Tag: writing

How Many Submissions do Poetry Journals Get? One Interesting Example, and Some Extrapolation.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

I discovered And Other Poems today via Twitter. It’s a very well done project.

And Other Poems opened to new submissions in November in a sort of relaunch. I don’t know exactly when their window closed, but we’re only halfway through December, so it couldn’t have been too very long ago.

They share that over 200 poets submitted over 700 poems in whatever the relatively short time frame was. Some new journals get less, some get more. Long-established venues get many, many more. Still, any way you look at it, 700 is a lot of poems. Reading them and giving them the right attention is a lot of work. No doubt a passion project.

Across the literary world, thousands of editors this past year have collectively read, what, probably millions of pieces? Mostly as volunteers. Mostly because they believe in the power and beauty and necessity of words. They believe their work and the work of the writers they publish matters and makes a difference. Thank you, editors, publishers, laborers of love. You make all of this happen.

Helpful Notes on Writing from My Social Tab in Gmail and My Uber-geeky Feed.

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

“Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.”

-Joshua Wolf Shenk, via Shannon from Authors Only/101 Words

Also, Trekkies Can Thank Herb Sollow for the Most Famous Plot Device.

It’s actually a framing device, but why split Tribble fur? I found this article incredibly germane to the issues I often have when trying to frame or ground a story. It’s a good read for any writer.