Category Archives: writing

A Deadline Crash, and a Reading

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to write a Doctor Who short story. It was for a competition that Big Finish, publisher of DW books and CDs, were running. Alas, the closing date was the 31st of January, which is now past, and I didn’t finish it (does that make it a Small Finish?)

Still, I’m enjoying writing it, and intend to finish it anyway, just on general principles. It doesn’t do to go around having lots of unfinished pieces (and I speak as someone who has a great many unfinished things lying around, of one variety or another).

When I do finish it, I’ll probably put it online. Now my question is, does such a work now count as fanfic? I suppose it does, on some level. Curious, because the winner of the competition gets professionally published, and that obviously isn’t fan fiction.

Still on a literary note, my friend Andrew was in town the other night, because he was one of the authors who was doing a reading that was organised by Farthing magazine. Until Andrew told me about the event, I didn’t even know that the publication existed.

It was a good night. I missed the first reading, by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, but heard various drabbles, Andrew’s story, and two other fine stories.

During the interval I picked up the back issues of the magazine and took out a subscription. Then at the end we helped the Editor, Wendy Bradley, to carry some boxes back to her flat, and drank her whisky.

All in all, it was a fine night.

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Copyright Matters – Pass It On

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So here I am, all ready to write about my day for the History Matters – Pass It On site’s One Day in History project, which has been much hyped of late. But before I started writing I took a look at the terms and conditions, where I found this little thought:

You agree, by submitting such material, to grant the Partners jointly and severally a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, play, make available to the public,

That’s fair enough, right? You’re granting them a non-exclusive licence to use the material. But it goes on to say:

and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to, your material worldwide and/or to incorporate your material in other works in any media now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in your material.

Umm, “exercise all copyright”? Now I’m not so sure. Let’s see what else there is.

you waive any moral rights to your material for the purposes of its submission to and publication on the Site or for the general purposes specified above.

Ouch. I don’t like the sound of that. Now the thing that got me looking at this was this, which is not in the Ts&Cs, but right on the submission page:

The History Matters partners own the copyright of any materials that you submit and be free to use them in any History Matter related materials such as any media stories, published books etc.

Not just overbearingly copywrong, but ungrammatical, too. Ouchy, ouchy, ouch, ouch!

Then, as if to add stupidity to a lack of concern for people’s work, there is a section entitled, “Links to this Website. It includes the following paragraph:

The Partners reserve the right at their discretion to prohibit any link from another Internet site or equivalent entity to materials or information on the Site.

Ok, so they’re not banning deep links, they’re just warning you that they might do so.

Furthermore, no page or pages from this website may be framed by or with any third party content or otherwise made available to the public in conjunction with any third party content without the prior written consent of the Partners

So it’s all right to take thousands of random contributors’ work away from them, but we can’t in turn reproduce or reuse your work (or that of the random contributors)?

C’mon, guys, this is the web: linking is what it’s all about.

And as to copyright: The History Matters project is founded, according to its FAQ, by:

National Trust, English Heritage, The National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund, the Historic Houses Association, Heritage Link, the Civic Trust, the Council for British Archaeology and Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

All publicly-funded and/or charitable bodies, if I’m not very much mistaken.

Now you may think that I’m being unreasonably cautious about this. I’m just some guy in London writing about his day. It’s not like they’re stealing what I write, or as if what I write matters that much in the grand scheme of things. And that’s true enough. I have absolutely no problem with them using what I might write. Indeed, all my writing here is Creative-Commons-licensed, so you don’t even have to ask if you want to use it. The problem is this: if you follow the letter of the agreement, then I lose all rights over what I submit to them. That means that if I write a description of my day, submit it to the project, and then post a copy here, on my blog (as I intended to do), then I’ll be in breach of copyright.

And that is madness.

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt: I’m working on the assumption that this is just carelessness; that the terms and conditions are just poorly thought through, rather than deliberately evil. But really, someone there has a duty to take care. When you’re a public body soliciting material created by the public, you have no moral right to claim the exclusive intellectual rights over that material.

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On Countries, Nationhood, and Being Invited to Write a Guest Spot

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Dave Hill is a novelist, Guardian writer and prolific blogger. He is running a series of guest pieces on his blog. They’re on the theme of “What I Like About England (or not, as the case may be).” He was inspired to do this mainly by all the flag-waving furore during the World Cup (with maybe some influence from Andy Murray’s attire at Wimbledon).

I’m pleased to say that he has asked me to contribute. I’ll post here, of course, when my piece is up. In the meantime I’ve been thrashing out some of what I might say in the comments thread of one of the earlier pieces.

Dave’s overall title for this project is ‘Big England’. You can see all the pieces to date here

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Cafe culture

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Well, I feel like a proper 21st-century blogger at the moment: I’m sitting typing this in a cafe. Specifically, the Clissold House Cafe, in Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, North London. The kids are currently at a tennis ‘camp’ (two hours’ intensive training a day for four days this week). It being the school holidays, I’ve taken the week off work to look after them.

So with two hours to fill, I went for a wander round the shops of Church Street (only bought two books in a second-hand bookshop) and now I’m back at the park, waiting for the tennis to finish. I’m typing this on my Palm with folding keyboard setup. It doesn’t have anything fancy like WiFi or Bluetooth, so by the time you read this it will be (at least) several hours later, when I upload it to the PC and post.

The coffee’s not very good, either. Their specialty is more cakes here, but I’m holding off until lunchtime.

I’m am reminded as I type of the existence of John Scalzi’s book on writing, You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing. Still, I’m not trying to impress (or, indeed, fool) anyone (nor, I imagine, succeeding in doing so).

At the same time I’m listening to Radio 4, where there’s a program about ‘battleaxes’, which is kind of bollocks, as all such stereotypes are. It isn’t annoying me enough to switch it off yet, though.

Curiously, they just played an extract from Fawlty Towers that I don’t remember ever hearing. There’s only about twelve episodes, so it’s hard to imagine that there’s one I’ve never seen. Then they’ve been talking about Thatcher as a battleaxe, which is an interesting one that I won’t go into here.

I sat down to write fiction, but ended up doing this. It doesn’t make for the greatest of blog entries, but I suppose it serves as slight relief from bleak political posts.

Damn, nearly made it without mentioning politics.

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