This all started last night when I was looking through my writings that were on a portable hard drive where i had backed up all of my previous writing excerpts from my old personal computer (which finally died in July after 9 years – thankful for that back up, let me tell you).
First of all, I learned that i had a whole slew of writings and book ideas in a folder that I completely forgot about. Well, not completely forgotten about, I just forgot I had this many little tidbits socked away.
Then I found my poetry manuscript that I haven’t looked at or touched in at least 10 years, probably closer to 14 years. I remember I assembled the collection together back around in 2000 and submitted to a few publishing places, but there weren’t many interested in publishing poetry anthologies as they weren’t profitable.
I would like to note, I still haven’t opened up said manuscript to look through it again – I didn’t have time last night and probably won’t till this weekend. But it reminded me of a few things – most importantly that at least two, if not three, of these poems in the anthology have been published in the past. That, in turn, reminded me how old I am and how long ago I submitted these for review and subsequent publication in anthologies – 17 years ago.
But, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the titles. Being friends with my soccer coach and publisher of one of the anthologies from High School, I contacted him via Facebook and started discussing it. He remembered the book, but the list of titles he gave me wasn’t one I recognized. So I turned to Google which won the day along with the hometown newspaper, The Kerrville Daily Times, which has scanned and translated all the text from old newspapers into a searchable database online.
Finally, after searching for “Grace Hall” kerrville poetry I found what I was looking for. The title to the anthology I, and several of my classmates, were published in. I was also reminded of the fact that I did do poetry readings as well during that time (something I kinda forgot about). Back on topic, the name of the anthology was “Long Before Tomorrow Becomes Today” in which three of my poems were published. Two of those three were also published in an anthology by poetry.com. Poetry.com has changed hands since then, but still has the submissions from back then, authors just have to register, search for them, and claim them – which was incredibly easy to do. So I claimed them.
Those two poems can be found here:
Which brings me back to the manuscript I found from so many years ago. I needed to find out if I needed to get permission to republish my poems. The answer ends up being no, both publishers had one time publishing rights which allows me to republish these poems at will.
So I’ve decided, now that I have found this, I’m going to self-publish this compilation of poetry as my first published work. I will be re-editing my manuscript and then going from there with a target publish of mid-to-end-November.
Please keep an eye on this website for more information as I will advertise the book when it is available for purchase. I am not positive of a print version yet, but it may be an eventuality too. If you would like to leave feedback on this blog for the above two poems, you are welcomed to do so as well. I will add them as teasers to the side bar later this weekend.
