Stumbling Tired Post-Philcon

[dr_pretentious]

Philcon went well. I manifested my mutant superpowers as The Vortex of Schmooze. More about that tomorrow.

I'm about 5,500 words behind. The 3K day caught me up enough that I'm still in the game.

26,135 / 50,000 (52.3%)

Comments

[dragonlaire.livejournal.com]

I might be a little ahead of you: 31,736 words as of 4:00AM Monday morning, but I didn't start until 10:00PM. Some of that word count needs some minor editing, but the last time I said that, it took me a day to finish. I have about a chapter and a half waiting to post on LJ. I'm hoping the rest will be easier to write. I find factual descriptions (towns, climate, history) gut wrenching stuff. Dialogue and straight are easier.
I'm not very worried about losing first publications rights. It's not really a public forum, and anything publishable will need extensive modification anyway, essentially a different book. It better be; I have mixed feelings about the present ms to say the least.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If you friends-lock your posts, then your copyright is protected.

As far as publishers are concerned, if it's on the web in such a way that people can read it without having to get explicit permission from you (friends-locking, password protection, that sort of thing), then it's published, and your copyright is broken, regardless of whether anyone actually does read it. Just yesterday I heard a panel of agents and editors talking about avoidable mistakes writers make, and they spent some time on this one.

I'm finding details of setting, really anything that requires vivid sensory description, is nearly impossible to do at this pace. A lot of times, I'll look at the paragraph I've just written, see exactly where the sense of place is missing, and put a little bracketed note there for myself to find during revision. [WHAT TIME OF YEAR IS IT?] [LUNAR PHASE?] [TREES IN FLOWER?] [BODY LANGUAGE?] And then I race off to more tagless dialogue.

[dragonlaire.livejournal.com]

I assume you mean that the first publication rights have been compromised. Copyright would be a different issue and, presumably, not affected by the mode of publication.
It's an interesting topic but far from a simple one. Here's a couple of different points of view:

http://headlines.nerdworld.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=38

http://www.writing-world.com/rights/erights.shtml

The first of these was the more provocative since it granted the legal assumptions but wondered about the strategy.

Posting just a few of the initial chapters and friends-locking the others might be a sensible way to proceed. Thanks for the heads-up, although I have no plans now or in the near future to publish anything. I'm not sure why I lack the ambition; I'd just rather spend my time writing than chasing agents and publishers. But my convinctions can change. They usually do about most things.

[drewness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm in about thde same behind boat, after a spate of writer's block on Thursday night and being gone all weekend. Hopefully, I can catch up today.