Tag Archives: submissions

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.

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.