Terrie

The not-getting-shortlisted thing is tricky. I had one story that was shortlisted in a major competition. I worked on it a bit more and submitted it to a few other places…and was met with silence.

@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]

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]

My significant failure this year has been to have written nothing.

I am not sure that there is much I can learn from that failure, but I have discovered that the desire to write is not one of the flash-in-the pan obsessions to which I am prone. The desire is still there, and I have valid reasons for the mojo loss.

I am hitting the half-century…[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.