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I personally think that kathleen's reasoning on that was rediculous. Do you mind if I ask why posting poetry on this forum is considered "publishing" and putting the first thirteen lines of a story isn't? I mean I thought the definition of publishing had something to do with a profit. I think that if people are here, "publishing" introductions to stories at their own discretion, then why is it considered illegal when they lay what they post beneath the shroud of a classification. I could say that everything that I have posted here was meant to be poetry. Would they have to then be deleted? I doubt that any of us have any compunctions about "publishing" anything as when you look at it, everything here is doing just that. Take a side, dammit. Oh, and I found it quite intriquing when I, Infyrno tried to post under my old name and it said that I'm not allowed to do so.
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The first thirteen lines of a story are equivalent to the first page of a manuscript, and many editors will only read the first page of a manuscript before rejecting the story. (The idea is that if the first page is written well enough, the editor will go on to the second page, and so on.)
The first thirteen lines are a small part of the whole manuscript, and as such, do not count as publishing the manuscript.
Posting a complete manuscript here, whether it is poetry or short story, is defined by people in the publishing business as "electronic publication."
We do not want to be responsible for the electronic publication of anyone's creative work, so we ask that people not post a complete work here.
Yes, posted comments are also considered to have been electronically published here, but posters are not likely to offer their comments to anyone for any other kind of publication, nor is anyone in the publishing business likely to be interested in publishing comments posted here. So such postings are not a matter of concern the way manuscripts would be.
If you don't like the above reasoning, Infyrno/"Bloodshot", you do not have to come here.
posted
Could we perhaps create a poem one post at a time? What I mean is, one person writes one line, and another a line, and so on, until we reach about twenty-five or so, (or whatever) and then the poem will be over. Since it is not the complete work of any one person, would it be considered e-publishing?
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Since it would be publically available on this forum, then yes, it would be considered 'published'.
On the other hand, since it wouldn't actually belong to any of us, and everyone would understand that they had surrendered any rights to the completed work...it's really not the sort of thing that we would have any reason to put in this forum, though. We used to do that kind of thing in the other forum all the time, don't you remember?
There was even a special project created to try and do a full story that way, but it fizzled out...I think.
The copyright would be jointly owned by all of the contributors, and no one of you could publish it anywhere else without the permission of the other contributors.
Since it would be an exercise (see the stuff that was done in the Writing Decision Stories area for an example of actual text longer than 13 lines being "published" here at Hatrack--all as part of writing exercises), then it would be okay to do.
If BudHaHa or Cris or Lord Darkstorm or anyone else, for that matter, wants to start a "write a poem one line per contributor" kind of thing here or in a new topic, that's fine.
Go for it. Just make sure the rules are clear and that everyone who joins in understands that by participating they have tacitly agreed to abide by the rules.
quote:The copyright would be jointly owned by all of the contributors, and no one of you could publish it anywhere else without the permission of the other contributors.
Glad this came up. I've been playing around with the idea of using my portions of the old Writing Decision Story (which is no longer on site) to develop into a short story of my own. I separated the "published" parts I contributed -- both the segments which were ultimately accepted as part of the story and those that weren't -- from the portions others contributed, and of course plan to fill in the gaps with new material. Would this work? I'm wondering if some publisher might accept the story as a reprint, if nothing else, with full disclosure of its roots.
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Okay. Here goes. (I hope I make sense here.)
If you take only those parts that you wrote, and rewrite them into a complete story, without using any TEXT from someone else without their permission, you should be okay.
Reprints are complete works, and your work wasn't complete. What you would be sending to a publisher would be a manuscript BASED on the stuff you wrote for the Writing Decision Stories. If that stuff had been published as a complete work, you would need to include a disclaimer explaining that "this story, in a different form, has appeared elsewhere" or some such; but it wasn't a complete work, so I think you're safe.
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