For this month, I'm focusing on getting submissions in because many lit journals close their reading periods in July or August. I'm concentrating on flash fiction and poetry submissions this time because I have plenty of these sitting around, and I would like to find a home for them.
I also still have some work to do to find journals, magazines and other outlets that are sympathetic to rhyming poetry. I have a couple pieces that I really like, but they have been all but shunned from the literary landscape. You've never seen a piece of writing rejected so fast. For anything else, the typical wait for a reject (or if you want to be an optimist, an acceptance) is six weeks to six months. When I try to submit one of my poems that happen to have a rhyme scheme, the longest I've ever had to wait is two weeks. One time it was rejection after only two days. If all lit journals worked that quickly, writers would either have no more confidence left to go on or little time to dwell on a reject, upping their confidence to an astronomical level.
It's a funny thing about using a rhyme scheme in poetry--today's literary elites think rhyming shows the skills of an uneducated moron whose only exposure to poetry is mass market greeting cards. Though if you go back a generation or two, those trying to get published with free verse instead of a steady rhyme scheme were also met with that label of ignorance to the literary canon. Luckily, the elite crowd is still relatively isolated inside university libraries and tend to find mild internet use blasphemous to the writing process. There's still hope for all of us writers who dare to break the mold by reminding the last generation that we are actually reforming the mold they dared to break first, making it into something new again.
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