Hi Barb & BichoDoMato! First of all, I'm glad you found a home for your story, Barb. Everything Fun is a FAB pub, and I absolutely adore Hollie more than words can say.

I see how writers may think that Six Word Photo Story pub has a lot of rules. Yep, I get it. But rules and submission guidelines are designed for the purpose of being followed. And if they can't be followed, self-publishing or submitting elsewhere is always an option, of course, like Barb has done here:)

FYI: The rules I've set in place in my pub are very similar to the rules that SNAPSHOT has set up, such as:

*submitting only unpublished drafts, etc.

*submitting only original, unpublished photos taken by the author (NOT published in other Medium pubs, or elsewhere),

*no more than 4 stories per week from the same author,

*no people in photos (other than yourself), etc.

Those rules I set up were actually inspired by SNAPSHOT's excellent publication.

The first rule is standard for most publications.

The second rule is pretty standard for photo publications.

I do have strict formatting guidelines, but once a writer has published their first story with us, it's easy to duplicate the formatting style.

And if writers forget any details, the other editors and I will often take time to correct the formatting, put in the proper tags, or let the writer know what needs correcting.

As for rules that apply to the different monthly challenges, yep, those rules always change, according to the type of prompt!

But the challenges are created to encourage and push writers to do something new in a different creative way each month, and we expect our writers to read and review the details of each new challenge.

Personally, I don't like to make it "too easy" each month, because it wouldn't be much of a challenge!

And if the challenge doesn't resonate with the writer, our Freestyle section is always open for submissions.

I'm sorry that you both feel this way about SWPSC.

I agree there are a lot of rules in our submission guidelines, but I stand fully behind them.

I felt I needed to clarify and respond to this story and the comments here. And yep, I realize this has turned into a very long comment to the rant about the "too many rules!"

Don't shoot the SWPSC editor here! LOL