100 rejections project update

As you know, I am following the advice of this Lit Hub article and taking an aim at getting my work out there a bit more than I have in the past.  After a few years of submitting very little and usually only by invitation, I am taking a more pro-active stance in my submitting this year--100 seems like a lot, and I probably won't make it there (it's probably more than I have poems to back it up with and there will of course, be some acceptances (hopefully many!), but it's a nice thing to work for, and as I said on facebook a couple weeks back, already a success in just getting the damn poems out there circulating. And I have a good amount of work from the past year to actually send.

So far, my results are 1/1--an acceptance for two pieces (Radar Poetry) and a rejection (Posit). I think I have about 10 others still out there in the ether.  I also took a gamble last week and applied for a prose NEA Fellowship this year. I have enough prose and hybrid published work to qualify, a good sampling of a lyric-essay project (exquisite damage) and thought what the hell. I applied for poetry one years ago and sort of figured I'm not the fancy sort of poet who gets such thing. And I'm probably not fancy enough for the prose world either, but the work is good and solid and maybe something of interest on the other side of the fence (since I spend a considerable amount of time straddling it.)  Most likely it will just be a rejection to add to my tally., but still good in that respect.

I also plan to start sending out feed later this year, so that will no doubt add to my numbers, so we'll see how that goes. I've also hit up some print journals that have low acceptance rates, not necessarily because I think they are better (I hate people who tout exclusivity as the key to quality), just in that they are harder to crack.   I think I definitely chose ones I really like and respect and think ARE better journals, but not just because they have low acceptance rates, but that I like what they publish and would like to be in there--places like Black Warrior, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast) In my early days as a writer, I spent a lot of time submitting to exclusive journals I actually don't really fit aesthetically in, but because everyone was saying they were the prime places to publish.

I still plan to hit up the places who've been awesome and published my work before, some newer interesting publications I really like, and some of my old standbys for certain rejection--Sixth Finch and Collagist I am looking at you...lol.

When I was submitting like mad to online journals back in the early 2000's, I quickly volleyed rejected poems right back out there, so last Friday spent some time sending back out what the responding journals either didn't take or didn't want back out somewhere else. Each week, I also have a new round of stuff from the previous week of daily writing that I've revised over the course of the next week and then start sending out.

I'll be back with another update in April..so until then..
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