So two things of happiness this evening, as I remain freezing my arse off in Atlanta. It’s been colder down here than in Charlotte for the past several days, and this Southern boy does NOT like the cold. But anyway…

I just got done chatting with the nice lady at the student loan joint, who informed me that the first nice lady I talked with was wrong, and my payment isn’t taking a 25% increase, only to be followed by a 25% increase ten days later. I am still stuck on this graduated repayment plan, which will see my payment increase by 25% every two years, but that means that my payment goes up again in January of 2012. By that time I think there will be little enough left on my total loan balance that I can hopefully just pay the fucker off. Sooner than that if I get anything working the WSOP from home this summer, but who knows what’s going to happen in that regard. So, on the one hand, my payment is increasing substantially this month. But not so substantially that I can’t make the payment and still pay all my bills, so that was a good conversation.

But the much better news is that one of my poems was accepted into the March edition of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature! The poem “Aftermath,” which was briefly featured here before being taken down to maintain its unpublished status, was accepted after just one submission! Now I know that it’s rare to have the kind of success right out the gate that I’ve had. I won the Charlotte Writer’s Club Board Prize for Poetry right before the end of the year last year, and two of my poems were selected as finalists in the Atlanta Review poetry contest, and now one of my pieces has been accepted for publication on the first shot. This is, as we say in poker, too small a sample size. But these little successes are encouraging, and it’s keeping me writing new stuff. I’ve decided not to enter any poetry book contests right now, because I don’t think I have a solid enough body of work to warrant a book of only poetry. I am going to branch out a little and submit some short stories and non-fiction, and there are a couple of first novel contests that I’m looking at as well. But if I can keep my nose to it and keep submitting, hopefully the list of publications on my resume will continue to grow.

And for those of you who’ve known me for a while, Aftermath was written about my uncle’s suicide. That was my first attempt at putting those feelings together on paper, and I’m glad that the folks at Dead Mule felt that it was worthy of publication. I think it honors Ed’s memory and my family by sharing the universal nature of loss and our common reactions to it. So it’s kind of an important piece to me, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to share it with a wider audience than just here on this little piece of the internets.

Home tomorrow afternoon, then Charlotte StoryTellers Guild Thursday night, Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte Friday night, Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, Charlotte Mini-Con next Saturday (attending, not showing anything there) and Carolina Writers’ Showcase next Saturday Night. Mark your calendars for anything that seems interesting, hope to see you there!

If you enjoy this post, or just want to make sure you don\'t miss a new release, please take a second to support me on Patreon!