descant Acceptance!

I check my mailbox everyday with a combination of trepidation and excitement. I know, given my knowledge of statistics (shaky and old, but there) that if I get an envelope back from a publisher, it is likely a rejection, mostly because most of my acceptance notes have come via email. But yesterday I received a letter - via post - from descant, accepting my poem "If I Had Been Born Your Son." Thrilled does not even begin to cover it. descant only publishes one issue per year. The editor's letter said that out of over 4000 submissions, they print about 40. Which means that my piece made it into the 1% they chose to publish this go-round. (The one formula I remember is "is/of=%/100." Ms. Edelstein, my high school math teacher, would be proud!) Please excuse me while I get naked and do my happy dance.

*dances*

Ahem. Anyway, back to checking the mail. Editor Kuhne of descant has single-handedly made checking my mail more fun, now that I know that my SASEs can hold acceptances and not just rejections. Thank you, kind sir, for your good taste!

Now, if you all will excuse, me, I need to send "thankss but no thanks" notes to the publishers of a few other journals where I simultaneously submitted that piece. *grin* Nothing like letting people know you're popular. I do wonder if letting them know of an acceptance elsewhere makes your manuscript more valuable to them...

Working the Manuscript

Instead of doing actual work this weekend, after a long week and fulfilling my semester requirements for both the MFA and the MA programs, I decided to put in a bit of time on my full-length manuscript, which is taking shape quite well. I'm having a tough time finding a thread that runs through the pieces - I rarely write on one theme exclusively (I'd bore myself to tears), though I have discovered that seasons and place (mostly Kentucky and Long Island) get mentioned quite often.

As of right now, I am tentatively titling the collection "A Stranger in Tornado Country." I don't know why, but I like the ring of it, and I like the poem it comes from, so for now, that's the winner. I hate sending things off half-cocked, and there's nothing worse than a collection with a lackluster title, especially with all the volumes of poetry being written. I don't want editors and judges bored before they get past the table of contents.

I've culled the collection to only polished pieces, and pieces I'm very fond of. Right now that puts me at fifty, with my new poem "Summer Sings," though there are about five or six I may take out because they're weak and/or obviously don't fit the rest of the tone of the collection. For instance, I happen to be in love with my new poem "Love Letter from a White Woman," but it's jarringly different in both tone and style, and relies more on rhythm than most of my other pieces do. I want it to be as strong as possible, but I also don't want to wait until the end of the MFA program (November 2009) to start submitting the manuscript.

My goal is to submit the full length manuscript to at least 4 competitions this year, as well as to some open reading periods at places like Tupelo Press, where the editor sends a handwritten note and critique for their open reading period. For poets, a full length manuscript is generally between 48 and 100 pages. Chapbook competitions are markedly shorter than that, requesting manuscripts of about 16 to 30 pages (and often shorter than that). There are tons of competitions, but it gets rather expensive after awhile, since most are about $20 a pop, with the full length competitions running closer to $25. Then again, I need to remember to ask if I can write those off...

My next daunting task, after writing a few more pieces that will round out the manuscript, will be to figure out what order they should be in. I haven't found a decent software program to do this (I've heard Scrivener is great, but I don't work on a Mac), so I'm seriously considering doing it with index cards and a giant corkboard. Any other ideas or suggestions are, as always, welcome and encouraged.

Does anyone have much experience putting together a successful poetry manuscript? What say ye?

Acceptances Galore: A Day of Hearts, Flowers, and Goodwill Towards Editors

Because we, as writers, generally spend our time moping over our mountains of rejections, which I will eventually fall into in this blog, I'm sure, I'd like to take this chance to celebrate a few weeks that have gone really well. My work is being picked up like hotcakes. Which I've never purchased or eaten, but I hear that if your stuff sells like them, it means you're doing well. So, hotcakes it is.

I've had two essays accepted for an anthology, Milestones for American Women: Our Defining Passages. Rumor has it that Knopf may pick it up to publish it, which would be a wonderful coup. That, and the former ALA president is slated to write the afterword. Librarians unite in your bookery! I don't think my prose is as well-formed as my poetry, but I am sincerely flattered that the editors were kind enough to offer some revisions and kind words.

I've been notified that though the Winter 2008 issue of the online journal kaleidowhirl has been slightly delayed, it will indeed be out sometime soon, and my piece "Disobedience" will be published shortly.

Ruminate Magazine will be publishing my poem "Refrigerator Borealis" in its next issue with the theme of 'addiction.'

Upon returning from work this afternoon, I checked my gmail account (which I do compulsively, for all those who care to toss em a line), and was thrilled to find that the editors of Quiddity literary journal want not one, but two of my poems for their inaugural issue for spring 2008. No contract or anything definitive beyond that email yet, so it's not set in stone, but goodness willing, "Flagrant" and "Wavewalk" will soon have a home in an honest-to-goodness university-published print literary journal. Since to date I've been accepted only in online journals and one faith-based print mag, this is a huge occurrence for me, book-snob librarian that I am. (Not that I don't appreciate the online works - I very much do, and appreciate the access they provide. But print is one step closer to my coveted ISBN!)

I'd like to send a warm thanks to all of those editors (who have also received my profuse thanks via email) for their kind words and support. We all know how down we get upon receipt of the form letter rejections in our hastily scrawled SASEs, and I've received a number of those back over the past few weeks as well. But the successes really do outshine the failures, and even one placement gives me the courage to send out a new batch of pieces I am very attached to, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Thank you to all of the kind editors out there - you make writing more fulfilling because you are willing to slog through the mountains of work you receive. Thank you to the subscribers that keep journals in the black (or close to it) so that we can continue to not only get published as writers, but also read our contemporaries' work. And thank you, Lovely Readers, without whom our work would float into the atmosphere, having never been discussed or appreciated.

Yep, I'm in a total Kumbaya mood. A total "let's kiss and hug and all vote for Obama" mood. (At least, I hear that's what happiness feels like.) If I was a supervisor, this would very much be the day that you wanted to ask for a raise. Alas, I hold no such pecuniary powers. You all will have to settle for knowing that I am sending general goodwill vibes into the ether, and wishing you much luck with your own writing.

On Immortality, and Submitting Work

We write for pleasure, despite the pain of it. We write as a hobby (some people grow gardens, we grow our words). Many of us write because we're simply hard-wired to do so, whether we're good at it or not. And some of us write for glory. I will admit, I decided at a very young age that I didn't want physical immortality. Even as a kid, I had been sick, seen enough health problems of the old, and had seen enough B-movies on the subject to understand that it's probably not all it's cracked up to be. Now, I'm talking about physical immortality, of course. I did, however, figure out the best way to live forever.

The people who stuffed my shelves with their pages pretty much lived forever, didn't they? I mean, I mightn't have liked Shakespeare at all as a person, but it doesn't much matter - I love his poetry, and it has lasted hundreds of years. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Donne, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Stephen King...it's pretty sad. Most of my favorite people, I've never even met but on the page. A lot of them happen to be dead, and it doesn't much matter. What a nifty trick! Yep. I'll admit it. The librarian in me and the poetess in me converge in complete agreement on at least this one point: I covet my own ISBN number. I want to be immortalized in (preferably acid-free) paper, safely nestled in various libraries with my contemporaries and forebears. I mean really - do you think that Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Marx would have ever gotten along at a dinner table? Likely not, but they sit peaceful as lambs together on the library shelf, and we can dig for their likely dinner conversations by placing their words side by side and examining them. What a legacy!

I am in no way comparing my talent to the folks above. I mean, I enjoy what I write, about more than half of the time, and I hope others do. But that's not the point. The point is that in addition to my impulse to write (a power under which I am powerless), I have a maddening urge to grab that immortality if I can. Which leads us, of course, to the subject of submitting work, and editors, and the various other nightmare beasties that plague the sleep of a writer.

Let me direct you to one of the best sites that lists writing markets in detail: Duotrope. Better than Writer's market, if only because it's easier and faster to use, and they update the markets and let you know who's closed regularly. What I like is that they also let you run a search so you can limit your results to only print or only electronic publications. Since I have been published only by the online folks so far, my goal is to break into the print journals. After all, who knows how long a website will last? And there are a lot of venerable, respected (well-read!) journals out there that I'd like to leave my dirty fingerprint on, in the hopes someone will stumble across me and enjoy my work. And (selfish, I know) remember my name.

In the pursuit of publication, I have entered a number of contests, but those get expensive in a hurry if you're a poetess on a budget. I'm also pretty good about sending actual mailed (the SASE kind) submissions, as well as the email submissions that are becoming more popular. Last night I sent submissions to fourteen print journals. That's right. FOURTEEN. I am a submitting rock star *grin* I figure if I can do that twice a month, I'll get a steady stream of rejections that will keep my head from getting too big and remind me to revise, with the occasional acceptance thrown in just to make me keep trying.

Take a look at Duotrope, if you've got the stomach for rejection (unless of course you don't get rejected, which is fabulous and rare). Best of luck with your submitting. Perhaps we'll meet in the slush pile!