There’s a reason we don’t tell people their babies are ugly, that if they put a bow on their head it might distract from how lumpy and misshapen it is. There are actually many reasons but the one that is most relevant to this post is because that baby’s parents love it (and would probs kick your ass).
Likewise I love my writing. Not all the time. Sometimes it’s a dumpster fire that needs to be extinguished. But when it comes to the final product (as is the case with Sword & Shield, Seer, and my children’s book) I truly love them as they are.
That was the premise of what I wrestled with myself for two hours deciding on last Wednesday morning and then ruminated on the rest of the week. As my weekly readers are aware, I wrote a children’s book this past summer. It has a rhyming scheme which is not necessarily ‘in’ at the moment in the publishing world but it serves a purpose. A publisher responded to my agent regarding the book’s book proposal and said they liked it and would possibly interested if I could produce a version that didn’t rhyme. So I got up at the ass crack of dawn Wednesday morning and sat at my laptop and tried to unravel and reweave a cohesive story.
I couldn’t do it.
Two verses in I was already miserable. It felt like I was destroying the very essence of the story as well as the details that made it special in the first place. With a lead weight in my stomach I reached out to my agent and asked that she let the publisher know about the good reasons for my book rhyming and that I can’t change it while maintaining the integrity of the manuscript.
You have to be open to feedback but also willing to stand your ground when you feel strongly about something. Still waiting to hear if the publisher will want to move forward with the original manuscript but if not, at least I know that when it does get published, it will be a final product I am happy with.
Bye for now!