[Max Goodman]

Apparently there will be no more 2018 comp results, so my year's project is complete. I met my goal (finished 8th--7th if I include the pseudonyms I'm aware of: Brian and his pals breeze well past me while my one pseudonymous win inches me past two others) but I don't think it means as much as I thought when I set the goal.

When I was competing casually and sporadically, I imagined a large cadre of high-volume submitters. Having paid closer attention to the results for a year, I now think most of us compete casually and sporadically. By setting a goal for the year and deciding to compete regularly I gained an advantage over most (in a contest in which they didn't intend to compete). Among those who competed as regularly as I did (56 of the year's 63 comps), I likely finished in the bottom half, possibly even dead last.

The two main things I learned:

* Being paid is really validating! Though the amounts aren't large, getting a regular check for writing poems has gone farther toward making me feel my poems are valued than anything else I've yet managed to do with them. It's lead me to go back and track what I've been paid over my "career," and while my biggest paydays came elsewhere, nearly half of the poems I've been paid for (21 of the 46) appeared in The Speccie. Kudos to Lucy for so frequently recognizing that my poems are worth something.

* I cannot predict Lucy's taste. I've sent her things I think are great, and things I think are weaker; she's published both types and she's rejected both types. And she's occasionally proven me wrong when I thought entries were outside of the Speccie comps' style range.

It might be of interest that 130 different names got at least one mention in the comps this year, 98 in the Speccie and 61 in the Oldie (with, of course, a lot of overlap). I know of 8 of those that are pseudonyms for other people on the list, and here and there are names that might be duplicates (P.T. Brown and Paul Brown, for instance). These stats come from Speccie 3029-78 and Oldie 223-236 (yes, I know that's 14 months (!), but the results from 223 were posted in January, so that's where I started).

Moving forward, I'm likely to compete more frequently than I did before, but less frequently than I did this year.

I'm glad I gave this a try. I'm glad I hit my goal. I'm glad the year (of pressuring myself to enter and of tracking all the results) is over.