P-p-p-p-published?

In January, I decided that this was finally going to be the year that I went ahead and jumped into the terrifying deep end (more like middle of the ocean without a boat) of publishing. As in, publishing my own poems. In real literary journals. That have bar codes.

I've made this resolution before. I've developed a strategy for submissions, researched literary magazines, and sorted through my poems. However, the last time I seriously submitted something was my first year of writing--back when I was new enough to think that it was okay to send the first draft of a (now, I realize) very bad short story to Glimmer Train. Heh. I was a confident bastard. The point is that I never actually had anything accepted, so I just kind of stopped trying. But I kept writing.

This year, I decided to try again. It was a bad year for fiction in 2009 (for one Ms. McClendon), so I decided to go back to writing and thinking about poetry.

Now, it's March (almost April) and I have submitted a total of approximately 12 poems to four different places. And...

one of them has been accepted!

I know what you're thinking. Either, "Good for you! That's hope, right there, is what that is!" or "Whatever, I do that all the time." But, here is (so far) my reaction:

Upon reading the acceptance email:
"Woah. It's like, official. I hope they didn't accidentally send this to me. Did they mean to send this to me? Yeah. They sent it to me. Woah. Yeah. Yes. Woah."

Then I was all like:
"I did it! I'm telling everyone! I can't wait to see it in print!"
(I started going into newsstand shops daydreaming about seeing my name in a literary journal.)

Then I heard that this awesome local poet* just published a book and I thought about how awesome she is and how much better her writing is and it turned into:
"So what if I got one little poem published. I'll never be as awesome as that."

* (Her blog post for March 26th has a poem by Marge Piercy that is kind of telling me to shut up and get back to work--but in a very inspiring and loving way.)

Which then became:
"What am I doing with my life?!?!? How have I convinced myself that this is a good idea?! This is ONE step in a long series of steps that has taken me FIVE years. By that calculation, I will be friggin' dead by the time I can do this for a living" (At which point I chuckled to myself cause that whole dead/living thing was kinda neat and I am my biggest fan.)

Then, I told some people and it was back to:
"Yeah! I did it! It's AMAZING."

But. This morning, I got an email from the editors asking me to look through the proof to make any last minute changes to my poem. I read the other poets and now I'm at:
"My poem sucks. How embarrassing. They were probably so embarrassed for me that they put it in the journal to make me feel better and to give me a reason to go on. Aw, man."

I'm sure it will change again. After all, there is (I hear) a release party forthcoming. I'm sure that will have it's own set of complicated (and somewhat rollercoastery) feelings.

Sigh. I love it. I'm sick.