This is not a New Year resolution

I’ve been quiet the past few months. I spent most of the first half of 2021 writing poetry and essays. Then I took a break and watched a bunch of Netflix and partied from September to December. Come on, you know you were doing it too.

Around my birthday, I was like — oh crap. I haven’t done what I set out to do earlier in the year. See, at my birthday party (the first one I’ve had since The Great Events of 2014!) (organized by my man when he was still courting me, sigh), a couple friends asked what I would like to see happen in the next year. It was a refreshing question and, in the company of good friends, it’s important to answer with honesty. I truly want to share my writing with people, I told them. And, with honesty, comes support. I’ve learned that by telling the world what I want, things start to fall together.

The Submissions vs Rejections vs Acceptances ratio

Then time passed, there were hangovers to get over, sick children to nurse back to good health, banking work and minutiae. When mid-November rolled around, I started reading about how many submissions writers send out before they get published. One blogger said that she had done around 400 submissions and 6% of those got published. Another said that 12%, or 6, of her 50–60 submissions that year got accepted. Most importantly, these writers were getting lots of rejections.

I’m sometimes an undercover numbers nerd. I use numbers to calculate a lot of things in my life and I also have/had a copywriting superpower I’m going to take the opportunity to brag about here. It’s a skill I worked hard towards, one that some depend on a word processor for but which I used to use my bare eyes for:

I used to be able to look at a piece of text under 250 words and tell you, within a few seconds, the approximate number of words in that body of text.

Impressive, right?:-P After more than 2 years away from my editing tools, though, I don’t think I’m as quick as I used to be but I still pride myself on that achievement.

OK, aside from that tangent, until early November, last year I had submitted six whole poems to two publications. By the way, this lack of submissions is not for lack of written work nor fear of rejection. I have hundreds of poems and I’m so used to rejection that sometimes I think I seek out careers that require rejection. It’s a bit masochistic, really. I started submitting actor/agent letters when I was 16, so this is a pretty familiar space for me. For every agent, acting role, stage show, story pitch, university acceptance, new job, client pitch I’ve experienced, there have been several rejections. And I’m also very comfortable with acceptances. To get accepted for something is an amazing feeling, if you’ve worked hard to get there, though I don’t consider it defining or else I would feel like shit whenever I get a rejection.

I felt silly, once I looked at the numbers. I was like — girl, you need to be submitting way more. And, basically, that’s what I’ve been doing since November. I submitted around 30–40 more poems to multiple journals with the goal to publish one by the end of the year.

What becomes of rejection?

Now, at that same birthday party, I told someone about something I’m writing and they suggested I submit it to The New Yorker. I am not there yet. If they read my work, they’ll know I’m not there yet, but how kind of them to suggest that. It makes me think bigger. But I’m not going to apply to something now when I am self-aware enough to see that it would just lead to a rejection.

I really love The New Yorker, I read it several times a week, and the more I write and the more I read, the more I recognize the calibre of writing I strive to achieve. Of course, it takes work and practice to get to a certain point, so I will keep writing and submitting to various publications. But I know I am not where I want to be yet. Just yesterday, I had my first meeting with my MFA advisor. I loved every minute of the objective feedback, and she gently revealed to me the many flaws and blindspots there were in the poems I’d submitted to her for review. Just hours before that, I had literally spent all that afternoon submitting half of those same poems to journals. Am I gonna go and withdraw them now? No. Will those journals notice all the things I need to change? Probably. But there might be an editor who sees potential in one of those poems. Also, there’s plenty more where that came from. I have to just keep writing, which has never really been an issue anyway. On that note, I must return to the drawing board…to draw some more, then scratch it out, and flip it around until it works.

Also, my poem Unleashed was published in the fall issue of the Tipton Poetry Journal. Not sure how to embed it so it shows page 33, but go ahead and check it out. So thrilled!