As you may know, I did a stint in
gymnastics when I was in Junior High and High School. Mostly so I wouldn’t have
to wear the horrible gym clothes. Gymnastics and modern dance sounded MUCH
better than “corrective PE”, and both were
better, and better than the green shorts and a white short-sleeved blouse of
our regular PE clothes. Consequently, I can tell you that Cathy Rigby was 5’2”
and so was I, but I don’t know much about regular sports.
It does seem that baseball has the most
statistics of any sport ever. And baseball players seem to have a superstition
for almost every statistic. If you know more than this, or if you’ve written
any sports poems, submit them to Sport Lit — we’ve talked about them before.
But there are some
statistics I do keep track of, and thanks to a friend of mine, Pamelyn Casto, we
encouraged the participants on the LinkedIn group I moderate to do the same.
Pamelyn has published many articles and essays on flash fiction, myth, critical
insights, and more, in Writer’s Digest, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New
American Reading, The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors,
Teachers, and Writers in the Field, and so on. She is also Associate Editor at
OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. This is a lovely online journal you might want to explore and submit to. They
published me; they might publish you too.
Pamelyn is always juggling twelve plates and loves to
research whatever interests her, but bless her heart, she is a wonderful,
generous, accessible person who always has room for one more thing.
She just posted (on the LinkedIn Group):
“Post Your Writing
Accomplishments for 2019 It's that time of year again-- a time to look back at
the previous year and a time to look forward to what the future might bring.
Please do post your writing accomplishments for 2019 (and that might urge you
to either get more work out before year's end or get more work out there for
2020). It's always fun and informative to see some of the writing
accomplishments of our writer colleagues. I look forward to reading all about
it.”
This year people seem to be posting
about individual collections they published. I look at something completely
different. I count:
- The number
of poems written;
- Number of submissions done (not the number of poems submitted, the
number of journals to which I submitted);
- Number of acceptances received, and of course—
- Number of rejections
I do not count the
poems written or submitted in 2018 that were accepted in 2019. I have the means
to do it, and it would certainly take into account those journals with long
turnaround times, but for me, it’s not that important.
Things I wish I HAD
kept track of:
- The number of short fiction pieces written. I save everything under my
“poetry file”; sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t;
- The number of short fiction pieces submitted. At the risk of jinxing
everything, I rarely, rarely write short fiction. I have always submitted it,
and it has always been accepted, for which I am completely amazed and very thankful. But so far I have been, and always will be, 98% a poet. The other 2% is a mix between this blog post, moderating the LinkedIn site, the occasional jacket blurb, and short fiction. I am grateful to be developing all these skills but I am a poet.
ENOUGH ABOUT ME,
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOU!!!!
IF you even care
about this, I would encourage you to measure your work in some way. Just for
yourself. I know a lot of novelists who measure how many words they’ve written
each day; that is an important statistic to them. I measure how many words my
blog posts are—no more than 1,000 words or someone will stab themselves, I mean,
stop reading.
If you write,
whether or not you choose to submit, you are a writer. If you are not currently
measuring your progress in some way, think about it. You don’t have to tell
anyone, post it anywhere, brag about anything or be sad about anything. It’s
just that if you don’t know, you don’t know.
“You don’t always know whether you’re writing well or badly, even in the
middle of your career. Sometimes you write out of desperation. ”—On why
we write
Stay warm, be safe, write well (sorry, Steve), don’t walk
under any ladders, and measure if you want xo
- - - -
Tobi Alfier's most recent collection of poetry is Slices Of Alice. She is also co-editor with Jeff Alfier of the San Pedro River Review. Don't miss Tobi's columns on the craft of poetry: insert your email address in the "Follow By Email" box to the right of this article and you'll be notified every time a new article appears.
