Tag: email

Acceptance drama!

Alternate title: What happens when you check Submittable late at night when you can’t sleep.

Since coming back from Hawai’i, I’ve been having lots of trouble with sleep, so I got up and decided to check Submittable, which is a tool that many literary journals use to host submissions. I wasn’t expecting much news, because journals also send emails, so I was shocked to see an acceptance! I was excited! Also, slightly terrified, because it seemed that I had inadvertently broken a cardinal rule of simultaneous submissions, which is to immediately withdraw an accepted poem from any other journal which has it under consideration. Most journals only accept previously unpublished work, so it is important that you notify them promptly so that they aren’t spending time reviewing a poem that they can’t include in their publication.

I powered up my desktop, which has my main inbox – which, granted, is overflowing with the mail backlog from traveling. I thought that I had reviewed everything I received in Hawai’i, but, somehow I missed the acceptance email from Wilderness House Literary Review  – which they had sent on July 3rd. I was shocked to read that they accepted all three of the poems I submitted for their next issue!

I quickly wrote a reply, about how excited I was to appear in their journal and apologized for the delay in replying. Then, I brought up my personal submissions database and found that I needed to send notices to only two other journals, because a couple of others had already rejected these poems. Fortunately, each of these journals still has one or two of my poems to consider.

By this point, my pulse had been racing for a while, and going back to bed was out of the question, so I took advantage of the six hour time difference to message E in Hawai’i. I rattled on about this whole wonderful-but-slightly-nerve-wracking drama until I calmed down a bit.

But I knew I still wouldn’t sleep so I wrote this post, scheduling it to come out at a more reasonable hour for most of my readers who share my time zone.

At whatever time anyone does happen to read this though, I am pleased to announce that my poems “(Not) the aunt I remember”, “Fifty-four” and “Downy” will be published in the fall online edition of Wilderness House Literary Review in early October.

You can be sure I will publish the link here at Top of JC’s Mind when it becomes available.

And maybe, in an hour or so, I’ll be able to fall asleep…

SoCS: Find the time

This week’s prompt is “find.”

As I write this, it is not Saturday, but Friday morning. My first thought in reading the prompt was how am I going to find the time to do this and I figured if I didn’t plunge in now, it was not going to get done, so here I am, with the washer running a load of towels, dashing this off before I go back to what I am trying to do today, which is catch up with some of my electronic life, especially my overflowing inbox. 516 emails to deal with, at this second. No doubt it will be more by the time I hit save and schedule.

People who read my blog may recall that my parents had simultaneous health crises this summer.  What I haven’t been blogging about is more recent life complications. I am happy to say that my parents, after losing most of August to recovery, are mostly back to their routines and doing well.  I spent the first part of September battling a GI thing, but recovered in time to prep for and participate in the Alice Parker tribute at Smith, which I wrote about here and here.

Within hours of my return from Northampton, we got word that my mother-in-law has a lumbar compression fracture due to osteoporosis. The time since then has been a blur of appointments, errands, transport duty, trying to get her to eat and use her medications properly, and rest, and not twist or bend or try to do things that put strain on the back, like changing the bedsheets or picking up the paper from the stoop.  There is also a lot of mental energy going to figuring out the next steps, which may include having a neurosurgeon inject a cementing substance into the collapsed vertebra, but first we have to get through an MRI and another consult appointment next week.  And a caucus with my brother-in-law, her elder son, who is a physician but who is several hundred miles away.

Meanwhile, I have been able to carve out some time yesterday and today to tackle the backlog on my computer.  It’s impossible to get to everything, so I am trying to jettison everything I can bear to, while still attempting to create at least a shadow of my presence here at Top of JC’s Mind, through my personal correspondence, and for my Facebook friends.  There are at least half a dozen blog posts that I have in my head that I need to find time to get worked out on screen, unless I suddenly become a stream of consciousness blogger.  No, that would be a bad idea. Forgoing editing once a week is one thing.  All the time?  Shudder…

And, as you read this on Saturday, I will be “celebrating” my birthday. Under the circumstances, original plans have been pared down and even those are vague, pending seeing how today goes for my mother-in-law and what she is like in the morning.  At this point, I’m hoping to be able to at least have dinner out with enough notice that we can wrangle an early dinner reservation at a fine dining type of place.  If push comes to shove, we can go impromptu, even if it means picking up a wood-fired brick-oven pizza and eating it with my husband at the kitchen table. Maybe we can put a candle in it….

519 emails…

socs-badgeBadge by Doobster @Mindful Digressions

This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays.  Please join us!  Visit http://lindaghill.com/2014/10/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-october-414/ to find out how.