questions on editing process

[DragonRiderX1]

Hi
Im not sure where to begin. But my needs are pretty basic.
Some questions for reasonably experienced editors....

1. What is the process for getting a copyright? (minus all the hassle)
I need someone who puts out a free journal or something like that.
If Literotica uses a story I have written do they get all copyrights?

2. Can a person have non copyrighted material accepted into
literotica's collection of stories. In a case like that would
literotica claim ownership of that material?

3. I'd like to submit a short story for advice or edditing.
Im not looking for heavy duty perfectionist edditing.
I consider my writtings to be pros. My understanding
of pros is that it can be fairly free style and does not
allways have to use every rule of grammer. Might even
use a wrong spelling in some places if the author and edditor
agree that some words look better mis-spelled.

4. My main concern today is... Suppose you have a quality scale of
one to a hundred. 100 being perfect. I might reach about 85
but Im not likely to hit the top 5 percent. So my question here..
Am I wasting my time submitting pros style writting to Literoctica?

5. My writting is fiction, and often deals with non consentual,
purely imaginary situations. Im very careful not to condone
or encourage any actuall offenses. Would like to know if
Literotica has certain rules on the subject.

 

[Weird Harold]

1. What is the process for getting a copyright? (minus all the hassle)
I need someone who puts out a free journal or something like that.
If Literotica uses a story I have written do they get all copyrights?

2. Can a person have non copyrighted material accepted into
literotica's collection of stories. In a case like that would
literotica claim ownership of that material?

You own the copyright to stories you create as soon as you type them. If your concerned about the need to prove a copyright claim at some future time, save a time stamped copy of the story, mail a copy to yourself and leave it unopened, or go to the time and expense of registering each story or collection of stories with your national copyright office. Which you choose depends on how vigourously you expect to have to defend a copyright claim.

To post a story at Lit, you have to certify that you control the copyright unencumbered -- i.e .that you are the author or that you have permission from the author to post it under your username. Literotica only claims "a non-exclusive permission to publish;" You retain all rights to your story.

3. I'd like to submit a short story for advice or edditing.
Im not looking for heavy duty perfectionist edditing.
I consider my writtings to be pros. My understanding
of pros is that it can be fairly free style and does not
allways have to use every rule of grammer. Might even
use a wrong spelling in some places if the author and edditor
agree that some words look better mis-spelled.

4. My main concern today is... Suppose you have a quality scale of
one to a hundred. 100 being perfect. I might reach about 85
but Im not likely to hit the top 5 percent. So my question here..
Am I wasting my time submitting pros style writting to Literoctica?

If your post is an example of your spelling/grammar ability, then youdefinitely need a proofreader who can spell at the very least -- the correct spellings are: writing editor, prose, misspelled, grammar, and I'm (or I am.)

Prose is basically defined as "NOT Poetry" -- everything posted at Literotica is one or the other.

Literotica doesn't expect perfection. If a score of 4.25 is equivalent to your 85/100, then your goal is a higher standard than most of the stories posted here; there isn't an exact corelation between quality of the writing and the score readers award a story, but it's the closest to a quantitative assessment as we can get.

5. My writting is fiction, and often deals with non consentual,
purely imaginary situations. Im very careful not to condone
or encourage any actuall offenses. Would like to know if
Literotica has certain rules on the subject.

Nonconsent/reluctant stories must be "rape fantasies" and NOT "Rapist Fantasies" -- your qualification of not condoning any actual offenses suggests you should have no problem, but it's a subjective judgement on the part of Laurel, the site admin who approves stories.

 

[DragonRiderX1]

Thank You plus follow-up questions

Thank You for your reply Weird Harold
That was rather helpful.

Oh, by the way, I don't always
spell check my posts....but any story I submit would
be spell checked in advance. An editor would be
welcome to double check that of course.

You were describing the time stamping of a story.
Then sending a copy to one's self and leaving unopened.
I have a few questions on that.

1. Should this be a hard copy?

2. Is the time stamp simply a typed date,
hand written, or literally stamped?

3. Should there be a copyright symbol right next to the date
at this point in the process?

4. signiture needed? If so...sign as pen name or self?

---------------------------------------
A few questions on basic layout
---------------------------------------
At this point I'm working with a rich text file.
The story is short enough that I have not assigned
pages to it yet. So it's all one long page of paragraphs.
If it would be helpful, I could tell the word processor
to create pages.

Sometimes it's easier to imagine these things as a print out.
My way of doing a print out would be as follows....
Cover page - contains name of story. Under that the word fiction.
Last line...my pen name... by: DragonRiderX1

Next page - copyright information. In this case probably
just showing the date, but if needed I could put a copyright
symbol to the left of the date

Next page - Not sure if I should call this a Forward or an Introduction
So I might have the occasional blank page in places I'm uncertain about.
For my purposes, I would put the introduction right about here.

Introduction contains:
The disclaimer
Some keywords to indicate subtopics
or possible ways of categorizing the story.
Character names and pronunciations
Possibly a one paragraph summery

Next page - The story begins

Thanks in advance for your help

 

[Weird Harold]

You were describing the time stamping of a story.
Then sending a copy to one's self and leaving unopened.
I have a few questions on that.

1. Should this be a hard copy?

Mailing yourself a copy can be a hardcopy or a file on disk or chip. the important thing is the post mark on a sealed envelope that contains your story.

2. Is the time stamp simply a typed date,
hand written, or literally stamped?

A "time stamp" can be any marker that is outside of your control -- a post mark, a posting date, a notary public's stamp, or just the time and date imprint on a computer file on a disk that you can prove hasn't been altered.

Anything that will establish when a story was written that you can't alter or add at a later time will do.

3. Should there be a copyright symbol right next to the date
at this point in the process?

I tag my my stories:

Two Bags For the Bride
Copyright 2000 by Dirty Old Man

I could use the copyright symbol instead of spelling it out, but the copyright symbol isn't a "standard" character and doesn't always show up as a copyright symbol in all programs -- browsers, word processors other than MS Word, etc.

4. signiture needed? If so...sign as pen name or self?

No, no signature needed -- claim the copyright under any name that you can prove is yours. It doesn't even have to be exclusively yours; I know of at least two other authors who write under the pen name "Dirty Old Man" on other sites but they can't claim "Two Bags For the Bride" as theirs because it posted here with a posting date and author contact information that points to me and only me.

---------------------------------------
A few questions on basic layout
---------------------------------------
At this point I'm working with a rich text file.
The story is short enough that I have not assigned
pages to it yet. So it's all one long page of paragraphs.
If it would be helpful, I could tell the word processor
to create pages.

Sometimes it's easier to imagine these things as a print out.
My way of doing a print out would be as follows....

You only need to worry about layout and pagination if you're planning to submit something to a print publisher in manuscript. If that is the case contact the publisher you intend to submit to for their maunuscript formatting requirements.

To submit a story to an online publisher, like Literotica, an RTF file without hard page breaks will suffice. If your thinking specifically in terms of submitting Literotica, a "Flat Text" with HTML markup for Italics, Bold, Underline (and a few other permitted HTML tags as needed) is the format that provides you with the greatest control over how your story looks and ease of submission -- Flat Text can be Copy and Pasted into the submission form and previewed before committing to the submission.

Your current format as described is probably just fine for submitting to Literotica; Just make sure there are two paragraph breaks between paragraphs instead of one paragraph break and Word Processor created White Space.

"Flat Text" means a file with no word processor codes or non-ASCII characters (like "smart quotes") and only double CR/LF pair separating paragraphs. (CR/LF is "Carriage Return and Line Feed" and how ASCII files mark the end of a line of text and most Word Processors mark a paragraph break. It's the equivalent of hitting the Return/Enter key.)

Lit's formatting scripts expect a double paragraph break to mark paragraph breaks because they're written to deal with "Fixed Length" text files as well as the preferred "Flat Text" format -- they treat a single CR//LF as a "manual line break" and remove it to enable word-wrapping in the final HTML file.

Unless you've changed the defaults, saving a file as "Plain Text" or "MSDOS Text" from MS Word will create a "Flat Text" file. Other Word Processors may or may not create Flat Text files -- "Fixed Length Text" is the most common alternative.

Lit's formatting scripts ignore page breaks for the most part; they break stories into "Lit pages" of about 3,500 words each (actually into approximately 14KB blocks of characters) without regard to your word processor margin and page settings.

Other sites have different requirements for a preferred format and convert submissions to HTML format using different rules -- you need to determine what is required on a site by site basis, but "Flat Text with embedded HTML codes" will probably work for almost any site since an HTML page IS essentially a "flat text file with embedded HTML codes."

 

[tanyachrs]

Copyright is both simpler and more complex than you imagine. You own the copyright. You don't need to do anything or prove anything or mail anything or anything anything. On the other hand, if you post something you've written on Literotica, it's very easy for someone to make a copy of what you wrote and post it elsewhere, for fun or profit, with or without attribution. Having a copyright doesn't prevent that from happening. It happens here all the time, unfortunately.

What you would have to do if that happened is track that person down, ask them to quit, then, if they didn't, hire a lawyer, take them to court, and prove damages. It's unlikely that proving you wrote the original piece would be the bone of contention. Proving damages is the tricky part (when you're talking about something you've already given away for free). The best you could hope for is to get them to remove the illegal copy and even that would take a lot of time and money unless the threat of litigation worked.

Ethically, anything you post here belongs to you but, realistically, expect to lose control of it.