Category: Notes on the Pad

Once you have multiple pieces of writing that you intend to send out into the world (submit to publishers, journals, contests, etc.), you need a good way to keep track of everything. If you have one or two books that you’re sending out, it’s not too difficult. If you’ve got a dozen short stories, it’s going to take more thought. If you’ve got upwards of 100 poems, your complexity goes up significantly.

I thought I’d share a couple of options for keeping track of what is in need of edits vs. what is ready for submission vs. what is out there (hopefully) being reviewed by an editor vs. those pieces that (thankfully) have been published and that you need to not send out again (except possibly as part of a compilation).

I’m going to describe two approaches, one using typical office software and another using some specialized tools. I’m not talking about trying to organize hard copies or using a notebook for tracking, as that way lies madness.

The Office Way

I used to use a word processor to house all my poetry. This was fine for formatting, but it was difficult to find a poem. I kept them in the order they were written, which was good for editing, as I often edited in a batch and poems written about the same time had been left to “breathe” the same amount of time. When it came time to submit, however, I had to scroll through an increasing large file or search.

When I thought something was ready to be submitted, I added it to a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had the title, date it was written, number of lines, current submission, date of submission, date of response, the response, previous submissions, and other comments. This works fairly well, especially because it is easy to sort a spreadsheet.

On another tab, I kept information on the places where I submitted. This included the name of the journal/website/publisher, the URL, submission method (through email, Submittable, etc.), number of poems to submit, whether simultaneous submissions are okay, whether a previous publication is okay, expected response time, style preferences, and other comments. Again, sorting on a spreadsheet is simple. It’s also easy to add a column when you think of some other piece of information you need.

This method is fine for tracking information. My problem with this came with storing my poems in an easily accessible way. I have a big chunk of “old” poems that I wanted to keep separate from the newer work, in part to make the number of poems in a document more manageable. The problem then became accessing multiple files to get to all my work. I had contemplated having each poem in its own document, but I honestly didn’t remember the title of every poem, so I would wind up opening multiple documents. It was awkward at best.

Scrivener and Duotrope

Scrivener is a tool developed by Literature and Latte (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) that is a complete writing studio. You can organize your poems into binders, similar to different documents in the Office approach, but since everything is maintained together in one project, viewing the documents in a different binder is only one click. There is a bulletin board view that lets you organize your work in any order with a simple click and drag. You can add descriptions, statuses, and other data fields to your documents. My poems have a status to indicate whether it is in progress, done, published, etc. I have fields to show the original creation date, date of the last edit, the date I had it critiqued on Scribophile, and a form if there is one applicable.

You can also create collections and add poems to a collection. You can order the collection independently from the overall project, which is great for playing with the order of poems in a chapbook without messing up the overall project. You can add information on submissions in these extra fields or in the description, but there is a better approach.

Duotrope (http://www.duotrope.com) is a website that has marketing information on more than 5,000 journals and publishers. You can list your pieces for submission, track your submissions, and save your favorite markets. The site also compiles statistics, so you can tell whether to anticipate a response in five days or five months.

While this approach costs a little money (Scrivener is currently $40 and Duotrope is either free or $5 per month, depending on your option), but I find it well worth the money due to the number of pieces you have. A spreadsheet is a totally reasonable way to track your items and submissions. A word processor may work fine for editing and storing your poetry, especially if you are more patient than I am or have a better approach than I did. I would love to hear other methods for organizing your work. Please share in the comments below.

My poem, “Legacy,” will be available in the online journal Jellyfish Whispers on February 25, 2016. I’m particularly happy about this one because this poem was the first one I wrote as part of The Great Yellow Rose in Your Brain poetry meetup. I now run the meetup at the Marilyn J. Praisner Library on the fourth Wednesday of the month.

My poem “The New Normal” is in the new issue (Volume Three, Issue 1) of Rat’s Ass Review. Lots of fantastic poetry in this issue and Roderick Bates has been a great editor.

I’ve been running a Meetup called The Great Yellow Rose in Your Brain for about two years. I inherited the group from someone who got us off to a great start but then had her life explode. The group attendance eventually slowed to a crawl, despite attempts at various ways to get folks involved, and I was all set to shut it down when marvelous happenstance inspired me.

I was looking for information on another writer’s group that I’d heard met at the Marilyn J. Praisner Library in Burtonsville, MD, not far from me. Upon investigation, I found out that the woman running that group had retired and they didn’t meet anymore. I also learned that their small meeting room, which usually had a rental fee, would be free if the library was sponsoring the event. Aha! So the Great Yellow Rose is morphing and melding into the Poetry Club, which begins meeting this Wednesday, May 27, 2015, and will meet the fourth Wednesday of the month. We’re meeting at 7:00 pm, which hopefully gives folks a chance to get there after work. Since the Poetry Club is listed on the library’s website and the GYRIYB Meetup page points to it, I hope to have a lot of folks show up to share the fun.

Great Yellow Rose in Your Brain

Marilyn J. Praisner Library Poetry Club

As part of National Poetry Month, Lidy Wilks over at Paving My Way of Authorship One Baby Step at a Time is doing an interview with a different poet each day. I think it is great fun that she varies the questions, so you don’t get the same Q&A each day. Her interview with me is posted for today, April 8, 2015.

Looking forward to “In My Neighborhood” – First book of poetry by Giovanna Capone due out by the end of the year. Giovanna and I go way back and I’m glad to see her work getting appreciated. You can find out all sorts of good stuff about her on her website: Giovanna Capone

I have recently come to appreciate limits. Not limits imposed by outside, but limits we find in ourselves. It is the process of recognizing our limits, accepting our limits (that is, accepting them as OUR limits, not belonging to anyone else or because of anyone else), and then finding out how to surpass those limits, that makes us grow. Odds are, it may hurt a bit, but that goes with the territory. It is stretching and pushing against our own personal envelopes that gets us to be able to fly.

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