What's Neat on the Net: Literary Version

I admit it now: Both of these were taken right from The Review Review's Newsletter, so sign up for it and skip the middleperson (me!).

1) Name your own poetry journal with Writer's Relief's literary mag name game. Mine's Big Poetry Bay Review. Not as interesting as some others out there, but I'm glad it's a poetry journal.

What's your literary mag name?

2) HTMLGiant features an article from Blake Butler entitled "22 Things I Learned from Submitting Work" that has some good reminders re: rejection along with other points.

Submit to This

I really don't like to post more than once a day, but this post by Blake Butler at HTMLGiant entitled "22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing" is a must-read for anyone who is, well, submitting their work. So many great points, and excellent perspective.

Here are a few excerpts:

4. Often editors who reject you are doing you a favor. Either the piece isn’t great and needs work (thus saving you face of looking back later like whyyyyy did I publish this) or taking a strong piece and making it stronger because of force of will. Yeah sure some editors just are pussies but so what. The work is never done.

6. Deletion is holy.

9. If you really want to publish a book one day you will publish a book. The time that you spend getting there is kind of wonderful. Don’t cut it short. The emotional range is valuable.

16. College journals are frequently a wild toss. Their boards change as students come and go. This results not only in a wide field of difference in their aesthetic, but a kind of group mind that is harder to get through usually than a place run independently or by an individual. I once had a story accepted and published and then after the issue came out got a rejection letter from the new board. Play the game like the game deserves to be played.

If you read no other link I have posted on this blog, at least read this one. You won't be sorry.