Speaking of Bad Record Keeping...

...how bad is this: I contacted an editor who had asked me for a specific piece asking how to send it, print or post, only to find out that she already had it because I had sent it to her already. Oy.

Embarassing, yes, but I have found the NJ poetry community, despite all the labels it can wear, to be quite generous and forgiving of such gaffes. In this particular case, I'm lucky to have "offended" an editor who has been very good to me over the years - for example, upon hearing a piece I was trying out at an open mic, she stopped me on the way back to my chair, pulled me down into the seat next to her, took the page from my hands, and applied her red pen quite specifically - much to the improvement of the poem.

But as we say in engineering (some of us, anyway): In the failures are the learnings.