A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-Eight
Aside from my writing, recently I began a real push to begin getting more of my poetry published. Part of that has been sharing poems here on this blog, as regular readers should know, but that is more about my own desire to feel that I am not just writing these poems and letting them sit around. Posting the poems here is important to me, but I also know that it is not a substitute for getting my work into respected journals, or, eventually, collected in book form. Placing poems here is personally rewarding, of course, and it does relieve me of the sense I had at one time of "hoarding" the poems I am writing, but I still need to do more.
Towards that end, this past week I began sending out packets to a number of journals. While I have sent poems out in the recent past, and even have a poem that is in this months issue of the South Florida Poetry Journal, this is a far more extensive press than I have made in the past, and while I am quite excited about this, I am also finding certain aspects quite difficult in ways that I had not expected.
Much of this is related to my learning disabilities, and I am honestly quite surprised at how complicated journals make this process. Even more, I feel as if attempting to explain the specifics that I find so hard, many would say I am just making drama or griping for no reason, and, I also have a fear that speaking up about this could easily antagonize editors. For me, though, it is a real struggle, and honestly, I don't know that I would be doing this if I didn't have a lot of support right now.
The thing that makes me really crazy, though, is that most of the submissions I am doing are going through a single online system, but one that allows the editors to make specific and minute requests about formatting that seem rather arbitrary at times. For example, different places want specific file types, have requests about formatting within the file, one place even gave extreme specifications about what they wanted in the author bio. In some cases, I've struggled for long periods just to meet the specifications for submissions at a journal, in a way I am sure many others would not, and the knowledge that these systems are set up in a way that makes it harder for me as an individual with certain disabilities is really upsetting. Honestly, there have been numerous times when I have looked at a submission and just thought it was not worth it. Really, I am only succeeding at even sending out the work now because I have help (once again, my deepest gratitude to Freesia McKee).
What makes it worse is that I know many of these things are being done for the purpose of gate-keeping. I've heard many publishing professionals state openly that if you cannot follow whatever rules they have, they will just not look at the work. Indeed, some have even acknowledged that those requests are, in part, an effort to help sorting through incoming submissions. Now, of course, I know that editors have a huge amount of work to sift through, and I can understand the impulse to find ways of making that job less difficult. They come from the perspective that these are simple requests intended to make sure that the writers care enough to pay attention. But they are not small things for me, as I have said. Am I wrong to feel that I am being told, we have made these rules to keep people out, so if you have difficulty following them, don't even bother? What is a person like me to do? I cannot ignore these requests without being ignored myself, yet even if I focus on the specifics and spend an hour prepping the submission, I know I may still mess it up. I do not want to make the lives of editors more difficult, I just want to be able to share my work without feeling, as so often I have been made to of late, that I am not truly welcome, that my dyslexia will be held against me.
Much of this is related to my learning disabilities, and I am honestly quite surprised at how complicated journals make this process. Even more, I feel as if attempting to explain the specifics that I find so hard, many would say I am just making drama or griping for no reason, and, I also have a fear that speaking up about this could easily antagonize editors. For me, though, it is a real struggle, and honestly, I don't know that I would be doing this if I didn't have a lot of support right now.
The thing that makes me really crazy, though, is that most of the submissions I am doing are going through a single online system, but one that allows the editors to make specific and minute requests about formatting that seem rather arbitrary at times. For example, different places want specific file types, have requests about formatting within the file, one place even gave extreme specifications about what they wanted in the author bio. In some cases, I've struggled for long periods just to meet the specifications for submissions at a journal, in a way I am sure many others would not, and the knowledge that these systems are set up in a way that makes it harder for me as an individual with certain disabilities is really upsetting. Honestly, there have been numerous times when I have looked at a submission and just thought it was not worth it. Really, I am only succeeding at even sending out the work now because I have help (once again, my deepest gratitude to Freesia McKee).
What makes it worse is that I know many of these things are being done for the purpose of gate-keeping. I've heard many publishing professionals state openly that if you cannot follow whatever rules they have, they will just not look at the work. Indeed, some have even acknowledged that those requests are, in part, an effort to help sorting through incoming submissions. Now, of course, I know that editors have a huge amount of work to sift through, and I can understand the impulse to find ways of making that job less difficult. They come from the perspective that these are simple requests intended to make sure that the writers care enough to pay attention. But they are not small things for me, as I have said. Am I wrong to feel that I am being told, we have made these rules to keep people out, so if you have difficulty following them, don't even bother? What is a person like me to do? I cannot ignore these requests without being ignored myself, yet even if I focus on the specifics and spend an hour prepping the submission, I know I may still mess it up. I do not want to make the lives of editors more difficult, I just want to be able to share my work without feeling, as so often I have been made to of late, that I am not truly welcome, that my dyslexia will be held against me.
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