Admin....it has to be done sometime.

It's getting to that time of year when I look back on my writing achievements. But that's for another post because this morning I took time to rearrange (yet again) my poetry into two folders. Having spent ages putting poems into alphabetical order with notes about submissions (if and when they were published, their progress etc.) last year - or was it early this year? I have found that it isn't really working. So now I have taken out all those that have been published and put them together (still in order) in one of the folders which also contains my 'small stones' poems and a bunch of rough drafts. All the unpublished poetry is in the other folder.

This has helped in several ways. Firstly I can see how few are published (sigh) and see how many poems are sitting in the other folder going nowhere. Yes, a fair few of them are 'out' and I am waiting to see if they might make it to the other file but there are many others lingering! Some poems have never been sent anywhere while others have been submitted several times. This got me thinking. Do the ones I never send out stay there because I'm not happy with them? And if so, why am I not editing them?  A lot to ponder on. I looked at some I have never submitted. Some do have notes about re-editing, others have no notes and some have some handwritten edits on them. I immediately thought what a waste. If some are that bad perhaps I should just abandon them. But I hate doing that unless they really are rubbish (I admitted that one or two might fall into that category).

I set about looking more carefully at a few and began to see what needed doing. My poetry has come a long way since I wrote some of the poems but a good edit might do it. In fact I have made a start and am determined to resurrect some of these and get them sent out - ah a new goal for next year!

I've also been remiss in updating the results of submissions. I do keep a main book which is up to date but I often fail to follow this up in the folders. I also realised that in the last few months I have written quite a lot of new poems, including a whole sequence. None of these are in the folder, including the ones recently sent out. Admittedly I have had a busy year but it's to my advantage to keep up with this.

Certainly this has been an exercise worth tackling. I've been meaning to do it for ages and it has opened my eyes to the poems I have and the potential within in them.