August's Submission Post
The Yes, The No and the Try...
There now follows what will be essential advertising for my upcoming pamphlet :D I promise to stop plugging this ONLY when we have sold all the copies for my publisher, because Barbara is lovely and deserves this to be massively successful.
PLEASE PRE-ORDER A COPY :D
Then, we get to August's poem successes and submission journey, which must be said, has been right grim in terms of anything that looks, sounds or feels like actual progress. The only bright spot is that I'll have a poem in the inaugural Molecules Unlimited Journal which is due to be published in September. Other than that, as my youngest would say, the rest is doodoo faeces.
This means that over the weekend I will throw some last-minute subs in, but am very aware that filling a publisher's Inbox at the end of a window is never the best idea. More often than not they've been reading poems all month and have already made their choices. I know this to be true as I've had enough people tell me in rejection emails 'great work, but doesn't fit my planning, sorry but no'.
Perhaps these people could also be lying, but it hard to tell.
Then there was the rejection from a sub back in the gloriously optimistic month of May. It came in two parts: really sorry but your work doesn't fit my plan, and then then the unexpected second message which decided to tell me how to edit the poem so it was 'more cohesive', when that actually meant 'less political'. The thing is, that was its entire point, and diluting that... well, it's not an option.
The editing 'advice' also included a mistake so basic that I'm kind of tempted to consider that this advice was not 100% written by a human either, that it smelt and increasingly read like AI. In fact, the more I look at it, the less human it feels, and the second 'quote' of helpful context given turns out to be made-up bollocks. Know how strong this poem is, there was then only one logical course of action.
I have entered it into the National Poetry Contest.
One piece of advice from the second email has been taken on board, because looking at the work now it is clearly even stronger than it was. I normally try and write something 'to order' for the National but creation in this way has simply not been happening for me of late. With the entry deadline the same month as my pamphlet release and Exhibition prep to consider as well, there is also no time.
There's also a second poem free to enter in the National as a Poetry Society member, so a structured rewrite of another 80% awesome rejection poem took place yesterday: that will be it. It seems important to keep aiming for the target of at least a Longlisting, because of the potential benefits even that placement could offer. Winning anything is often more trouble than it is worth.
It should never stop you trying, though.
The last week has tried my patience. There is still work to be done plus the exhibition work for November 1st will take priority starting on Tuesday. I am well aware of how much there is also still out, including in a number of major contests for longer-form work. We will take out all the rejections from my Index Card system at the weekend and clean the slate for September 1st.
There is everything to look forward to in the next couple of months.
