OH, THE FEAR/PAIN/JOY OF SUBMITTING

Odd things happen with writers and their submissions. Currently, having finished another rewrite of The Porn Writer, I'm not trying to submit it, believing no one will want to publish my disturbing glimpse into the lives of desperately troubled people, and I'm also suffering writer's block. I clearly expect if I sit down to my computer, nothing will appear to write about. I'm too old and et cetera....

Then, an email arrives from the prestigious Prairie Schooner with the editor's message, "Although we have decided against using 'Buffalo Wallow,' we were interested in your work and would be glad to see more of it during our general submissions period, which will open again on September 1, 2021."

The creative urge fires up again, but my problem is the story "Buffalo Wallow" is an old story, written years ago, and all my recent stories are empty of the style I attempted back then. What to submit? One of my old stories or a new one?

A PUBLICATION PLAN

Time sure disappears. Last entry in this writer's blog was June 22. I'm more than 4/5 done on 6th? 10th? rewrite of my novel The Porn Writer. I'm reworking poetry constantly as they straggle home bedraggled and d(r)ejected from the fields of literature.

The August issue of Better 

Than Starbucks is here, 

online or ready to be bought 

and printed at Lulu. My poem Afterthought sits inside, a lüshi in the 8 line form of Chinese poet Hanshan.

Read the other day, the "publication plan" of a fellow writer. He said his goal was to get 100 rejections next year. Do you know how hard it is to get 100 rejections? I'm lucky to get 2 or 3 a month.

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" from a Ronald Reagan campaign speech, 1980. And we wonder why the Republican Party has deteriorated so badly.