In the end of September, I got an amazing email from Wicked Banshee Press. It said:

I am beyond elated to inform you that your chapbook submission “All the Bright Stars“ has been selected as a semi-finalist in the Wicked Banshee Poetry Chapbook Contest. We are sending your submission to our amazing guest judge Margaret Bashaar for review. Finalists will be contacted by Dec. 15th, 2015. Thank you so much for your voice and patience.

I read it early on a Sunday morning and literally whooped out loud with excitement. I was one of seven semi-finalists, three of which would be published. In mid-December they announced they needed a bit more time and the finalists would be notified on January 1st.

The days ticked by until finally New Year’s Day arrived. I tried to not manically check my email every two minutes (I failed horribly). Finally, at 7:43pm I received this email:

Thank you so much for trusting us with your words, for having patience with us, and for the magic that you are. We at Wicked Banshee Press have gone over the fierce manuscripts submitted and ALL THE BRIGHT STARS floored us. We wish that we could publish all of our finalists, and it was such a hard decision, but we are sorry to say that we will not be publishing your manuscript at this time. We thank you so much for all of your effort, for your faith in our brand new and still growing press. We ask that you please keep checking out our website and facebook page and submitting. You are an amazing writer. We are just a small press right now. We praise you for your bravery. It takes so much to put yourself out there.

To say I am disappointed would be a huge understatement. I am so very disappointed. I so desperately wanted to be chosen as a finalist and have my chapbook published. I wanted to start 2016 out with a BANG! Instead I wanted to cry. I wanted the publication of my chapbook to really launch my poetry in a way that hasn’t happened yet.

I gave myself a few days to be sad and disappointed. I gave myself permission to be upset about not being chosen. And then I put on my big girl pants and started working on my next manuscript. It’ll be submitted this month to another press that I think might be a good fit for my poetry. And I’ll keep writing and submitting and I know a book of my poetry is in the future – I just gotta find the right place for it.