Counting up my failures (and successes)

So I am one year post-Mills and it seems about right to look at where I am. And the ledger has a number of failures, or at least, successes that haven't occurred yet.

For instance, I am no closer to publishing my book, Valley/Ridge. Hell, I can't even seem to get journals to publish individual poems from it. I keep saying that's because the poems must not work by themselves, that they need to be part of a unified whole. As to why that unified whole isn't attracting any attention, well, that must be because I have failed to send out my manuscript -- in the past year, I have submitted it to exactly one publishing house (Palm Press, because Jane Sprague is fantastic).

The biggest success of the past year is There, which has published three issues so far. Additionally, we can add the reading I organized for There in November at Mama Buzz. And there has been some progress on the publication front: Mirage #4/Period(ical), Deep South, ListenLight. Making the chapbook for Nissa's Art for Autism event was an important experience -- who knew it could be that easy to make and publish a little book? And I enjoyed performing some of my recent work ("Pythia says") at the event. It didn't go terribly.

Perhaps I can say that for the past year, too.