2/ on 16 december, received a letter from toyon literary magazine, informing me that my piece “Metamorphosis Points” has been awarded the 2019 Jodi Stutz Award in Poetry and there is a $100 cash prize for it. this is really a little happy surprise, since i stopped participating in any poetry contest 10 years ago. encouraged by this, i will try to send poems to such events, but only those free of charge. i hate the very idea of having to pay for someone to read my poetry - it makes me feel like an insult on my work.
3/ now i think is time to begin trying to do something about the pieces i have written for the past 15 years. there are simply too many of them, probably at least 2, 000 already. that is, when i have nothing better to do, i will review, edit, or rework them and even organise them into chapbooks or collections. i know this will be a very long and time consuming job, a process which reminds me of what Wordsworth did in his old age.
4/ a few days ago when i happened to check my submittble account, i found, to my delight, some acceptance messages had never reached my email inbox. that means the submittable is not really dependable.
5/ as for the two book projects which GT (formerly known as 'create abundance' group) asked me to do, i have spent a great deal of time and effort to find the right professionals and provide the samples among other thins, but they have never given me even a reply. it's been so very difficult to deal with them. (as a popular chinese saying goes, rich and bitch!)
6/ my eighth chapbook East Idioms will be released on jan 20, by india-based cyberwit.net, which has set too high a price on it. here's the link i received yesterday:
https://www.amazon.com/East-
