Poll over. In the end, I submitted the two poems which had made it out of the printer before I started getting too many paper jams. They were ɘloЯ, which got one vote and one second-choice vote from a Countdown voter (I like Countdown, but I was a little reluctant to submit it by itself in the place of two other poems), and Fork and Tongs, which only got one vote but was very well-received when I read it at the Geneva Writers’ Group’s mid-year evening of readings. I would have liked to have sent something more serious as one of the poems, but in the end my printer made the decision. I will try to get the other poems people voted for published elsewhere.

So, thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read the poems and give an opinion; without you I would probably have printed different poems before the printer jammed. Yannick, Mark, Grace and my printer each get a photograph of a chocolate fish, and may contact me to claim their other awesome prize. That is, give me a topic and a style (short story, poem, song, country-western sonnet etc… not novel) and I’ll write something using them after Thing a Week is over. Maybe I’ll even name one a character after you, and you’ll be internet famous!

Alternatively, propose your own awesome prize and maybe I’ll agree to it. Note that only awesome prizes requiring approximately the same or less investment of time and materials will be considered.

One more thing: For my second Joker, I’m going to need at least 52 followers on Twitter. So if you don’t already, please follow me. Be warned: for historical reasons, I only use Twitter to make remarks about pants and reply to other people’s tweets.

Right, now to write the two of diamonds.

As I explained in this post, I need to choose either two short poems, one long poem, or a prose piece to submit to Offshoots, the biennial showcase of the Geneva Writers’ Group. After removing everything that was too long, too context-dependent, too geeky, too terrible, too weird, too misunderstood when read to the writers’ group, or too much like a song or video, I came up with a list of 12 poems, most of which are short enough that two of them could be submitted. The problem is, now I only have until the post offices close on Saturday (let’s say about 30 hours from now, to be safe) to choose and submit them. So there’s not much time to consult the great hive mind that is the internet, or even just the two or three people who actually read this blog regularly. But I’m going to do it anyway.

Here is a poll. Please vote for the two poems you think I should submit, and add any comments you feel like making. I realise that if you haven’t already read any of them, then that’s a lot to read in a short time. But to make it easier for you, and also make the poll a better judgment of which poems make sense to the general public without much explanation, please vote without reading the blurb that follows each poem. I’ll do what I can to reward voters in some way, perhaps with a photograph of a chocolate fish, perhaps with a personalised Thing, who knows?

Incidentally, the deadline for submitting to Offshoots is about as close as you can get to being exactly a year after I started Thing a Week. That is, I started on February 29, the deadline is March 1, but that’s a Sunday, so in order to get my submission postmarked early enough I’d actually need to submit it on February 28.

The submission deadline for the tenth edition of Offshoots, the biennial showcase of the Geneva Writers’ Group, is on March 1. I missed the last one, even though people recommended that I submit the pantoum I wrote during the 2006 Geneva Writers Conference. I don’t want to miss this one. Perhaps I will even submit that pantoum, if it comes down to it.

It should be easy to find something to submit, now that I’ve written 52 new Things (yes, 52 already, including a Joker and two bonus letter-only Things.) But which should I submit? Here are a few extracts from the submission guidelines:

There is no theme for this volume but it is the tenth issue, which will mark our twentieth year and will celebrate our community of writers. The Offshoots committee asks for your best work.

We do not accept translations. Categories include fiction, creative non-fiction (essays, memoir, interviews, travel) and poetry. Writers may submit two poems of up to 40 lines each (or one poem of 80 lines) or one prose piece of 1,500 words.