#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 07 — Do you add a copyright statement to your work? How comprehensive is it?
When I submit to a publisher in the US, I do not include a copyright notice. Publishers understand that copyright law automatically protects authors whether or not they include the notice. Typing one on your manuscript shows you don't understand the basics. It's simply not professional.
When I publish online, for example on Mastodon, and I own the copyright AND care to have others understand that, I include the copyright notice below. The copyright is still automatic by law.
What I use is the word "copyright" followed by "(c)" or the symbol, no space, the year, and my name or pen name. This is what I understand as all that's necessary, but I am unqualified to give legal advice.
I include the copyright online to ensure:
non-US entities understand my ownership
if the content is scraped (e.g. by someone training an AI), the text will include an unambiguous copyright notice that this text is NOT public domain.
#Writer#story fuel: Think about these two paragraphs, read the article, then write a story. Or read Jean M Auel's The Mammoth Hunters.
Neanderthals disappeared roughly 40,000 years ago. But before they died out, some of them mated with early humans—which is why modern humans of non-African ancestry have between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. The reconstruction of Shanidar Z makes it “perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species,” says Emma Pomeroy, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge who helped discover Shanidar Z, in a statement.
“The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different,” she says. “Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life.”
#WordWeavers 2405.04 — How does your SC deal with failure?
Try different ways to get what she wants until frustration sets in, followed by anger, followed by doing something stupid.
When all the hauling companies in her home prefecture blacklisted her not simply for being female, but for being female while being persistent, she may or may not have thrown a brick through some windows and turned over some vehicles. She ran from the constables. She got tricked in another city into thinking she could earn quick money hauling questionable things to start her own company. She got blackmailed into the mob. She's still saving, for that day she might escape.
#PennedPossibilities 305 — Are there any characters of yours that you wound up HATING once you were finished with a story or WIP?
Taking a cue from @floofpaldi on how to answer this one, I have characters that are HATEFUL but none that I hate. I'm not to a Conan Doyle level that I can hate a character so much that I want to kill off my Sherlock Holmes.
Occasional hateful characters are great fun to write and pit against my MC. She ticks off one misogynist prizefighter during a press interview where her trainer presents her as a contender. An off-handed remark. He becomes her boogeyman, but he's stupidly angry, obviously uses steroids, blurts racist epithets, and gets used by others as muscle. The time he attacks her on a crowded public street, she manages to get him to trip into traffic where he breaks his legs. She walks off with her "Starbucks" she'd put down on a newspaper rack to deal with him.
Another time he ambushes her in a quiet neighborhood midday when nobody is around. His first punch to the head renders her unable to use magic part of her martial art and leaves her stumbling. He fights only with brawn. He wants to kill her. How could you hate a character on character setup like that?
She defeats him with a child's wooden pull toy. Anymore would be spoilers.
4 May 1694: d. Victoria Cary who married in 1640, Sir William Uvedale, father of her deceased fiancé, also William. Victoria was daughter of Henry Falkland Lord Deputy of #Ireland & Elizabeth Cary Tanfield #writer (NPG/EH) Her brother Patrick, ex-Benedictine m. Uvedale's niece.
Silence has a
tremor to it
a tremble like
a quiet cold. I
wish I could move
fast like that
all the time or
make myself
gigantic with
massive
goosebumps.
But super speed or
growth are for
cool kids and I
get a preview while
freezing in the quiet,
cupped hand, ear.
I need someone, preferably an agent or editor at a publishing house, to help me ascertain the content value on a finished book thwt is shelved because I cannot objectively discern its content anymore.
#PennedPossibilities 304 — How did your MC feel about friendships growing up? How do they feel about them now?
This one is easy. She was betrayed by a boy she thought was her soulmate at age eight. She distrusts friendship full stop.
She's learning how wrong she was now, and seems to be taking the advanced course in the subject with multiple boyfriends and people who intensely value and support her. Hearing someone loves her more than life itself, she of course commits herself to a deadly confrontation to save him, herself, and his attempted murderer.
The male lead is feeding chicken soup he made to the female MC who seems faint. He is trying to get her to rest. She likes his concern. He blows on the Asian-style spoon and she lets him feed her twice like a toddler, before taking his wrist.
I thought I wrote that she guides the spoon to her mouth.
What I actually unconsciously wrote was that she guided the spoon to his mouth
This is from a romance novel. Suddenly the electricity between the perspective couple is doubled, especially when it manages to get him to blush slightly.
So, I decided to listen to the chapter I keep on stalling on, while doing my morning stretches, setting my iPhone to read from #scrivener. I fixed a sentence, then finished the half-written sentence where I last stopped, then kept on writing the romantic soup and dragon magic scene. Sitting crosslegged on my exercise mat, legs falling asleep. 950 words latter I'm #writing about it on Mastodon.
#autocorrect auto-incorrected "lips" into "libs" and now I'm offended that my iPhone took the right word and changed it to a trending pejorative that people might apply to me, a pejorative I'd never type out myself.
A human would know better, but an #AI? Ugh! Keep this in mind if you are ever beguiled into using "tools" like #chatGpt. (I'd never stoop so low.)
Did you know #scrivener lets you search your project for images? Neither did I. Check dropdown of the search (magnifying glass), select Images, and search!
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 03 — Does your work include pictures, maps or other custom graphics? Share your pics.
For my current WiP, I decided I could afford two covers (and actually paid for three). They depict two events from the story:
The very special glare a minor antagonist favors the main character with in a throne room when she subtly insults her.
The cliché embarrassing hot moment when one of the two love interests pushes the heroine/MC up against the wall, smacks arms to either side of her face, and kisses her deeply.
The novel /is/ a romance, amongst other things. Since I do my own titling, I'm including the untitled images in the relevant chapters.
In another novella with alternate covers that had little to do with the text, I did include in one chapter the artfully bloody piece of cover art, untitled of course. Yeah, he (the MC) uses a martial art that favors sharp edges.
For /reasons,/ I am not sharing any of these images. Sorry. However...
For one online fantasy novelette that had the vibe of a Theodore Sturgeon story, I bought a stock art image. It's of a katana amidst cherry blossoms. The MC is a seven year old Japanese girl sucked unwittingly into a fantasy world. Her misunderstanding of the semantics of the magic creates the sword, which she wields in the story. But it's her misunderstanding of the semantics (i.e., kid logic) that also defeats her antagonist... maybe. I used the art for the cover design. I've used crops of the image for emphasis and chapter breaks in this extra-long short story. See images.
(/Update: I learned my image posting service timed out my images. Thanks to this question, I am now repairing the story. I really need to host my own images.../)
I did include a map in a published book, as discussed in the linked Ch5 Nbr 13 reply to this prompt series. You're welcome to click the link (https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/111750589349655437) and favorite both posts. 😇
File this one under the #comingLaborApocalypse. Really, I can't think of a job that is safe, but these are soon toast. Consider supporting basic income #ubi before it's too late.
#PennedPossibilities 303 — Is your SC one to be haunted by adversity, or to use what they've gone through to become stronger?
I was going to answer only stronger, but because it is true, I'll answer haunted. She calls him /The Monster,/ and he savaged her, but from that experience she learned she could fight, and win, and never be chattel again. She refers to The Monster often, comparing her current actions to that paradigm of evil, and sometimes finding herself wanting. She's not what is often called /good./ Those who know her say she has a death wish. Once, when she thought she'd murdered in an act of enraged vengeance, she tried to stab herself at the source of her magic in her guilt. She's since then experienced and reacted to other things. Bad, things. She remembers. When she encounters situations in the current work that remind her of how she became stronger, they haunt her as she fights to make surviving her past worthwhile to those she helps in the present.
#WordWeavers 2405.02 — What are your MC’s living conditions like? Are they better or worse than average?
Wow, this question! A bit of background: I wrote the original novella, then wrote a prequel novel based on the history in the first story, then retconned the novella, worsened the situation and followed it with new events to make it a novel, /then/ wrote the sequel. It's her life story, now.
In this last story, the answer to this question is the running joke. The new work takes place over three days. She starts having been living with a fellow student, an ever-seeking-male-companionship elite who months ago offered her a free roommate situation—so long as the MC slept with her in the same bed (and her new roommate only sleeps well being held). The next day it's the couch after the MC is reunited with a former coworker (bodyguard) whom she introduces to her elite roommate. They hit it off. Noisily. All night long! The next night, not wanting a repeat performance, she connives to spend a (satisfying) night with her new boyfriend in "palatial" digs in the Residency where the main antagonist lives, but is currently out on a military adventure. Having reconciled with a childhood friend, the subsequent night she ends up on his bed, in a Residency guest suite, sleeping with him and a pile of thaumaturgy books they nerded out over. She regrets not having had more fun with him, but he's too sweet and obviously not ready for that. The next day, she's fighting for her life in a hospital.
Her living conditions are way above average, arguably superior.
Previous Living Conditions
Born in a nice house in an obscure village
Raised in a newly built mansion for a newly titled elite (her)
Homeless for months, having run away, living in encampments and wandering the east coast
Big city hostel for over a year
Gangland trainer's nice apartment with separate beds
Boarding house with aspects of a brothel, where she must defend herself
Leased a one room dance studio where she sleeps on a mat between a wall of open windows and a wall of mirrors, having no need of further furniture
A series of high line hotel and mansion rooms owned the Doña she works for
As for the homelessness, she was moving around without money while hiding her identity, and rarely stayed long. The worst was trying to sleep under eaves in the city during storms; she didn't always have a tent. Regardless, it qualifies as below average living conditions for a total of about a year. It did focus her like of asceticism.