January is named for the double faced Roman god Janus, one who looks back and forward, which is what I am doing here, now. Looking back, the last time I put together a little collection of poems for someone else to read was for high school English class, maybe year nine (I can’t recall exactly). It was an odd mix of random poems I stumbled over and liked, plus a couple of my own pieces. Anyway, that was approximately a million years ago. But as of now, this January, I finally assembled enough of my own poems for a chapbook and then submitted it to a competition and I am looking forward to finding out what will happen with this. But it has thus been a long time between attempts, but at least I didn’t have to handwrite it all out, staple it together and include my own hand drawn pencil illustrations. Fairly certain this chapbook won’t be graded either, but who knows.

In other news, the rejections are coming in, and I’m slowly gearing up by sending more work out, and writing new things. Plus, to continue the looking ahead theme, I have a new poem out for the end of January.

The 2023 writing update:

• Rejections: 7
• Pending: 16
• Accepted (3 carried over from 2022): 3
• Published: 1