The Poetry Incident

So I had a weird night. First I watched too much How I Met You Mother, which isn't the weird part. I do that all the time. The weird part came after I finished watching "The Pineapple Incident" and groggily decided I needed to go to bed.

I went to check my email one last time, as you do when you're anxiously on submission and past the usual response time, and found the strangest acceptance letter ever (and no, it wasn't from the place I expected to hear back from five days ago). See, usually acceptance letters are all, your piece has been accepted, now wait fifty years for it to be posted (okay, I think the longest I've waited is six months? But that kind of feels like fifty years sometimes). This acceptance letter was all, oh yeah, your poem's been posted.

Me: *blink* *headtilt* Say what now?

So, yeah, my poem is posted.

Then I checked my amazon ranking, as you do fifty times a day, and noticed it had gone up despite the fact that I hadn't sold a single new copy. I don't know what algorithm amazon is using, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't understand it even if I knew how to do those double integral things (the professor was all,"we're doing this next semester," and I changed majors). (If you're wondering, my ranking has now gone back down again. I give up.)

So I'm still anxious about life, the universe, and everything, but I think I'm getting better. My sales seem to have stopped, so I can stop fussing about checking them all the time (hopefully). And I hit my goal of five sales! YAY! Next up, I want to hit twenty sales by October, which is a bit ambitious but if I pull off what I'm planning I'll have more stuff up by then, which should help.

I feel like I've learned a lot about the realities of self publishing over the past couple of days. Formatting is a pain, selling books is hard, life is flipping weird and WHAT ABOUT THE PINEAPPLE?