Creating a submissions calendar

One way of making sure you remember the dates of potential publishing opportunities, is to create your own submissions calendar.

The Victorian Writer's Centre newsletter contains information about competition and publishing opportunities and, if you're not a member, you can always see it at your local library.

It's an easy enough task to set up an excel spreadsheet listing the dates of various competitions, word lengths and genres of submissions and any other information you need to know before submitting. Some of this information will be valid from year to year, so you might want to headline big competitions at the beginning of the month, as well as note the exact date.

Submitting work regularly also reduces your own anxiety about whether or not a work is accepted for publication or shortlisted for a competition. If it becomes merely another administrative task for that month, you buy yourself some distance from the event - and that can be an important attitude to establish and maintain. It prepares you, too, for the editing process which can be quite fierce. You will have started to view your own work with more objectivity.

A busy calendar of submissions should keep you on track with both writing and revising. If you receive written rejections from publishers or journals, do read them and listen to what is being said. It's difficult not to be disappointed when your work isn't favourably received. We all fear rejection. But you don't want that fear to overcome your love of writing or your ability to revise. So try to cultivate a professionalism that distances you from your work and allows you to revise and self-edit rigorously. Do listen to comments from others and learn to sift through them and work with the ones that ring true to you.