January was a low-writing month. At some point last year, I managed to mess up my submissions spread 
sheet so that a lot of old submissions got attached to the wrong journals. Because I use past submission history as part of my determining where I’ll submit new things, this turns out to be something that I feel like I need to fix so I’ve ended up going through old submission records (a lot of rejections saved in gmail) which is fascinating in its own way because I find myself seeing a lot of near misses in the past for both accepted and abandoned stories. I’ve also been unpacking the boxes of miscellaneous junk that are stacked in my office and with a bit of luck I’ll have a cleaner and better organized workspace by the end of February
My big thing was printing a copy of draft three of the novel in preparation for the final revision before querying. It’s a little strange to me that the cheapest way to get a spiral bound copy of the manuscript is to send it to Lulu, but it is nice to have this as an artifact.
A trio of poems that I had accepted last year at Belt Magazine were finally published this month. I’m pretty proud of these. The first two of the trio I knew I had something good when I finished them, the last I was doubtful about until I saw it excerpted in Belt’s promotional material and realized this was pretty good too.
Other than that, it’s been a steady trickle of rejections, mostly form, for lingering submissions.
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