When an Acceptance is More than it Appears

My adventures in submitting to Litmags

Bee Butt

Ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil, I’ve been writing something.  As you can imagine, most of those early attempts were pretty awful.  That’s normal when you first begin writing.  But for a long time, I held onto the idea that my writing was bad.  On the few occasions I inflicted my poetry on other people, they grimaced and listened politely, then quickly excused themselves.  Occasionally I would get the question, “WTF was that about?” 

A couple years ago, I joined a local poetry group that met at the library and had the opportunity to read some of my poems there.  I was surprised when several people said they liked what I wrote.  This gave me the courage to submit my writing to some magazines last summer.

My first few submissions met with rejection, and doubt crept into my mind.  I was ready to quit until I received my first acceptance.  A magazine wanted to publish all three of the poems I submitted.  Suddenly, I felt like my writing was good and other people did like it.  Buoyed by success, I began a frenzy of submissions, sending to over seventy publications by the end of 2023.  This led to four more acceptances, including my essay in Business Insider that went to the home page of MSN.

The magazine that first accepted my work told me that the issue would not be published until spring of 2024, so I patiently waited and continued to send out submissions.  In the first half of this year, I’ve sent over 120 submissions and received seven acceptance letters.  Half of those submissions are still pending response, so there may be more acceptance letters to come.

When the spring issue of that original magazine arrived, I went to their website and eagerly downloaded the PDF to read my work.  But it wasn’t there.  My accepted poems were nowhere to be found.  Puzzled, I replied to the acceptance email I had received last fall, asking if I had misunderstood.  The EIC responded with profuse apologies.  Somehow, between acceptance and publication, my poems did not end up in the right place to be included in the layout.  She did not give me specifics, but I’ve worked in enough offices to imagine how someone in the chain might have failed to upload the file to the proper folder, causing it to be accidentally left out.  I told the EIC it was not a terrible thing, and I thanked her for being the first magazine to accept my work. 

Without that encouragement, it’s possible I may not have continued to submit to the other publications who accepted my work and would not have had any of my writing published.  Plus, I had the knowledge that those three poems were good enough to be accepted by them so they must be good enough to submit elsewhere.  And, no, they couldn’t simply run my poems in the next issue because they have themed calls for submission and those poems did not fit into the upcoming theme.  My takeaway from this whole situation was still a net positive as it gave me the confidence to keep going at a crucial moment.

Confidence is an important part of the submission game.  No matter how good your work may be, you’re still going to get a lot more rejections than acceptances.  That’s not a reflection on your work but simply a measure of how many submissions editors get for every issue. I would also say that confidence is essential in determining how willing you are to compromise your work.

Recently, I received an acceptance letter from a magazine for a quirky little poem that probably won’t be a good fit for most mainstream magazines.  I was thrilled until I read their request to edit the final line of the poem.  It contained a mild curse word for excrement, and they wanted me to change that one word.  Normally, that shouldn’t be a big deal, but the original word fit the vowel rhyme scheme of the rest of the line, while the substitution would use a word whose vowel sound didn’t fit and it began and ended with a plosive that truncated the line, effectively ruining the ending.  I declined the edit and the acceptance.  This was an easy decision for me based on the confidence I have gained from having other work accepted over the past year.  If this edit request had come to me a year ago, I may have compromised and ruined the poem in the process.

In summary, if at first you don’t succeed, keep pelting the literary gatekeepers until they relent and the gates swing wide open, or least squeeze open a crack. 

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