Submission Sunday, Or, You Can't Win if You Don't Play

48º ~ halfway dreary skies with a hint of light behind the cloud cover, a chance of rain, wintery mix removed from the predictions, looks like we might make a full week of school (knock wood)

Just a quick update on some recent submissions.  I sent out a plethora of poems about two weeks ago (read about it here).  However, I recently received some poems back from a non-simultaneous sub publisher (one of the rare non-SS journals that I send to), and I discovered a couple of journals I've been meaning to try have opened their reading periods again.  So, I sat down yesterday and sifted through the poems that could go out.  To add to my pile, I've spent the last couple weeks fine-tuning several more poems from the fall Friday drafts.

In the bad old days, I used to send poems out to upwards of 15 journals that accepted SS.  Now that I'm a bit more established, I cut each poem off at five or six journals max, given the time withdrawing a poem can take.  The only problem with this is that there are way more journals that I'd like to send to, and being a slow writer, sometimes I just can't send to every journal on my list.

In any case, in the last three days, I've submitted:
One group of five poems to six journals (simultaneous and all accepting electronic submissions).
One group of three poems to one journal (simultaneous, but the poems didn't really fit with the other journals on my list, postal submission).
One group of three poems to one journal (a BIG one that doesn't accept SS and reports fairly quickly, so I'm willing to risk it, postal submission).

All of this backs up my philosophy on publishing poems in lit mags: submit, submit, submit and submit some more.  I do keep meticulous records to avoid any major mistakes like re-publishing a poem already accepted and such, and I think that is important if you take the "overwhelm them with numbers" approach that I do.  Some folks may think I should be more discerning or narrow my focus to the upper echelon of journals that take ages and ages to report back on non-SS submissions.  They may be right, but for now, my competitive nature prefers a method that seems to work more in favor of receiving the happy email rather than the sad, thin envelope.

Finally, a bit of good news.  I'll have a poem in the digital anthology Two Weeks, being put together by the editors of Linebreak.  Wahoo.