I suddenly realized, in the middle of pacing all aggravated around my house, that I haven't blogged in forever. That must be what's wrong.
Ironically, I've been doing a fair amount of work on writing & publishing. I haven't felt all that creative lately, though for a while there I was writing every day; lately my focus is on getting things together to start sending my poetry out for publication.
It's not easy. Good lord, it is anything but easy. It's funny how much of a practical, business aspect there is to the publishing process. Must be why so many of us writers go unpublished in the larger market - and why blogging's so popular. (Sure works for me.)
So I created a spreadsheet practically the size of Pikes Peak of places I can send my work, what the specifications are for each place and so forth. Well, I'm in the process of creating it. The first runthrough, I identified 52 places to send my work, with the goal to mail to one each week in 2008. (My mom calls this sort of approach "eating the elephant one bite at a time.") But when I looked more at the spreadsheet and the publishing process, I found I needed to reorganize and expand the spreadsheet (I mean seriously, I thought the spreadsheets I made for our wedding were complex, but this is ridiculous) and now it holds lots more data, which I get to go back and fill in for all 52 places.
To be honest, it's sort of a nice task. I don't have to be creative, I can just do a few at a time and still feel good about contributing towards my writing career.
The next task is to review the focus of each magazine, start getting samples, making inquiries, etc., and look at what poetry fits each magazine. I also need to figure out the whole simultaneous submission thing, and prioritize certain poems for certain mags. So, not all the work of an instant, especially since I can hardly look at a poem without revising it, if only to remove an unnecessary 'the'... which is fine, since the writing can always be made better, but takes more time. (This is why I started the project two and a half months out.) I also want to develop a couple of different cover letters and my bio.
Anyway, we're on the road to progress, and glad of it. I think the spreadsheet is key. My past attempts at taking an organized approach to getting published consisted of color-coded, labeled page-tabs and far too many dogears. So any time I would want to send something out, I'd need to look it up again, mentally process the information, look for poetry that would fit that place's needs... just not really time-efficient or very appealing. (For one thing, the book is a pain in the ass to try and keep open to the right spot while you look for something on your computer. Let's talk spiral bindings, guys.) Anyway, now I have all the info in the same spot and it's easy to understand and use. Sweeeet. And if I end up not having time to work on it, the info's still usable later and easy to update, as opposed to all those forlorn tabs in an outdated reference book.
The other challenging aspect: the budget. It can only help to get samples from each place; plus, how else will I know if my work's right for that publisher? But they all cost, and they all need postage there and back, and then there's mailing the submission and the SASE. I don't know about other poets, but I work for a non-profit, and I don't have a ton of spare cash. It's worth it to budget some, though, and that's another reason for my approach of wanting to spread it out throughout the year. I figure I can start now with the samples and stay a month or two ahead with those, to facilitate my weekly goal.
Seems like a decent plan, if I can keep making the time to do it. I think it's going to work. We'll see, anyway. But you know, it's times like this when my favorite Yoda quote comes to me:
"Do, or do not. There is no try."
Posts
