JT.

Oh, failure is hard! And so unavoidable. It’s a bit like the ‘slushpile’ term though isn’t it? Perhaps more negative than it needs to be for some of the things we are talking about. Things like not getting short listed in major comps, or not getting a story into a popular journal … are they really failure, or are they a lack of success? Maybe…[Read more]

@daedalus The law in the USA is basically the same, copyright rests with the creator as soon as the creation is in a tangible form. The difference is litigation, America’s national sport. To defend, or attack, is far less complex and expensive if you’ve registered the copyright. But, an important point, just putting the C-mark on your work,…[Read more]

You called, ma’am? Yes, no ‘c’ required for the reasons already given on this thread. It sends out a signal that you don’t really know how this stuff works, which is less-than professional.

Go to ‘Groups’

Go to ‘A Room with a View’

Go to ‘Forum’

The different topics are all in the ‘A Room with a View’ group forum. You will find ‘Chit Chat’ and explanations of what the competition is there.

A failure of mine is to take each failure to heart while not believing that successes are real or worthy

Oh goodness, yes – we are our own worst critics!!

On the cloud, we often talked about ‘failure’ and ‘success’ and how differently people perceived the definitions of them. So I completely understand that you view not being placed as failure – it was one of a whole range of responses we used to get.

Me – I enter very few comps because I hated…[Read more]

Definitely not failure if you’ve tried some comps – you had to write the bloomin’ entry first! And from experience, competitions can be a matter of luck as well as great writing – does the judge like your particular genre? Your style? I know from peer-judging comps on the cloud, my own preference for reading material comes through in the kind of…[Read more]

A New Dawn

A blood red sun rose through the smoke from a thousand cooking fires, smoke that hung like mist over distant Alexandra township. A typical African morning on the highveld, but this was not a typical day. Daniel and his mother stepped from the bus onto the dusty road and followed the other passengers. Daniel wished his father could be…[Read more]

I suspect there might be a difference between US and UK practice as far as copyright goes. In the UK, copyright is presupposed so you don’t need to do anything to assert it. In the US it may be a bit less clear cut

Indeed it is. Well done John. That’s an amazingly fast turnaround as well, they must have loved it

An author’s work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it’s produced. Registering copyright is not necessary. All registration does is make legal pursuit of a plagiarist a little easier.

Gosh, no @alanr! That seems fairly ott and kind of paranoid. Plus a lot of hassle, right? Spending time and money to copyright something on the small chance that an agent will like it, and even smaller chance that they can be bothered stealing a promising idea rather than just requesting a full ms.

Who was the published author? I’m intrigued…[Read more]

Well done, @johnalty!! That’s fab – will pop over and have a read.