I was going to call this post “Outstanding,” but that would be pretty misleading, even for me. I just spent a few minutes skimming through my master list of poetry submissions (which, at some point, I’m going to need to systematize more intelligently) in the hopes I was somewhere close to clear. We call this “wishful thinking.”
Admittedly, my effort to clean the slate by doing absolutely nothing except grinding my teeth has gone well; at present, I only have 19 submission packets in circulation. Much to my chagrin, however, the distribution mocks the clock. I have five submissions remaining from my March ‘08 mailings and three from my January ‘08 batch, but the nine left over date from September ‘07. (I think I’m going to give the lone submission from March ‘07 up for dead.) That puts me somewhere around the ten-month mark with half of my outstanding work, a time frame that always troubles me.
On the one hand, I take the Hannibal Lecter approach to time: I have oodles. I’m seldom in a rush, and if a poetry editor is willing to give my verse a good, long look, I’m delighted. On the other, I do some fairly active tracking–I try to keep abreast of editorial changes, reading period shifts, summer siestas, and response time fluctuations as much as possible. Consequently, I know that several of the September submission packets have been out much longer than usual.
Because I am a fretful little man, I worry about all the typical things: the prospect that one or more mailings might have miscarried; that I might honk off some terribly busy editor and accidentally burn a bridge; that I might put together dozens of new packets for submission at summer’s end, only to have them lightened by an acceptance from a packet pending since last fall. And then of course there’s my perpetual fear of unwitting simultaneous submissions as a result of faulty bookkeeping. That kind of stuff keeps me up at night.
I wanted to know where I stand today, as I plan on returning to the drawing board for fall submissions sometime soon. Knowing, however, is not half the battle, no matter what G.I. Joe says.
