Whispers

You know exactly what you want to write, you have the right mindset and could drop in the scene just the way you want to get good words out of it.

And it's not G-rated and you're at work. :headdesk:

On looking into my email inbox...

Oh, hello, poem! I forgot I'd submitted you.

I submitted a 346 line SFF poem to Strange Horizons (apparently I can be very long-winded; who's surprised?), and they thought about it, bumped it back, and suggested I submit it to a different market because reasons they outlined.

Now, the last time I got a rejection, I commented here that I'd come to expect them and it wasn't really a big deal. But today, I realized something else: I'm getting personalized rejections where my work affected the editor even if they decided ultimately not to publish it.

:cue surprise:

I always thought I was a bit of a take it or leave it kind of girl when it came to writing and I have almost no luck finding an actual good fit for any poetry, so it's been my own thing, mostly for myself with the occasional piece or book finding its way to family or friend.

And part of my secret to writing so frequently and so easily when it comes to works under 5000 words is that I just do it all the time. Words aren't sacred, they're words, and I accept that the only way to produce a lot of great fiction and poetry is to produce a lot of bad fiction and poetry. The stuff that wavers between good and bad is 50/50 whether I'll throw it out there. So there's a lot of bad poetry and mediocre poetry I have under my belt, and it never really occurred to me that there was a lot of good poetry that wasn't just amateur anymore.

I had decided to quit submitting poetry because finding the right market for the stuff I write hasn't always been easy. My narrative stuff is... challenging, epic, or just plain odd. My greeting card verse and personal stuff sometimes feels trite. I don't read the literary, personal, reflective stuff in periodicals, so I don't actually know where to send the loads of that I write. I like form poetry and that's even harder to place.

Now I don't really know. Is it worth the bother? Poetry takes months to come back. By then, I'm often staring at the inbox going, "Oh, I forgot about you!" And it's almost always rejected. (I've had one poem published and it got a bad review there for flowery language and old-fashioned style, which I didn't even know it had.)

Maybe poetry will stay this personal thing. Maybe I'll start treating it a little more seriously. Just some thoughts.

Resolutions! I finally made some—today. In order to make a living at writing, I have to sell 1600 words a day, five days a week, at five cents a word. So:

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.