Writerly resolutions June status

So I’m climbing out of the depression, although not quite as fast as I’d like. Most of my writing this month has been on the working on the new story, which I have managed to finish the rewrite on which seems to have expanded the story by a bit over 10%.

I only had two poems left in submission, so I went ahead and launched my annual poetry submit-a-palooza. The thing that usually makes this a bit of a pain is that I need to combine single-poem documents into multiple-poem documents, but different publications want differing numbers of poems and a poem might be inappropriate for them or already rejected by them. I ended up writing a little MacOS helper that automates this so I can select a group of poems, then ctrl-click on them, and select combine word documents from quick actions and boom, it combines them (in a subdirectory) and opens the file¹ and I’m good to go. In the process, I discovered six publications on my list have started charging for all submissions and another five were verifiably defunct.

And since I like charts and graphs, I made a nice pie chart for you of how my efforts varied over the month:

1. I added this for two reasons: first, the script did not like two of my poem files, one with a footnote, the other with some Greek text, second, sometimes I needed to make some edits to the file before submitting like removing my name, or setting format to the specifications of the publication.