Just don't want to screw up my first time at bat. Thank you!
 

While you can post a link to another site, if this site is accessable to the public, your rights will be compromised by having your work already posted there. That is why the recommended course of action is to post only the first thirteen lines on this site, alone with a brief description of the work, and ask for interested parties to contact you by e-mail for the rest (sending a limited number of e-mails to persons known to you does not compromise your intellectual property rights to the work).
 

Your intellectual rights to a work cannot be compromised as such by publication. You do retain those rights as long as you are the originator of the material. But in a practical sense, material published in an indiscriminate manner can become subject to fair use laws. While this doesn't mean that your rights to the material are compromised, it can mean that other parties in the public domain gain certain practical rights to use it in limited ways.

Also, if you "publish" material yourself, you tend to compromise the exclusivity of the material. In the eyes of any potential commercial publishing venturn, for you to publish your work independently and then try to sell them the right to publish that same work is seen as something close to trying to sell them the right to publish material that you've already had published by one of their competitors (this is particularly true of those publishers that literally regard the internet and independent publishing industry as competitors ).

This is all in the nature of hairsplitting, though. If your material is not close enough to its final form for anyone to mistake it for the same work, or if you are not ever going to sell the publication rights to anyone, then it doesn't matter. But of course, many persons on this forum are trying to bring material into something like the form that a publisher might accept, and thus those concerns are quite significant.