Quandary!

Quandary. I have a ready to publish poetry manuscript. It contains all of my poetry (some selection was required. Some of my poetry is sheer crap!) from the years 2001 to 2004. It is about 84 pages, and it is already formatted in 5 ½ by 8 ½ inch book format. It’s ready to go. Well, I have about 30 poems (I know, I should have at least 100 by this time, but I just don’t work like that, yet!) that I have written thus far this year, and I really like some of them. We have a “homecoming” event this year that I was planning to set up a table at. You know, free bookmarks, selling my little chapbook. I still have a week to change things, and I was thinking about taking the best 30 or 40 poems from my whole collection and making a small little chapbook just for this fair. You know, select poems and so forth. But it would take many hours for me to put this other chapbook together, and with my health issues, I don’t know if that is possible. As is, we would still need to assemble my current manuscript. My wife says that she can get a binder with supplies very cheap from her old work, and use the laser printer at her current work. That would work real well. It’s just that I am thinking about putting my current manuscript in some contest this fall, and they require an unpublished manuscript. That being said, most times, a manuscript under 50 copies is really not considered “published” by most of these small publishing houses running these contest. As you can see, I am kind of back and forth. I think that I should run a limited edition of a selected verse manuscript just for the fair. That means I have to get back to work. TTFN.