folding or flailing

This is not meant as a negative commentary about small presses or editors or publishers. After all, I run my own tiny indie small press (and I'm not some sort of perfect professional expert and I'm not a fan of business socks) and I've always been personally drawn towards small indie presses.

This is just more like a personal mini-rant of small frustration.

In the last less than three years, I've had three different encounters where a poetry chapbook of mine was accepted, but then never ended up being published by the press that accepted it.

If this would have been a onetime thing, I don't think I'd have quite as big of a mental glitch about the matter, but three times in less than three years? 

One was solicited, I pulled it out of the other presses it was submitted to, the tentative publication date was put off several times, and then communication from the press just stopped, until I finally just pulled my chapbook out and started submitting it elsewhere.

The other one was accepted by a small press that ended up shutting down close to a year ago - but shortly after that, another small press said they'd love to publish it - but yesterday, I was informed that other small press has decided to shut down too.

So my first poetry submission of February 2018 was submitting a poetry chapbook that's been accepted twice, but then let go of twice, to ANOTHER small press.

I'm not mad; I'm just rather frustrated by this three time sequence of exciting acceptances disappearing into nothing.

Interestingly enough, one of the chapbooks is entitled "circles into nothing". Maybe I should re-name it. Maybe its title is making this happen.

I know a lot of writers have undergone this kind of thing in recent years. Getting extremely excited about having a chapbook or even a full-length book accepted for publication - and then eagerly awaiting that publication - and then having the press suddenly shut down and feeling like you have to start over with your book again (and sometimes wondering if you even SHOULD start over again). The limbo land of an accepted chapbook being pending pending pending and then suddenly let go of and now it's starting to feel old and causing you to wonder if maybe you ought to give up on it.

Since this has now happened to me three times in less than three years, part of my brain feels like giving up on submitting these chapbooks. I'm not saying I'm going to do that, but it has crossed my mind. Also, it's crossed my mind that maybe I should just publish one of my own chapbooks myself, so it can be published before it feels even older, and so that I can move on, without giving up.

I know some people look down on self-publishing and/or don't take it as seriously as being published by another press, but I don't want these two chapbooks of mine to remain in limbo land for another year. Maybe I should compile my three unpublished chapbooks into a full-length manuscript and start submitting that instead. Or maybe I should swallow them all up and then spit them out into something new, like some vomiting broken bird shaped piece of art.

I can handle rejection, but this feels different than rejection.  This is getting all excited about an acceptance, extracting your accepted work from other sources, having your accepted work on hold for half a year or more, and then having it suddenly released into the wilderness again and having to start over with it again and wondering if its wings are too misshapen to continue the journey and wondering what the journey even is.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic here, but hey, I'm a poet.

(My next mini-rant might be about how porn appeals to me less and less now that most porn stars are close to half my age. Or it might not. Time will tell I guess.)