My new writers’ group partner (we’ll call her “TQ Poet”) and I met again last week and this morning. We’ve decided that entering contests will be a great motivation. I had begun to enter a few last year, but, of course, lost my motivation when I didn’t make it past the short list.
TQ Poet and I agree that entering contests places us is reminiscent of our time at UofM. In various literature classes, we were required to submitted 10-12-page essays and the deadlines were extremely motivating. Added to the time restraints were the actual formal requirements of the essays themselves, and much of our lack of motivation to write today stems from not having a clue what to write about.
The first contest we’ve selected is the October 1st deadline for submitting poetry or an essay to the American Literary Review.
I chose one poem: Up in Smoke. I know submitting a poem that I wrote years ago seems counterintuitive, but we are under a week until the submission is due. We both agree that we are more motivated to create new works, but that this “used” submission is just a beginning.
Crossing my fingers and submitting tonight.
