Riding the advice from the beautiful poet, Melissa Green, I have decided to stop pursuing publication of individual poems in literary magazines for at least a year.
Why?
Because I’m fucking tired. I’m tired of focusing more on rejections than I am on my poems. I’m tired of feeling like I’m failing every day. I’m tired of feeling like I can’t write; that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m tired of lacking confidence. I’m tired of caring and pretending not to. I’m just done right now.
Somewhere along the way, despite telling myself not to do this, publishing and writing became one entity. I’ve heard it “the writing matters, not the credits” and I know this, but I get so wrapped up in proving rejectors wrong by submitting and submitting again that it’s taking too much of my energy away from what I really need to focus on.
so here’s my decree: I’m going to write the shit out of the manuscript I have forming and tone the old and new that will surely come and in one year I will see where I am. That is my promise to myself and my poems. I desperately need to fall in love with them again.
I’ll let the last of the rejections come in from previous submissions and then I’m done.
It’s like quitting crack. But I stand up to say – I have a publishing problem.
Damn that feels good to say.
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