Submissions

For a few months I've been blitzing the magazines - I've 13 stories, 3 flashes and 7 poems doing the rounds, some at places that charge submission fees. So far it hasn't gone well - just 3 acceptances, though I'm in profit having got $20 for a flash. I'm hoping to match my 2017 performance when I had 11 of my 17 poems published and 5 out of 14 stories - better than my lifetime acceptance rates of 1 in 3 for poems and 1 in 6 for prose. In the graph the blue line shows the number of poems written and the pink line shows poems accepted.

I've little left to send off - 1 good story and 2 so-so ones, 3 sub-200 flashes which are ok, and 2 poems that somebody might like - so while I await the rejections I'm trying to write new stuff because to some extent success in magazines is a numbers game: the more you send off, the more acceptances you get. Quantity as well as quality has always been an issue for me - many years I don't manage to write a poem a month. On the other hand, the graph above shows what might happen if I relax quality control: 2013 stands out as a year where I wrote far more than I published - I wrote more than usual but it was rubbish.