Good Gawd, Fingers, not Day 201. I would have a complete mental breakdown if I had to do this for 201 days in a row.
The poem today's prompts inspired made for much lighter subject matter than yesterday's brief, sobering verse.
The April PAD Challenge prompt asks for a trope poem.
The NaPoWriMo prompt asks poets to focus on a single color in today's work.
I used this prompt in an oblique way when creating today's Haibun entitled "Dear Author."
I utilized this prompt to create the Haiku portion of the Haibun.
I had an experience last month which made me consider giving up writing entirely.
Admissibly, I was struggling after last year's NaNoWriMo. I started out strong but was burnt like toast by the time I finished, and I didn't recover well. I had gotten into a pattern of writing monthly anthology submissions and I was pretty proud of that. However, I was starting to feel like a typing monkey and the ideas weren't flowing freely.
I was planning to create stories to submit to three anthologies. One was an Old West themed horror story, one was an erotic romance, and the other was a sweet romance.
I ended up with several false starts on both the horror story and the erotic romance. I took myself out of the running with the sweet romance.
I finally found plots I could commit to with both the horror story and the erotic romance. I'm still waiting to hear back on the horror story. With the erotic romance, I got one of those nebulous, frustrating "this isn't directly a rejection letter, but yeah, it's a rejection letter" communications, which included such phrases as "good bones."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, fuck me. Just say this one isn't your cup of tea and have done with it! They basically said "we aren't telling you to rewrite the story, but, yeah, we want you to rewrite the story."
They wanted me to make such changes as somehow referencing ethnic differences between the characters without describing the traits of those ethnicities. No saying such things as "Sunny was a fair-complexioned young woman with curly blonde ringlets flowing over her shoulders," or "Ellie was a tall, full-figured Latina with dark frizzy hair, eyes the color of black coffee, and a warm, golden complexion." They wanted me to describe the characters' defining traits in a way that doesn't focus on their defining traits.
It was so fucking nebulous it gives me a headache just thinking about it. It sounded like they wanted me to say something like "Sunny was Caucasian and Ellie was Latina. Meanwhile, their boss Zara was a black South African." I thought I was supposed to write an erotic romance with a friends to lovers trope, not a strictly fact-based piece.
While a few of their suggestions weren't entirely maddening and I will actually take them into consideration when giving the piece a final rewrite before self-publishing it, this incident was the last straw, and I had a bit of a mental breakdown. I'm still not good at heeding warning signs that I'm trying to do too much and need to take a different approach.
~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~
Free use image by HG Designs on Pixabay
"That's it, I'm completely out of fucks."
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