"Copy cat, copy cat, sitting on the door mat..." As a writer that old school playground rhyme sticks in my head because I get quite paranoid about people stealing my work. It's a stupid worry, really, because a radio writer I once heard in a lecture said, "Nobody can really ever steal your story - ideas can be taken but the way an individual puts their own stamp on a story is what makes it their own." But still I get anxious about what kind of copyright I have on my work when it's let loose in the "public domain", especially now that I've actually put my stories onto the net proper with my new blog sites...I make sure I always put the "©" symbol with my name after anything I e-publish myself and of course do the old trick of posting all of my stories to myself and I recently found this useful page on the UK Patent Office site about what they call "Intellectual property" - http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/info/ideas.pdf So I think I've been going the right way about stuff - the gist of that web link is that once you write a notion or idea down, once you actually commit it to paper, it should be able to be credited back to you in the future as long as you make sure you date stamp it with your name!)
As a writer, I think you always want to safeguard your work - whether it be physically, with CD backups etc, or legally, with copyright law, so it's an important part of the "business of writing" to get right. I'm hoping to one day earn a living from writing, so it's of some concern to me to be able to lay claim to the works I've produced in the past (and the future). But still, here at the beginning of this writing life, there's always a nervously thin line between wanting to get your work read but also taking the risk of it being stolen.
"Vanity publishing" is something I've never and won't consider if I can help it - there's just so many horror stories about writing hopefuls being conned and swindled down that route. But I suppose in setting up my new blogs site, I'm sort of sitting on the edge of the pool with my toes dangling into the vanity publishing waters - I take comfort from the fact that I've got pretty much complete control over how my material looks on the sites and Blogger is free...
Plus, it's quite a liberating feeling, knowing and hoping that someone may stumble across the collection of words you've created, even quite by accident (even if I'm search result 600 in Google!) and then take five minutes to read them...
What with the new blogs and everything else that's happening in my life at the moment, a decidedly busy air is floating over me, so I've decided this is gonna be the last week that I do multiple posts in here. The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed a pattern emerging on this blog where one week I'll do 3 posts and then the next 2, then the next 3, then the next 2 and so on... and while that was great for me to get into a routine of writing regularly, I'm going to limit myself each week to 1 or maybe 2 posts (if I have a specific writing feature I want to talk about) here. It'll probably be at the end of the week that I post too, once I've actually got some productive news to share. This'll free up some time to update my other story blogs too!
I've enjoyed the many posts I've done so far here, so don't fret, I'll be in touch here again soon - I just need to concentrate on getting the main homepage finally finished for www.findthemissingreel.com over the next few weeks... Stay tuned, it's almost time for the final curtain to be lifted...
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