With the good comes a dilemma

As the year draws to a close, I find myself looking back on my work this year with both a satisfaction and a quandary about the future.

My success rate with getting material published has been the best ever this year. I think in part due to more aggressive submission efforts than past. Still, I do feel that I have managed some outstanding pieces of work over the year and this is a result for growth in my work.

I've placed a greater emphasis upon revision of my poems and keep them back longer in many instances then in the past. The dilemma I am facing is the feeling that the method I have relied upon for workshoping work is broken. There is not sufficient consistency available among my existing sources to be able to simply be satisfied with how this is working.

I have met in the past with another group at a local library for this purpose but there were only a couple of us writing poetry and the rest were fiction writers. It was not a good match and I discontinued my participation.

Our local poetry chapter has at times been a source of input, but we do not meet solely for the purpose of workshoping and while it proves helpful at times, it is not a situation where there are other who regularly use it for this purpose and as such I do not want abuse the meeting time.

There are others with whom I have in the past exchanged work by email for the purpose of workshoping and that has worked well at times, but more recently it seems again, a one way street. It is not a good thing when I am more regularly working on stuff and others have little or nothing to send. I am a firm believer that everyone needs to feel the benefit of such a process. Lately, (and perhaps it is due to the holiday season) everyone else seems to be at a standstill. At any rate, as I look ahead to the new year, I must figure out how to deal with this challenging issue.