Is It Rebeccamas Yet?

Whew, I'm behind on e-mail, blogging, No Tell, gift shopping, pretty much everything.

In the good news category, the bathroom vanity is installed and beautiful. Hopefully the second vanity won't pose any problems for the handy man on Weds.

We still haven't purchased our Christmas tree -- it's going to be a Charlie Brown Christmas, I fear. Normally this would really bother me. Surprisingly, I'm not so bothered.

I'm not doing Christmas cards for the first time in probably 12 years. I'm a little bothered by this, but again, not so much.

After three trips to the Rockville, MD Buy Buy Baby they finally gave us the correct glider for the nursery. Chris seemed to have an aversion to opening the box and checking before driving out of the parking lot. He has a trust in labels and numbers that Tender Buttons would surely call naive.

Just heard from a prolific poet that she's pregnant with baby #3. My 2005 resolution will be not to complain about not having time to write and to instead just write.

Speaking of prolific, Didi is posting a bit about online publishing, sim subs, etc. While I don't share all of her views, I do agree that doing an online journal (just like a print journal) is a tremendous amount of work and no matter where one submits his/her work, the very least he/she should do is be familiar with both the guidelines and the type of work the journal publishes. I am constantly amazed at the number of poets who submit less than 5 poems to No Tell Motel. That tells me right off the bat that not only have they not read our submission guidelines, they haven't even looked at our journal because if they had they'd know we publish five poems per poet. Although it does make it easy to reject the sub, we don't even have to read the poems. And it's not like these submitters didn't have access to our journal. It's free and available to anyone with an Internet connection. There's no excuse.

As for simultaneous submissions, I'm cool with them as long the poet informs us immediately that the work has been taken elsewhere. We respond to all submissions in under 6 weeks so there really isn't that much of a need, but it's your work and we're not going lay any claim until we decide we're actually going to use them. We do our best to be considerate of each poet and his/her work and in return we hope to receive the same consideration. As a poet, I've had my work held for unnecessarily long periods of time by editors. So I understand why poets sim sub. I sim submit about 25% of the time, but only to places that accept sim submission (actually there are a number of places, both print and online that do accept sim subs these days). If the pubs guidelines state they don't accept sim subs, I will either exclusively send to them or won't bother at all depending on what I anticipate the response time to be. This is the reason we're temporarily suspending our reading period from Jan 15 - Mar 15. I can't guarantee I'll be able to read and respond to subs during this time so I'd rather not have them sitting and piling up in the inbox for months.

That being said, do not send us work that has already been published by another editor (in either print or online publications). We don't consider posting a poem on your personal blog publication (yes, technically it's self-publishing). We do consider poems appearing on blogs run by editors, such as the Verse, as published.