Readers and writers blog

Copyrights, dead links, inactive links, posting schedules, free publishing . . ..

With the autumnal equinox more than a month behind us, we at R&W Blog figured it’s about time we did some fall housecleaning. (This blog didn’t exist at the vernal equinox, and nobody does housecleaning for the summer. Or for the winter, a good thing in regions where cleaning already involves ice and snow.) (And by that last ‘we,’ we mean ‘I,’ since I’m the only one of the two or three¹ people with any influence at the blog who has to do chores.)

And so I now address the following topics:

Copyrights

Thanks to emails from a bright young² writer in Ontario, Canada, I’ve amended the copyright section on the ‘Contact details’ page found in our Works section (upper right of this page) to make even clearer that we make no claim to rights of works submitted for publication here.

Copyright law is not simple, but basically, your copyright to your work is established the moment you finish the work in material form — that is, a manuscript or computer file — and belongs only to you unless you convey it to someone else. As we say in ‘Contact details,’ we don’t require that conveyance. And now I’ve added words to that section that amend our byline policy and clarify our intent even further:

Bylines in our Works section, which once were accompanied by a copyright that listed only the year of publication, now say the work is copyrighted “by the author,” followed by the publication year.

Links, dead and alive

Sadly, we say goodbye to Phone for Profits, the first weblog we’ve jettisoned from our blogroll. Nothing has been posted at the site since Aug. 25, and we’re no longer fascinated by the face of its author, Kamau Austin, happy and prosperous as he may appear. As we said when we listed the site on Sept. 13, we’d love someone out there in the blogosphere to suggest a good, personal blog written by a telemarketer. So far, no takers.

And yet, some blogs can be inactive for several months and still be very much alive. Case in point — The literary thug, where Robert Lashley’s latest blog entry was Sept. 4, and that was the first since June 13. But the latest is about his latest poetry on a companion site, A thug’s poetry, where he has posted 15 poems written for a Rosenthal Fellowship application. They’re all compelling. We especially recommend No. 6, “Dear God, I Got Those Bused to School Blues.” We know he’s busy, but we hope he returns as well to his narrative blog, which remains on our active list.

Same with philosophy of art, where the last main-page post was Feb. 25 but the comments remain sporadically active. The last comment had been Sept. 3 until someone named Skannof posted a long rumination about the Feb. 25 subject, a universal aesthetic, on Nov. 8 — not once but twice. Ah, those nutty philosophers.

Our posting schedule

Generally, we try to post twice a week, once at 12:01 p.m. Sunday and again at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, so that each entry is at the top of our blog for 3½ (see note ³) days. (This is for standard time. The numbers are 1:01 p.m. and 1:01 a.m. during daylight savings time because our computer refuses to save daylight. At any rate, this schedule is not a hard and fast one.) We also try to limit each entry to 700 words, although this one is droning on.

Free publishing

Our bright young² Canadian, Ian James Michael Spitzig, introduced himself to me in an email:

Hi Sid, I don’t see the point of publishing if not for money.

I don’t have a good answer except what I told Ian — basically, that some people just have to write, to communicate something that only they feel or know about and are able to express well enough for others to feel or know it, too. I granted that some writers don’t do that last part very well, but . . .

. . . I like honest writing, even if it’s not very good. And I think there’s something to get out of really bad writing, even from its badness.

And that’s why we publish for free.

But Ian, 29, who’s been writing for 13 of those years and wants to become a fulltime writer and still pay off those $30,000 in student loans, needs the money:

I realize that it is difficult to get published (for money) and that I am just a small man in a big lonely world. The day will come when I will not have to worry about money, but I wish it would be tomorrow.

I wasn’t able to offer him much comfort other than to say any exposure is good for an aspiring writer. And I do think he expressed a writer’s hope pretty eloquently.

The royal ‘we’

See note 1.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Besides myself, this number includes my wife, with whom I live (oddly, I just mistyped ‘live’ as ‘love,’ a true Freudian slip . . . really, hon), and my mother-in-law, who lives next door. At various times, voices also are heard from my wife’s two grown sons, both very computer-literate and, not coincidentally, bigger and stronger than me.

2. Anyone under 60 is young to me. I’m in middle age and will be so until 80 or 85.

3. In case the compound number garbled on your browser, the interval between each post is 3.5 days.

4. Today’s illustration is a Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner developed by iRobot of Burlington, Mass., a company founded by three robotics engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The model shown is the Discovery, which you may notice is upside-down because that gives it kind of a smiley-face look.