Some magazines open for submissions plus a couple of interesting finds

Here are a couple of useful blogs and resources I’ve recently come across – hope you like them too.

First of all, Christine Murray’s Poethead is a blog devoted to ‘increasing the profile of women writers and editors.’ But the content seems a lot broader than that, for example I particularly enjoyed the section devoted to Small Press Poetry and Indies, which immediately led me to several new (to me) magazines such as The Stinging Fly, Southwold Literary Journal and The Pickled Body, as well as news and views on the (mainly Irish) small press poetry scene.

If you’re after new places to submit work then this article may be useful – The five best literary journals that have re-opened for submissions this month – the article is undated but I followed a link to it from Twitter (I think – thank you whoever posted it) and it appears to be current. The journals are all American I think, but definitely some opportunities there.

Something a bit different is this little tool I’ve started playing with – ‘online word counter’ at TextFixer. Use it to check how often you’re repeating words (although it was developed as an SEO tool to check keywords, it works quite well for this.) Have a go – paste in your entire pamphlet and see just how often you use ‘licorice’ or ‘steamboat’ – you may be surprised!

I’m always looking for free tools that help (particularly) with the editing of collections of poems or even book-length manuscripts, so if you know of something useful or recommend anything please let us know in the comments – thanks!