Acceptance Hurrah

Puntitas is a happy gal. She had a pleasant work experience. The last three, which occurred in a four-week time frame (ah, the joys of self-employment), required interactions with the stupidity and ignorance of the less evolved. Today’s went well (short and sweet, but fully paid) and included a ninety-minute panoramic of the drought stricken and economically depressed west San Joaquin Valley. Only good friends, cola drinks, and bags of corn nuts can turn that into anything but grim—except for the whole ninety minutes of lost aspect.

The other two pieces of good news are

1. The friend who drove Puntitas to her job (today dubbed her “assistant”) received some hopeful news on the job prospects front.
2. Puntitas received an acceptance.

Today’s acceptance supports Puntitas’ belief that publishing is more about luck than strategy. Two poems were accepted for an anthology scheduled to appear in February, if the funding gods are smiling. Puntitas almost didn’t respond to the call for submissions, and when she did, she acted more from momentum (it was during one of her submission frenzies) than conviction since she didn’t really think the poems matched the call. But they were accepted, so … who’s to say … ?

Of course, Puntitas’ enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that she keeps checking two online mags for her latest hits, and the new issues aren’t up. She isn’t really expecting one to be ready until December or January, but the other one should have been up by now. Obsessing, she Googled her way to a Wikipedia entry on the journal and learned that the publication schedule is irregular, so patience is called for and the inability to brag keeps her silent.

Puntitas reads _The Sealed Letter_ by E. Donaghue.
Puntitas has a positive work experience, spends a lovely day with a friend (who has good news on the job front), and receives an acceptance.

Shuffle and Reshuffle

Puntitas had an exhausting day. She spent most of it avoiding and delaying. The computer was up, and word was loaded, but the various printing and skimming tasks Puntitas had scheduled for herself didn’t get done.

Puntitas likes to blame it on the emotional aftermath of having dealt with yet another particularly ignorant clump on Friday, but the truth is that she’s feeling vulnerable and afraid of more rejection, especially since she knows barrels and barrels of that will come in any day now.

Her one real moment of work (downloading audio books doesn’t count) came at the end of the evening, when Puntitas got around to moving the poems around in the books according to the revamped tables of contents she wrote out … a month? Ago. One book was revamped in a relatively short time since the revamping consisted of substituting two pieces and reordering half a dozen others. The other book is being revamped more substantially, so Puntitas stopped for the evening after revamping it for thirty minutes.

Moving poems around in Word is a little fiddlier than Puntitas expected. Simply cutting and pasting isn’t ideal as the stanza breaks tend to disappear in transit. What yields better outcomes is to highlight and cut (ctrl+x), then to insert the file (alt+I, l, file name) in the appropriate place. Better still is to remember to cut before the page break; otherwise, the heading attributes that generate the table of contents get erased, and the end user is forced to swear loudly against her will.

Puntitas would actually like to finish now, but she’s tired and susceptible to the kinds of careless mistakes that make whole documents vanish. She will power down for the night, in the hope that, when she wakes tomorrow morning, she will remember that one perk of self-employment is time for writing.

And with her final burst of energy, Puntitas officially renamed one of her manuscripts.

Puntitas reads _the Sealed Letter_ by E. Donoghue, whom Puntitas didn’t remember reading before until she read the list of other titles. If Puntitas had remembered, she would probably not have read the writer again so soon, but she’s enjoying the book, so it’s just as well.

the Value of Experience

Puntitas has organized her favorites into four nice neat folders, one of which is “Writing,” so she feels very accomplished. She has also set up her kitchen cum postage scale, and after some experimentation, she has discovered that she can accurately weigh her manuscripts, provided she paperclips the top and bottom edges so that most of the physical document is on the weighing platform. If she lays the document flat, like a leggy damsel with limbs aloft, the weight is off by one to two ounces.

The other thing Puntitas discovered is that she’s been putting way too much postage on her manuscripts. After using slide rule and graphing calculator (okay, Puntitas exaggerates, but only a little) combined with new scale and USPS website, Puntitas has determined that six forty-four-cent stamps are more than sufficient for her fifty-five-page document, plus cover letter, plus SASE, plus post card, plus entry form where applicable.

The other literary activity Puntitas engaged in (minimal writing has occurred since last post) is that Puntitas and a friend went to an experimental theater production yesterday. It was fun, four Poe selections partially read, partially dramatized in various rooms of the university library. The first was “The Raven—all screams and hurling self onto floor–which was Puntitas’ least favorite performance, as she imagines the speaker of the poem to be crumbling in a fidgety quiet. The rest of the pieces—“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—were more low-key, but there too, the performances tended to characterize “madness” with the hysteria of someone who has never actually been around people with delusions and other mental illnesses. The interpretations also lacked the nuance that only comes of having ten or twenty years worth of experiences with people and life. In “Amontillado,” For instance, the narrator carried herself with a venomous intent, which is how Puntitas imagined the character when she was younger. Now, however, Puntitas imagines the serenity of a decision made and the strain of giving the self courage enough to seize the opportunity. After all, maturity gives one both the tolerance to deal with unpleasantness and the patience to take action when tolerance is exhausted, and Puntitas makes this remark after an especially unpleasant experience at work.

Puntitas also noticed that the productions, which were understandably low on scenery, were also disappointingly low on sound effects. Poe is full of sound, creating much of the tension by describing stillness, the ticking of a clock, the jingling of the bells on someone’s hat. He is so meticulous about sound that Puntitas suspects he was a predominately aural person or that he spent enough time drinking at night to value his hearing. Puntitas thought that greater tension would have been achieved with subtler acting, more sound effects, and greater experience of life.

When Puntitas is being sensible, she thinks that her eight years of percolation between graduation and the present have been good for these reasons, but Puntitas is rarely ever sensible for very long.

Puntitas reads _Reflections in a Golden Eye_ by C. McCullers and _Bridget Jones Diary_ by H. Fielding.

Poetic Stress

Puntitas had a small but important revelation concerning the almond poem and her poetry in general. While she’s liked the idea and the overall shape of the piece, she’s had trouble finishing it. The problem hasn’t been trouble moving from Point A to Point B or trouble resolving a technical issue. It’s been lack of motivation, which is odd since Puntitas is generally interested in writing this poem.

She’s noticed that this lack of enthusiasm is sometimes overcome by a little formal poetry, either reading or writing it, so she started writing another sonnet, and she spent some time on the web Googling around for other forms and for articles on forms.

Two stayed with her, and now that she wants to cite them properly, she can’t find them. Ah, well …. One was an interview, and the other was the forward for an anthology of formal poems. Both talked a lot about sound.

The first said that a poem is different from prose in that the former seeks to create an emotional effect, which is reinforced by the sound of the language, sibilants for soft soothing poems and plosives for capturing terse, harder pieces. He used many of the terms high school English teachers quiz their students on: assonance, alliteration, caesura.

The other said that the problem with free verse is that much of it is actually prose with arbitrary line breaks, prose and poetry being distinguished thus: prose is stressed roughly every ten syllables while poetry is stressed roughly every four. He talked about other things as well, most especially the line break and the need for concreteness not only in the imagery but also in the experience or moment described. But he returned to the sound of the piece, echoing the first writer’s thoughts about the connection between the emotional impact and the aural experience.

Puntitas’ first revelation was that her almond poem was stressed like prose. When she went back into the text to stress it more poeticly, she discovered that she was more motivated about working on it because the piece sounded like a poem again, and she realized that she is very aware of the way her work sounds. This is in part because of her writerly esthetic, having grown up on formal poetry, lived around songs, and listened to, officially studied, and worked around the rhythms of speech, but it is also due to the way Puntitas writes, typing to the echo of a robotic synthetic voice and considering a piece to be finished when she stops being aware of that voice. When a draft isn’t working or when it contains lots of research, she gets stuck, and she often finds that what produces her stuckedness is a prosaic rhythm, which she either modifies to something more poetic or emphasizes for something prosy.

Her second revelation was that she isn’t clear about how important sound should be in her own work. Some of her poems are rich in sound, working hard to reinforce the content aurally. Others strive for a starker soundscape, letting the content carry the burden of impact. Puntitas own impulses are toward valuing sound, but she wonders whether that isn’t an old-fashion tendency, since much of the poetry she reads has a prosier feel.

Puntitas reads _The Elegance of the Hedgehog_ by M. Barbery, _Dirty_ by M. Hart, _Hell House_ by R. Matheson, _siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Perez, and _The Link_ By C. Tudge. She has decided to finish books she’s started. Three or four are left on the metaphorical stack.

Still Tinking

Puntitas has received two more rejections since her last post. She didn’t have much hopes for either (well, a little hope for one), so the news wasn’t very disappointing. She did entertain the thought of assigning an acceptance probability rating to each submission, but entertained it briefly on considering that such ratings would only highlight her inability to predict the likelihood of success. Puntitas is no stranger to self-flagellation, but she isn’t into cesspits of despair.

She missed some manuscript deadlines, the books to have been sent out by Saturday, but she’ll send them out tomorrow anyway on the assumption that editors will want the money enough to accept them. Her excuse of the day is that she was having serious trouble sleeping for much of last month and couldn’t think clearly enough to finish the revisions and editing she had in mind, then was suddenly overtaken by sleep the last few days. Even now, she’d rather be sleeping than typing though dinner is still a couple of hours away.

Today’s poetic efforts have centered around reorganizing the poems in the books. In one book, she has moved two poems in one section, moved one poem in another, and removed two poems in a third. In the other book, she’s thinking more work will be needed. Two sections make sense, one sort of does, but the third doesn’t at all. She’s thinking about changing the title of the book, but hasn’t quite figured out how to organized the two iffy sections.

Since her last post, Puntitas has also been working on two new poems. Well, she hasn’t made much progress at all with the almond poem (waiting to be less sleepy), but she did start another one, a Shakespearean sonnet on a subject she’d written about before (she destroyed the previous poem because it didn’t really do what she had intended).

She’s thinking she really does need to finish up a couple other drafts and maybe strengthen the pieces in one section. She’s thinking she can’t believe she thought her books were done last year.

Puntitas reads _Amy, Come Home_ by B. Michaels and _Wicked Game_ by L. Jackson. These were a nice Halloween break. Today she resumed the other stuff where she left off.

Some Rejections Are Good

Puntitas has received two rejections since her last post. One was for the tanka, a short formulaic note with her first name in the salutation, but nothing else to suggest it was written especially to her. The other one was more encouraging.

It was for a group of poems Puntitas sent out last May. It appears to be a surprisingly positive standard rejection with a personal note imbedded. The text reads as follows:

Dear Puntitas (last name included):

Thank you for sending us your poems (listed by title).

Hello Puntitas (first name only),

Please do accept my apology for taking so long with your poems. It was not that they were languishing, but that they were under consideration. While these particular poems were not what we were looking for, I would be pleased to see more of your work in the near future.

Thanks and hope to hear from you again real soon,

Poetry Editor, (name of) Journal

Unfortunately this particular piece was not a right fit for the journal, but we were very impressed by your writing. We hope that you will feel encouraged by this short note and send us something else.

We look forward to reading more.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Puntitas is very happy. She would have been happier if she’d been accepted, of course, but this is good enough for now.

Puntitas reads _What Came Before He Shot Her_ by Elizabeth George. She is still reading _Siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ And _The Link_. Both are interesting, but the George is quite the page turner.

Postage Prices

Since Puntitas’ new postal scale should arrive some time next week or so, she decided to piddle away part of her afternoon by reading up on first-class postage prices of the United States:

http://www.usps.com/prices/first-class-mail-prices.htm

(Puntitas really will update her blogroll links between now and January 1.)

Wow, Puntitas had clearly underestimated the complexities of postage calculations and the specific stresses put upon the American postal employee, whose job is it to keep track of it all.

Previously, Puntitas thought that postcards of a maximum length and width were mailed at a fixed rate of X while envelopes were delivered at a rate of Y per ounce. She had a vague notion that large envelopes, the ones that are the size of a half sheet of letter writing paper or larger, had a higher postage minimum than other envelopes, but it was one of those nebulous and possibly mistaken notions based on the coincident circumstance that such envelopes usually hold more pieces of paper.

Now she discovers that she was right about the postcard, more or less: it takes 28¢ to mail a postcard that is 3.5×5 to 4.25×6 inches in size, provided that it weighs less than 1 oz., has a thickness that falls between 0.007 and 0.016 inches, and is addressed conventionally in landscape position.

But she was completely misinformed when it comes to letters, large envelopes, and packages (Puntitas book-length manuscripts, when combined into a single mailing, may actually be packages). Yes, size does matter where envelopes are concerned, and so does girth, heft, flaccidity, and degree of conventionality in terms of general dimensions and weight. Who wouldn’t have guessed that postmasters have traditionally been male?

Puntitas had to read the page several times to familiarize herself with all the esoteric details. She has no complaints about the rates themselves. They seem reasonable enough. At least they do at this point, while Puntitas has no real way of knowing how much her manuscripts weigh. Her neuroses center around all the factors involved in coming up with the right amount.

Hmm, Puntitas just realized she doesn’t always figure postage into her expenses.

Puntitas reads _First Comes Marriage_ by M Balogh.

Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

Another Rejection

Puntitas received another rejection today, a form email beginning, “Dear Writer,” from a journal she thought would probably like her work. The poems she sent were strong, and the audience seemed ideal.

Very disappointing.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge, which is really short and interesting, but slow-going somehow.

the Difference a Line Break Makes

In her many wanderings on the web, Puntitas found a journal that publishes Senryu and kyoka. Since she didn’t know what the forms were, Puntitas did some Googling:

Senryu is a haiku that comments on society rather than nature. In English, the form is a three-line poem divided into five, seven, and five syllables. It does not contain a nature word, and the tone is reminiscent of the grumpy old guys on The Muppets or of any gathering of Puntitas and her collection of displaced friends.

Kyoka is a tanka with senryu convictions, the English form having five lines divided into five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables.

Since Puntitas still isn’t comfortable with very short forms or capable of saying anything succinctly, she decided to turn both of her twenty-five-word short shorts into tanka. Surprisingly, having a line break to organize ideas around was really freeing. Puntitas was able to cut words and set up images more easily than when she had nothing but punctuation to work with. She likes both poems (which are even shorter now) better than she did before though she is not confident enough about them yet to make firm decisions about including them in her books.

She did submit them to the senryu and kyoka journal. If the work is rejected as favorably as before, she will probably add them to the books. If not, she will keep working on them, possibly expanding them though only a little. What Puntitas thinks she did well is to pick subjects small enough for the form.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.