July's Submission Post

On the last day of each month, I need to remind myself of what has been achieved. I do this already in a personal, longer form via my physical planner: a list of tangible progress. There is also a note of what could be better, because nobody is perfect and this always needs work. Normally there is a poetry-only version as well, but the last four weeks have been a lot and it fell by the wayside.

Going forward therefore, we will create a digital version of my progress for posterity and can then come back at the end of the year and see where things stand. There's been only one sub in the 'single poems' category as well, which makes this bit of the process stupidly easy. That window was so oversubscribed that it was shut in two days. We got two poems in.

EVERYTHING ELSE has been long form work.

After this, in no particular order there was:

• A 10-poem sequence for a horror-themed submission
• A revamped and re-edited older pamphlet for a 'new' window
• Two samples of collection work for two separate collection windows

I honestly have no idea of how ANY of this will play out. I am neither confident nor nervous. However, the collection stuff is a decent step forward. It's work I'm proud of and which I believe in. After that, it's literally in the lap of the gods because fuck knows how anything works in publishing past pamphlets, which I get now. Everything else is a learning curve. That's my mantra from now on.

Then, there were the rejections, of which there have been several, and I'm sharing portions of these with the room starting from now for a number of reasons. Mostly, it is as a reminder to those of you who may only be starting out on your poetry journeys and therefore could benefit from knowing and learning to recognise what a decent rejection looks like in practical terms:

This one was the biggie. I will give no more details on who this was from at this stage because one of those two pamphlets (which is stronger than the other) remains in another sub (not done this month). I tend to be a bit fast and loose with these things, mostly because I am well aware what timescales do to work and to personal expectations. It has not yet bitten me in the arse :P

After this, we had some poetry in an anthology:

I'm going to make a conscious effort to push hard for new, single poem submissions in August, for no other reason than I have a LOT of collection pieces that have not yet seen the light of day and a number of them are potentially at the level that they could be of interest to both magazines and potentially anthologies. Knowing the work 'works' now in a larger framework allows me some breathing space. I should capitalise on that going forward.