Here, a little bit late, are my final numbers for 2017:

• Rejections: 62
• Acceptances: 9 poems (in 8 journals)
• Total submissions: 95
• Submissions still open: 14? something like that?

I didn’t quite get to my goal of 100 submissions, oooooops. But, so what? Overall feeling:

I’m especially happy that the first of my “fey/strange girls” poems found a home at Gingerbread House. (See the “Writing” tab for all recent publications.)

And it’s become pretty obvious that I’m working on two separate book manuscripts. Nooooo problem.

I’m currently working 50 hours a week, so I’m confident that will end well.

But I learned something valuable from all the submitting this past year, and that’s that I need about 8 revisions to really get a poem to where I want it to be. It’s hard to define how much gets changed in 8 “versions”; since doing all my editing in Word, I’m much faster, more likely to trash whole sections, quicker to rearrange things. But regardless, I think it’s key that I go back to the poem with an exacting eye about 8 times. Less than that, and it’s not as polished; more than that, and I start to de-edit, mistrust myself, and lose all the weird parts. The poetry cleanse exercise has been huge in helping me learn how to jump over the weak early drafts faster.

My general feeling about the months of January and February are:

So… I haven’t submitted anything yet this year. But I did get one acceptance from a 2017 submission! And I need to take a look at my Spreadsheet O’ Doom and see if it’s time to update the format.

Happy writing and any other hobbies you might have!!

xoxo j