Literary Magazines and Databases

Earlier tonight, I talked with Matt for a good while on the phone. We kicked around one of his sonnets, and the talk led to publication. Specifically – all the organization that has to happen, the tracking, where to send, when, etc.

A few years back, when I was sending work out… it wasn’t that much. A handful of poems here or there. I could keep in my head which poems were where.

If I’m serious about sending stuff out – I’ve got a bigger task ahead of me. More poems, more potential places to send them. I’m not sure if I’m going to try simultaneous submissions (some places allow that, others don’t), where one poem is sent off to multiple magazines at the same time. Most of all – tracking which poems have been sent to which publication.

To me, this screams out databases.

So I need to lay this stuff out a bit, and come up with some fancy shmancy way of organizing which poems are at what magazines, etc etc. My first poetry professor from Indiana University, Richard Cecil, once suggested keeping track using notecards (which I did do, at one point). I’d like to think of this database idea as an extension of that.

Perhaps this impulse is my nerd side trying to join in on the fun, and play with my poetry side. It’s a nice excuse to really force myself to learn a bit more about databases. Although I don’t feel I know too much about them, as I was going through my list of what I needed to track… this really feels like the right thing to do.