April PAD Challenge + NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 21

 

Image by Prawny from Pixabay

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.

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/2024-april-pad-challenge-day-21

The April PAD Challenge prompt asks for a trope poem.

https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-one-9/

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."

https://chevrefeuillescarpediem.blogspot.com/2012/12/carpe-diem-60-winter-shower-shigure.html

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."

Saccharine Compliments

Free use image copyright John Hain on Pixabay

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/blame-shame-judgment-abuse-5182354/

the things that people say to me

always come off contradictory

your imagination is certainly flexible

but your credentials are hardly credible

you're a walking psychological disorder

whose house has never been in order

the anarchy in your brain

can only be described as insane

to expand on our point of view

you are chaos through and through

it's hardly a stretch to say

that you should be locked away

oh, but you're an imaginative little tart

they say with soulless smiles and no heart

all saccharine and lies

that cause me to roll my eyes

they look at me with disdain

as if I have no brain

then try to ply me with false compliments

their bullshit makes no sense

I stopped playing by the rules

because I found that rules are for fools

since I do nothing right anyway

I may as well do things my way

~cie~

promptpostorous

http://www.octpowrimo.com/2020/10/octpowrimo-day-25.html

Poetry Style

Some crap that I thought up and I made the end words rhyme.

Seriously, I was so not up to attempting to create my own poetry style.

Want more poetry that's just your style? Or my style, anyway.

https://bit.ly/getmorepoetry

This poem was posted to these places:

http://fishypoets.blogspot.com

http://poetryofthenetherworld.blogspot.com

https://lbry.tv/@poetryofthenetherworld:9

LBRY is a decentralized content marketplace. I price the PDF versions of my work at approximately half of the Kindle price because I receive the entire amount rather than a royalty percentage. 

You can get a free LBRY account through this link. You can earn LBC for viewing content on LBRY as well as from selling your content.

https://lbry.tv/$/invite/@naughtynetherworldpress:d

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press/Poetry of the Netherworld

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. LBRY’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on LBRY. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Note

I can't receive earnings per view from LBRY if my work is copyrighted. I've been marking my work as copyrighted to protect myself. So, now I have to go back and mark my work as being protected by a non-commercial share-alike license so my broke ass has a chance to earn from it. Isn't that a pain? 

Cie Sez: Popularity Does Not Equate to Writing Quality

Note: This is a direct copy of a post on my Netherworld Writers Guild Tumblr. I have provided links to all the participants.

Anonymous asked:

How to know if my story sucks? It has about 100 hits and 3 kudos and no comments. Kinda frustrating. I like the story tho. Help?!

ao3commentoftheday answered:

If you like it then it doesn’t suck. Those are the rules. 

What you’re asking about isn’t about how good the story is, it’s about how popular it is. Those are two different things. Popularity comes down to the following (incomplete list)

a good, clear summary that describes the fic and lets the reader know what to expect. No typos. No grammar problems. No “I suck at summaries”

tags for the show and characters of course, but also tags for tropes that are used, genre (fluff, smut, angst, etc), episodes if it’s a post-ep, meta, timeline (if applicable) etc. Tell the people what’s in your story so that they can find it. Or avoid it if it’s not for them.

relevance to the fandom. The Silmarillion is a great work of literature, but how many Lord of the Rings fans actually read it? If you’re writing to make yourself happy, sometimes that doesn’t appeal to everyone - and that’s okay

 kineildwicks

You’re the first reader you need to please–if you like it, more will follow. :)

Try promoting it around–that always helps broadcast it to potential readers.  Doesn’t even have to be online either–was at the pet store the other day, was telling this guy I was writing original fiction, he’s kind of politely listening; tell him I do fanfiction too? YOOOO he’s suddenly interested. XD

 netherworldwritersguild

This is the thing I struggle with the absolute most. I’m not the kind of person that other people like, and I’m rubbish at self-promotion. My brain is weird. Consequently, my writing is weird. 

Having rapid-cycling type 2 bipolar disorder, I tend to have three different approaches to the fact that my writing is not what the teeming masses want to read. Considering that the teeming masses seem to want rubbish like Twilight and its even more rubbish hellspawn, Fifty Shades of Gray, I’m rather sure I wouldn’t like any story of mine that happened to become popular.

When I’m hypomanic, I don’t give flea fart in a category five hurricane what people think of my writing. If they like it, fine. If they don’t like it, meh, whatever. I know it’s hella fucking great, or at least pretty good, or at least I liked it. That’s the only thing that matters.

When I’m euthymic, my thoughts are “if I build it and promote it, they will come. Or not. Whatever.”

When I’m depressed, my thoughts go a little bit something like this.

“I’m trash and everything I do is trash. I should stop writing and destroy everything I’ve ever written. Nobody will ever like me. I’m a thing that never should have happened. I even make my grandma sick.”

The fact of the matter is, the depressive thoughts have far less to do with the quality of my writing than they do with feeling unwanted and rejected. I was a weird kid who became a weird teenager who grew up to be a weird adult. I was badly bullied when I was younger and taken advantage of and abandoned by the kinds of soulless people who think nothing of using others and throwing them away when I became a needy adult with very low self-esteem. None of this has fuck all to do with the quality of my writing. 

One of the things writers can do is to seek out beta readers. I do offer my services as a beta reader and a reviewer, but I don’t always have time to do it. Anyone who is interested can find the information on the http://horrorharridans.blogspot.com page.

The number of comments one receives has very little to do with the quality of the work presented. Unfortunately, it often boils down to how popular the writer is. New writers tend to get few if any comments. I’ve been blogging and sharing my writing since 2006. I’ve never been popular. I was very naive when I first started and believed that the Internet would open doors to finding all kinds of friends, including other people who were Just Like Me. Instead, I learned that most people really don’t give a fuck and that nobody else is like me. 

This, however, is not an indication that your writing sucks. It’s an indication that people suck, and if you enjoy writing, you should keep doing it. 

Jimi Hendrix once said that he found that compliments distracted him from the thing that was most important: creation. 

Writers are often lonely and misunderstood people. We need to try and separate our personal need for acceptance from our reasons for writing. If we are writing in order to be accepted, we are going to fail. We need to write for the sake of the story which is asking to be told.