, I have now made 11 submissions this month. I may go on to do another and, even another, depending on how superstitious I am feeling. Alternatively, I may leave the 13th until next month – they are one of the few magazines that does not use a submission window system and it can then be number one of the new month. Next month, has very few places to submit to, so I will mainly be writing in preparation for December, which is another bumper month for submissions. I already have twelve noted. In comparison I have three noted for October and one for November. I must look harder.

I already have acceptances for this month, so something is going right. I’m hoping there will be a few more once the window closes.

Well, that’s it for now.  No change at WP – my replies still aren’t loading. Very irritating.

 

Missed a day – Ooops!

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I missed a day. Sorry about that. It would be nice to report that after leaving work on Saturday I became embroiled in writing and wasn’t able to find time to produce a blog post, but in fact I spent most of the time sleeping. I actually went to bed in the afternoon for about 4 hours. It was, I think, nature’s way of telling me to sleep more and get back to a sensible routine.

At the back of my mind I have an idea that I should be able to produce good work in the early hours of the morning when everything is quiet and there is nobody to disturb me. This was true at one time, but these days I tend to find that I don’t do anything worthwhile after midnight. All that happens is that after an hour or two of doing nothing useful I go to be, sleep badly and next day, find myself nodding off in the afternoon or evening.

At the moment I have three submissions to edit before sending them off, and two others to finish writing. I suppose that I can at least take pleasure from the fact that I have three ready. This is three more than I manged in either February or May, so it’s not all bad, even if it short of target. With two days to go I can still do a bit better, so I’ll get this finished and get to work.

Of course, as soon as I say that, the ideas stop. Julia just called me to remind me that we are going out tonight. We are going to a carvery. I had forgotten ll about it. If I’d remembered I would have cooked a smaller brunch.

Random photos, sorry, I have no inspiration. Two views of the red boat at Dunwich. One from last week, one from several years ago.

Red boat at Dunwich

Grumbles and Guest Photos

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Red Boat at Southwold

The end of the month draws nearer. I have two submissions ready to go, though I actually had six planned. One of those passed on 25th, leaving just five. I really need to get a move on. It’s not this month I need to worry about, it’s the six for the months after that, and the six for the month after that . . .

It’s hard to believe that at one time I was sending my submissions off at the start of the month rather than letting it drag on until the end. The advantage I find with submitting for the end of the month is that you hear from the editors sooner.

In the shop we had no customers calling to buy and nobody coming to sell. Just three aging men muttering to each other and, in my case, answering vexatious telephone calls. It was a vintage day for phone calls. From callers on bad lines to callers who seemed determined not to give me any information (despite ringing me to ask bout their coins), to customers who has seen their 25p coin on eBay for £14,000, we had them all.

Southwold – Gun Hill

Finally, released from work and free to use the keyboard, I wrote most of my daily blog, went for tea, watched TV and fell asleep just before midnight. That is why I will be writing the minimum number of words and going to bed.

One thing we noted today was that things we put on new (such as a run of medallions) not only stimulate sales (we sold two of the new medallions within an hour) , but seem to have an effect on the sale of similar, older items. Three of todays sales were medallions that had been on sale for six months or more. There must be a PhD thesis in there somewhere.

The pictures today are all guest pictures from Julia, who took them during our recent trip to Norfolk, including an artistic bicycle shot, the red boat from Dunwich and the cannon from Southwold – site of the Battle of Sole Bay.

Southwold – Parked Bicycle and Atmospheric Clouds

 

Some thoughts on Long Covid

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I made six submissions last month, all apart from one were in the final week of the month. This month I have only two submissions to make, and have made them both already.

This is a welcome return to what I consider normality. Twelve months ago I was able to make the month’s submissions on the days the submission windows opened. Illness intervened and I found myself entering a period where I was mainly editing work that was already written, and I was struggling to complete it and submit for the end of the period. After six months I started writing new poems again, and it is only this month that I have managed to get far enough ahead to submit closer to the beginning of the period.

I could have submitted sooner, but have become lazy in the last year.

The advantage of submitting earlier in the period is that (in my theory, at least) you establish yourself as the favoured candidate, and later submissions have to work harder to push you out.

The advantage of submitting later is that you (probably) have more time to let the piece mature (unless, like me, you are struggling to keep up) and you get answers quicker, as decisions are made within days of submission rather than waiting until the end of the month.

In years to come, the mythical PhD student I always think I’m writing for, will be able to read this post and add it to the list of Long Covid symptoms – difficulty in writing new poetry. I didn’t write anything new for several months after Covid, and even struggled to knock the existing writing into shape. I then spent a long time struggling to write anything new – resulting in missed deadlines and lots of last minute submissions. Finally I managed to find some form and, for the last month, have finally started writing with fluidity again. The plan for next month is that I will submit as much as possible in the first week of the month, using things which I am finalising now.

What a difference a year makes.