Poor, Poor Poor Man's Copyright

To my amazement, the Myth Which Will Not Die has again reared its head at one of the handful of writing sites I visit often.

Can't I just mail (or email) a copy of my novel/script/poem/essay as proof of when I created it, without going to the bother and expense of copyrighting it?

Sure you can, but in the United States this will not prove anything at all in a court of law. No US court at any level has recognized this so-called Poor Man's Copyright. The website of the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress even says so, yet people who should know better still pass this information around as if it has value.

The moment you save your writing to any fixed medium--your computer's hard drive, a CD or flash drive, a print-out, handwritten sheet of paper, a cocktail napkin--in the US, it is copyrighted. Registration of that copyright offers further protection and is not free, but it is not required for your work to be copyrighted.

For whatever it may be worth, violations of copyright for monetary gain are fairly rare. What's increasingly common is the theft of writing posted online for reposting elsewhere, without permission or acknowledgment. That's a pretty compelling argument against posting in an open public forum, whether you're in the US and that work is automatically copyrighted or not.

What Goes Around Comes Around

"What Goes Around Comes Around." When I was a kid and my mom would say this, I didn't get it. This folk wisdom only made sense if you were talking about colds or chicken pox. If it was going around, it would eventually come around to me. Yippee.

Now, of course, I see what the saying means: You get back something akin to what you give. Maybe not exactly what you gave, or immediately, but it does indeed come back.

If you know me, you know I struggle with my weight, especially in winter when all there is is the cursed treadmill and snow needing removal. I have a longstanding deal with myself that if I shovel snow, whether for fifteen minutes or two hours, I don't have to exercise that day in any other way. On the average, it works out, and we have the clearest driveway in the neighborhood, even though our neighbors all use plow services.

Once or twice each winter, some plow service driver will see me working with the heavy snow the town's big plow has thrown across the foot of the driveway. He'll gesture me to move back and he'll clear it in one or two passes. This is a lovely thing to do, saving me the worst part of the job and letting him feel good about himself for the day, because even though it took him literally two minutes, he really did do me a favor. And I'm genuinely grateful for it each time it happens.

Today, though, was different. I was at the end of the driveway, working it slow and steady, when a truck stopped and a big man in a sweatshirt got out.

I knew this guy. The spring and summer we had the dumpster in the driveway, he'd come to the door and gestured that he wanted to go in it, and once I understood, I'd let him. He returned several times, removing metal and anything else he could resell. He borrowed a broom the one time his taking something made a bit of a mess. If I saw him stop, I'd wave. Once on a really hot day when I saw him sweating profusely, I'd brought him a glass of cold water in a disposable cup. This was not exactly going to a lot of trouble.

Now he gestured for me to hand him the shovel, and I did. He cleared the base of the driveway with the ease of a big person who uses his weight to push. I thanked him--he seems to understand "Thank you!"--and he waved at me to step back.

He started to shovel the whole driveway. Two cars wide. Heavy snow, since it was over thirty degrees. I got the spare shovel and joined in the work. He gestured for me to hand him that shovel, and he worked one with each hand. In less than ten minutes, he'd cleared away the bulk of the snow, working up a good sweat. Could I pay him? I gestured. No, no. "Thank you. Thank you!"

"Thank you," he said, then returned to his car and drove away.

I tidied up the edges, thinking about him. I'd not gone out of my way much to be kind, but I'd certainly not been unkind, as I imagine some people are to trash pickers wanting a shot at their dumpsters. I thought he might be Turkish. Weren't they nearly all Muslims? Maybe he had his own agenda, showing Americans that people like him were good people, not terrorists. Or maybe he had the notion that women should not be doing such heavy physical labor, and shoveling was proving himself the man.

I suppose I'll never know. But I like to think he did it because he's a good man who remembers copper pipe, a medicine cabinet, and a glass of water.

Recovering from a Bad Start: "I Was an Online Idiot"

The regulars at writing sites have seen it many, many times. Newcomers arrive pretty sure they're geniuses, every word they write golden if not magical. They're waiting for the industry to buy their script and beg for more, to recognize their brilliance, to make them rich, to award the Oscar. While they wait, they're willing to drop crumbs of knowledge on us lesser beings, although we are unlikely to ascend to the lofty and creative heights they anticipate for themselves.

By the way, they mention, they do it all. They've written the score, although some lackey will need to write down the actual musical notes. The domain for the movie title is reserved and it's got a Facebook and Tumblr presence. Their own professional website is up, under the pseudonym that sounds so writerly and so cool as it explains both their process and their source of inspiration. They've got the poster designed for theatrical use and BluRay covers. They've selected the clips to use for the trailer, plus the voiceover actor. They want Joseph Gordon-Levitt or James McAvoy starring opposite Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde if there's a scheduling conflict, and they plan to be on the set to help each actor better understand the character.

It's both sad and funny that this happens so often it's unsurprising. Whether the online response is mean-spirited, frank, instructive, or mocking is beside the point, although I applaud the websites which demand civility. Each of these newcomers requires two rude awakenings. One, this isn't how the business works, and two, their writing is utter crap.

It's demoralizing, I know, to think you'd written something that was pretty damned good and be told differently. You worked hard on it--really hard!--and the characters seem rich, nuanced, and real to you. The few friends or family members you dared to show it to said great things about it. They could see it playing like a real movie, just like you can! You may have found websites where screenwriters told you the script showed talent and promise, just like their early work did. And here these nobodies are telling you it sucks.

They suck! And they're idiots, too stupid to see how good this is! Spiteful and nasty retaliation, name-calling, and moral outrage happen far more often than denial or disappearing. The regulars have seen that play out a lot of times, too.

What we seldom see, though, is what might actually make you a better screenwriter. We rarely see people sorry they got upset, apologizing for their behavior, and saying they'll do better, and so far, we've never seen that promise come to pass. We don't see people open to learning exactly what they've done wrong and how to fix it. We don't see people ready to face the reality of early writing being bad. We don't see them asking for guidance on structure, format, character development, pacing, writing to a budget, grammar and punctuation,or anything else on the craft.

Which is a damned shame, really, since it means they're unlikely ever to improve.

Rate Books for Quality

Among my many, many pet peeves--a menagerie of peeves?--is the person who gives an online product a low rating because they did not read the product description and were unreasonably disappointed to find it was exactly what it said it was and not what they thought it was.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when someone rated a lamp with two stars of the possible five, because it was small. The dimensions of the lamp, the shade, and the lamp and shade assembled were in the product description, so how is this person's inattention helpful in informing other potential buyers of its quality?

I've seen the same thing on art prints ("I didn't read the description closely and was disappointed it came rolled up and not framed."), clothing ("This sweater isn't wool!"), and coffee makers ("This didn't grind the beans, which is what I wanted.")

And of course it extends to book reviews.

Don't get me wrong. I'm firmly in the corner of anybody who has an opinion and backs it up, even if I disagree with the opinion and the reasoning that led to it. But I have little patience for the buyer who writes a bad review when a book was exactly what it said it was going to be.

I've seen it in hard-boiled private eye novels ("This book has so much swearing and violence I had to put it down."), horror ("The gore made me sick--like the author must be!") and erotica ("This book is disgusting and decent people don't do these things.")

Excuse me? This is only a small portion of what real people do--your neighbors, the kind people at your church, the clerk who takes your money or sells you the ticket, the couple that owns the coffee shop, the plumber who'll come out in the middle of the night, the receptionist at your dentist's office, the ordinary people whose paths intersect yours on a daily basis.

If you approve only unadventurous sex between married heterosexual couples, then maybe you should be buying erotica only after reading the blurb. There's hot fiction written just for you--and plenty for everybody else.

The erotica writers selling commercially- and self-published books cover the full range of sexual activities actual people do. Your disapproval of their choices, or of who they are, does not belong in a book's rating.

Rate it poorly if it's badly written, if the characters seem flat, if it bored you, if the plot had holes. That book deserves a low rating. But the fact that you do not approve of the activities or characters depicted? Giving such a book a low rating just shows you're a fool.

On Dirty Girls

Pardon me, but I have to get something off my chest. Or more accurately, my thighs and ass.

I'm recently returned from a short trip through western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio on my way to Akron, trying to dodge bad weather hammering Cleveland and Erie.

I like Ohio in many ways. The people are uncommonly friendly, from hotel desk clerks to crowds milling in line to enter Akron's gorgeously renovated Civic Theater. The weather, while wintry, has more sunshine than I get at home. Drivers tend toward courteous, letting you into their lane.

But there's one thing I loathe about Ohio. I first noted it more than a decade ago, and it seems to be worsening. I see it at highway rest stops, restaurants, hotels, stores, academic buildings on college campuses, sports stadiums, museums, movie theaters, comedy clubs, and music venues large and small.

Ohio women--surely not all of them, but far too many--hover above the toilet seat rather than sitting down. They piss on the seat and often the floor as well. They do not clean it up. If you're the next woman and not paying attention, you're going to seat yourself in somebody's pee. If you are paying attention, you get the pleasure of wiping up some stranger's urine.

Oh, sure, I've gone to the next stall, and the next, and the next, living one of those weird dreams you're having because you really need to pee but haven't waked up yet, to no avail. It's not that some inconsiderate woman has hover-peed. It's that a great many do. At a place with a half-dozen stalls, it's not at all unusual to find every single one of them sporting a wet toilet seat.

This does not happen in neighboring Pennsylvania, by the way. You use a public restroom in Pennsylvania, the seat is likely to be dry, same as in most places.

So what is it about Ohio? My theory is that there's a basic distrust of and contempt for other-ness. In one's home, for instance, and perhaps at one's job, one's church, etc. surely these women sit. They presume the bathroom that looks clean is clean and the basic hygiene of the others using the bathroom is fine. They're right.

However, they also presume people and places they don't know are dirty, that sitting on toilet seats which only look clean might make them dirty, too, that the default for other women is unclean. And so they hover, making the seat unclean for others.

Who's dirty?

I take offense at the attitude that anyone who's not One of Us is presumed dirty. This isn't just about toilet seats but carries over into politics and social mores, and it's every bit as ugly as somebody's cold piss on the seat.

Yup, I'm in There

The internet is all the proof required to know many, many people cannot reason at the most basic level. The family member who thinks schools need to teach logic in middle school is absolutely right.

I'm a fangirl--it doesn't matter which actor--and there's a woman I see on various fan sites who is certain the actor is gay. She reads between the lines of every print interview in which he mentions a male friend or colleague, gleefully reposts pictures in which he stands near any other handsome actor (while ignoring those of him near or touching gorgeous female actors), knows his few public relationships with women are for publicity's sake, ignores the pregnant girlfriend, and generally sees what she wants to believe whether it's there or not.

Among her favorite arguments to convince others (which seems to be her mission in life) is a novel written by a gay director who has worked with the actor. A character in that novel is very probably based on the actor, and that character is gay and has sex with the narrator. Obviously the director had sex with the actor, right? Is this not proof?

This is where her logic fails.

Novelists, including this director, put themselves into their characters. There's a bit of me in everyone I write, male and female, hero and villain, gay and straight and in between. I'm the curvacious wife--and her neglectful husband, the new lover, the older woman who becomes a friend, the elderly neighbor headed for a nursing home, the harried doctor, the stuttering man who prays aloud, and the cop.

Writers add many details which are not drawn from their own lives. They're inventions, fantasies, what-ifs, intended to develop the character or propel the plot.

Do I fret over my looks like Natalie? Yes. Am I long and happily married like she is? Yes. Would I add a very attractive person we'd only met that evening to our sex lives? Nope. I made that part up, like the director probably did his gay scene with "my" actor's character.

Using our own lives, and minutia drawn from those around us, is how authors make their characters seem real and rounded, with lives which existed before the events in the book and which will continue after its end--unless we kill them. I work hard to give my characters backgrounds and childhoods, opinions, beliefs, hopes, fears, families, friends, weaknesses, doubts, jobs, frustrations, tempers, senses of humor, hobbies and interests, and everything else real people have which make the simplest lives rich.

I make it all up, peppered with a few tidbits from real lives if they fit in the fictional mosaic of my characters' lives.

On Writing vs. Having Written

I've been hanging around in-person and online writing communities for a lot of years now, and there's one phenomenon which is a constant. If you, too, observe or participate in any group of writers, you've no doubt seen it yourself.

There are a lot of people who call themselves writers who write very, very little, if at all. I don't mean this month, or even this year. We all know life takes some crazy turns which can eat all of a person's available time or every bit of energy, creativity, or motivation they can muster.

What I'm talking about is the person who likes to consider himself a writer among his own kind when he only talks the talk and rarely walks the walk. You know these people. They're the self-identified writers who talk about their story, who figure out what actors at what ages would play their characters, who draw maps of the settings or create the world where it takes place, who generate detailed character biographies and determine the limits of the monsters' or aliens' abilities, who run potential titles or plot ideas past their "fellow writers"--but do not sit down before the blank screen or page to put down the words to make it so.

These people don't want to write. They don't like to write. What they want is to have written, and what they like is to call themselves writers.