No no… this is not a top 10 list of local pubs with good atmosphere and great cheeseburgers (though that would also be the bomb). THIS… is the never-asked-for update on my personal journey to trick reputable publishers into including my poetry in the print or virtual pages of their esteemed magazines and journals. 

This post could also be titled, shameless self-promotion part six. As surely there have been five previous attempts where I tooted my horn about success or progress in publishing my work. It is definitely not worth my time to research the actual number, of course, so I’ll just dive in with what’s new.

But first, I’ll answer the question of “why now?”… 

Feels like all the mischief has been managed fairly successfully lately which leaves me free to contemplate life more than usual. Or maybe it just means I have more free time to walk on the treadmill and muse and, if the mood strikes, write a little. 

Whatever the reason, there’s definitely been an uptick in blog posts lately. There for a good long while I was only posting a few times a month. And I don’t think it was because I didn’t have anything to work through… I think it was that I had too much going on and not enough time. 

Could also be the number of must-see shows in my queue. The last episodes of the most recent season of The Bachelorette dropped in August alongside a new Gordon Ramsey show, Food Stars, and the return of Master Chef. When it rains it pours I guess. But now the queue is empty again until the end of September when the next Bachelor franchise seasons start. Two shows at once, Bachelor in Paradise and the first season of The Golden Bachelor. Brilliant! 

I know it’s crap TV and seems like it would be a huge waste of my time, but it’s just one of those selfish indulgences that make me happy. And if I cut to the chase here… life is about the pursuit of happiness so why wouldn’t I indulge? 

Ok. So now that I’ve defended the choice to watch trash TV instead of writing, reading, or doing something else productive, I can move on to today’s actual topic— The Pub Update. 

Real quick first though, I think it’s noteworthy that before the “Summer Feast” that I’m about to reveal is that before that, there was a good long stretch of nothing but rejection and that drought was pretty rough. 

Sometime in 2022, I made a commitment to only send my work to more reputable places. You know, publishers people have heard of or those that have been around a long time and have a healthy audience. Needless to say, this change-up had an effect on the process. I mean, I started with sending work to those long-shot, top-tier places, and not only do they take a super long time to respond (because they are dealing with thousands of submissions every month) but they also often only take a small fraction of work from “emerging” writers. 

A lot of those places publish work by state and national poet laureates and folks who have 10+ books or have won big awards. Obvi their poems are like gold, and it’s hard to compete with that. 

After those top-tier places, I moved down through the other tiers, and even with that, the process still takes an incredibly long time. It’s a lot of waiting. Lots of radio silence and rejection. 

Then around May I finally started to hear back from a few places with good news. And I’ve been enjoying a steady stream of acceptances mixed in with the dozens of rejections I get every week. 

These are a mix of print, online, and print/online combo publications, and since print takes way longer to produce, the is more “immediate” gratification with online. It’s also way easier to share and promote because a person can drop links on social media, etc. 

Like I said, in May I was feeling pretty down about the whole publishing scene and had lost a lot of confidence in my work. Amazing how that can happen. The pieces themselves don’t change, but the more they get rejected the more you think they must just be trash. Then you get a positive rejection or two and start to believe there’s merit in the writing again. 

Anyway, the first acceptance that came in was for a poem called “Giving Thanks” and the publisher is Naugatuck River Review. That’s a print-only pub so I knew I would have to wait a little bit for the release of that. Incidentally, that poem was written after Thanksgiving 2020 and I’d sent it to about 81 different places, in one version or another. That’s a testament to how random the process is and also how long it can take. But it felt good to have someone finally validate that the poem was not trash. That it was worthy of an audience. The book, Issue #30 ~ Summer/Fall 2023 was released in August and is available from Lulu Books here.

After that acceptance, there was a steady string of other good news that came in over the course of the next five or six weeks followed by a cluster of publications being released from July through August: 

My mood is as punctual and unstable as the tide
Published online by Eclectica, Vol, 27 ,No. 3
July/Aug 2023

Untamed River
Published online by Stone Poetry Quarterly
August 2023

In the Kitchen of Grief
Published in print by Midwest Quarterly, Volume 64 No. 4
Summer 2023
(print only, so there’s no link)

“Jumper” and “Idle Music” 
Published in the Red Hen Press Writing in the Schools Anthology: The Miracle of Flip Flops.  
Summer 2023

Hiring Death’s Transcriptionist and The End of August and Everything After
Published online by Blood Tree Literature
June 2023

Giving Thanks
Published in print by Naugatuck River Review Issue #30
Summer/Fall 2023

And finally, the latest publication to drop, “Will You Buy This Person’s Book, Please?” was released by Write or Die Magazine on September 4th. I’m especially pleased with this one because it’s my first official publication of something that’s not poetry. I’ve been writing little personal essays my entire life, so having one find its way into a real publication is very satisfying. Especially because of all the effort and revising that went into it. It’s definitely a different revision process than poetry. Some aspects are the same, but on the whole, very different indeed.

The essay is what some would call a “hermit crab” essay because the contents are housed within a unique little shell of a form. In this case, a series of 3rd person bios. All-in-all, a very candid glimpse into the life of the emerging writer, or at least my version. It even “name drops” the url of this blog (sans link) so really putting myself out there. What fun! 

But the good news doesn’t stop there. Nope… 

I’ve also got a few forthcoming pieces in two different journals: Door is a Jar Magazine and New York Quarterly. Both are well-established names, but New York Quarterly is probably the most recognizable and respected place my work has been published thus far. 💃💃💃 I don’t have solid release dates for either but I believe both have an online and print component and because of the print aspect, they will likely be farther out (winter/spring). 

In any case, it is nice to have something to look forward to, especially if that sub “radio” goes silent again.

Well… It’s not likely to go silent, because I’m still pushing hard to get new submissions into the pipeline, but any response I get back could just be rejection noise.  

And there you have it folks. The BIG Pub Update. Time now for me to turn my attention back to some trash TV or maybe an audiobook or podcast. Goodness knows I can’t be expected to think more about what I’m doing with my time after this long-winded, self-congratulatory post. As they say, though, you gotta stop and smell the roses once and awhile, or you’ll end up on Duffy’s Farm thinking you wasted your life. 

Thanks for reading.
Peace and Love,
~Miss SugarCookie