I'm interested to see how many of you are creative writers, and have written or plan to write prose or poetry. I am a casual creative writer - I've started one novel which is sitting at about 30k words and I have a pile of notes for a couple others that I'll start in due time. I enjoy works that are critical of humanity and society and make one think about the fundamentals of morality and ethics. That said, a big inspiration for what I write comes from reading Nietzsche. I draw inspiration from nature and am a romantic at heart; imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire for adventure, chivalry, etc. I have also created a website to help find and promote writer's of a similar nature. Writer's of any experience are welcome but the site is designed to attract writer's of a similar mindset: Forest Poetry appreciates and understands nature through transcendent art. By studying nature we can find inspiration. By breaking down all illusions we can perceive the reality that is inherent. Humans in modern society create illusory categories and lie to themselves about reality. At forestpoetry.com we want to capture this reality in words. As a community we will explore ideas and concepts to better our understanding our reality. With a greater understanding of reality we can communicate this information creatively: telling a good story! Forest Poetry
I have written 2 very small, short stories and couple of poems. For the member's poetry go to the top of this subforum for the poetry thread... ...some pretty good stuff there among heaps and heaps of poetry about dying, bleeding, dying while bleeding, blackness of dying with minor bleeding involved etc etc etc
I have writen 137 pieces (short stories, poems, songs, etc.) At the risk of sounding egotistical, I am really very good. I have had three of them published in our local hometown newspaper and one copyrighted and published in a book of poetry which derived from a poetry contest that I entered. However I found out that the book of poetry is actually BS. It seems that everyone who entered the contest won a spot in the book. Then the company makes their money buy selling idiots like me the book for $40. When I bought the book and saw some of the crap that was in there, I figured it out. Its just like that "Can you draw a picture of this pirate? If so you may have artistic ability" blah blah blah. It is a great disappointment for people like myself who want to be taken serious about their writing. My question to you is this. I have thought many times about post a piece of my work here on this forum, but I am afraid of it being stolen. How do you protect your work. I have heard that if you mail it to yourself and never open it, then that can serve as a copyright because the envolope will be stamped with the date by the US Postal service. I don't know if that is true because I can see reasonable flaws in that plan. Anyhooo, I would love to share on your website or this one but I have that fear of theat of my work.
That method of copyrighting is useless and doesn't work. If you post a poem online here you don't really have anyway of protecting your words.
I agree. I'm quite sure that 'self-copywriting' will not stand up in a court of law. You can copyright material, officially, but that costs. I believe you can register work with the Library of Congress ($30) and with the Writer's Guild of America ($20). Even though I live in the UK, this is advice that was given to myself. I'd need to research copyright outwith the US and compare costs. Also consider that once something is in electronic form it is impossible to stop it being copied and distributed. MP3 illustrates this perfectly. With that in mind, anything you copyright and publish can still be 'stolen'. Any work that you value as too precious is perhaps best left unwritten? I'm being facetious here as I can't offer a perfect solution.
Written work is automatically copyrighted, but any form of public distribution is considered publishing and if you post any work on a public forum it wouldn't stand a chance of ever getting published properly in book form, so the point about copyright becomes moot. I've written 2 novels, which I revisit from time to time and have fun editing and improving.
Well despite your efforts to not engage in proper discussion, I've researched copyright law. I can now understand what you are saying. Yes, some written work is copyrighted as soon as you write it - all original novels would be covered. But to increase your change of sueing for copyright infringement you should register. Given the options, those that are bothered by infringement should register. http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html Just as I said.
