If I dwell on my list of poem titles, I break out in a cold sweat. What am I going to do with all of these poems? Then I take a deep breath and the word SUBMIT appears over my head, a cartoon light bulb. If I believe that writers must share their gifts–and I do–then merely feeding fat three-ring binders on the shelf in my office is wrong. As I’ve been reminded often, no one will ring the doorbell and beg to read my work. More likely that bell tolls for Amazon, FedEx or UPS.

How then to share via the submission process? In our digital world I use a lot of sites/apps/devices. The cost of submitting digitally is about what it would cost in postage, paper copies and manilla  envelopes. And I know that the cloud is not a fluffy freebie. It‘s a huge bank of energy gobbling computers in some remote building, maybe a used missile silo. I don’t really know where my Dropbox is. To me it’s a cute little icon at the top of my screen. Also important to me are Duotrope, Submittable, Word 365, Numbers, my aging Mac Mini, Acer monitor, Logitech keyboard, and Epson printer. So much hardware and software to manage. But it must be doable because I do it.

Once I’ve written several drafts of a poem, it often goes to one of two critique groups, is revised and then added to a Dropbox file “Poems,” and a print copy tucked into a binder, alpha via title. The title alone appears on a six-page spreadsheet (yeah, that’s about 200 individual poems) that shows me if a particular piece is in submission or waiting to venture out. One column also tells me where a poem has already been rejected. No use annoying editors who have already wished me luck elsewhere. Then there’s the red submissions binder where I keep an alpha sort of markets that I routinely contact and a print copy of the spreadsheet (remember, my hardware is aging faster than I am and will one day fail). Once an editor says “HELL YEAH” I eliminate the data on the spreadsheet and note the acceptance on the paper copy in the binder! Whew, I’m tired just trying to explain this, but it works, mostly.

When I finished my MFA, a faculty advisor urged us all to apply for an NEA grant every year until we got one. When would I find time for that? More importantly, that sort of po-biz holds little interest for me. Over the years I’ve been happy to be part of a loosely connected community of writers and that is itself my preferred station in this literary life.

#WritingLife #SubmissionsManagement