#mentionmonday for today, coming in three parts!
First off the basket is the Mention Monday flash:
falling off that great height, she remembered the day she had promised herself to keep a diary and put down brief notes and ideas. so useless a memory. not even worth the mention.
Directly from the mind oven comes the hot-hot-hot Mention Monday blog post:
Today being Monday, I feel like mentioning that my primary career is EFL/Eng Lit teacher and En>Bul>En translator. For years my teaching earned my living. Then I switched to full-time sworn translating and private part-time teaching. Sworn translations are not that fun as people imagine. They are boring, for the most part. A lot of uneducated translators out there, too. As in every profession, I guess. All along I translated fiction as a hobby. Applied to work for several publishers. Unfortunately, no answer came. One publisher sent me a test text and then all was quiet. I enquired, they said they had no answer from the editor/proofreader yet. And that was it. The other publishers didn’t even make the effort to re- to my mails. Then I started poeming a lot! That made me very happy and found me some new poetic friends. We started communicating over various social networks. Step by step, I became part of a supportive community. People would come by my blog, read some of my poems and comment. A good thing about that is, that only people who like the poem they read, leave a comment. Whenever the reader doesn’t like the poem, they simply move away. Of course, the small number of visitors and comments made it clear that what I write is not widely-liked. Somewhere along that social networking road I got the idea to try my hand in novel-writing. It made me happy and enthusiastic. It developed better than expected. I came up with an idea for a second novel, and that happened even better than the first one. Somewhere along the road, however, I got involved in tighter communities and suddenly, unperceivably to me, writing was not as thrilling and fulfilling as before. I got into some sort of self-imagined race to submit and seek approval and recognition. I always do things for recognition. My very small audience has always made me feel not good enough. Official rejection from 8 of the 10 places where I submitted (1 response still pending) and an opinion for my second novel-like text simply crashed me. Thus, two days from the day I heard two haiku of mine were published online, I felt very low. I suddenly realized writing makes me miserable. Not finding good work, that I think will make me feel better, just added to my downcast mood. All the pressure at University, where I take endless exams and write numerous assignments, doesn’t help the situation, either. The depressing aspect of that is that I might be an excellent student (as usual), but my prospects are close to null, all due to lack of connections. I have noticed that I only get accepted to places no one else is interested in, or places that don’t pay, which is usually the same thing here.
And finally, because Brevity is the soul of wit, have a bite at those Mention Monday 6 words that describe my life right now:
Mention me believing madly I mattered.
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