Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I'm going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I'm going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I'm going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

This morning I decided to submit some individual poems to journals whose submission windows close soon.  As I do this, I update my submission log, which I don't always do when the rejections come in, which means I miss a few.  Today, along with a rejection, a request to submit during the narrow window in December when the journal is open for submissions.

Happily, I hadn't missed the opportunity, so I submitted right away, before I lost momentum.

And now it's off for a very full day of volunteer work.  I'm going to help the group that builds the set for "Return to Bethlehem," zip over for quilt group from 1:30 -3:30 or so, and then back to the Bethlehem set.