I Got Some Cool News Today

So something awesome happened today. I got a message from NY Literary Magazine that their 2017 edition of Erotic Poetry, Flames, was being released today. I had submitted a piece in for a contest via Writer’s Café last year and I won 2nd place, but when the magazine listed the winners for the anthology on their website, I wasn’t listed among them. I supposed that only the winner on the Café contest would go on to the magazine. The win of 2nd place was cool and the contest administrator gave some very encouraging remarks on my piece, so I was happy.

I pulled up the sample of the anthology to check it out and see who made the issue, and low and behold, my name was among the other poets! Whaaaaaat? I scanned over through the titles of the poems listed and sure enough I was in there. Me! Now a published poet! Needless to say, my productivity has gone straight to pot with me being on cloud nine. I went around in circles to make sure it was me and there was no mistake about fifteen times before, yes, my brain accepted the fact that I was included.

I got way too excited. After I downloaded the entire electronic version (my hard copy is coming later) I started going through each piece to see who else made it and what they had. I read the first piece. “Hey” I thought to myself. “This is familiar.” Dummy, that’s because it is. This one is yours too. Yep. They included two of my pieces. The first two pieces in the book are mine. How awesome is that? I kept reading. Each piece is pretty good with their own voice. I found another one a little later. “Hey, that one’s mine too!” It turns out that all three pieces I had sent in on the contest made it into the collection. Three!

I’m over the moon. I started writing last year with pieces of poetry and anyone who’s been reading this blog from back in the day (are there any of you still out there?) remembers when I would try to throw up words poetical on here often. I invite anyone who is interested to check out some of my earlier stuff. It’s not all erotic; I wrote on a variety of stuff. If the steamy stuff is your thing, I’ve put them in their own section HERE if you want to take a read.

A big thanks to NY Literary Magazine for selecting my pieces to include in their publication. After a rejection email I received yesterday, this came at the perfect time to help pick myself up and keep on writing. If anyone is interested in submitting work into NY Literary Magazine, they have free contests they run all year and invite anyone to submit their work. The poetry collection Flames can be read for free via Issuu, Scibd, or on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. The digital version can be found on Amazon or can order a print copy HERE.