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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Disclamery Stuff

[I'm fixing, revising, and cleaning up the tabs at the top of the page, but it's good to put this into a reminder post every once in a while.]

Variations: they may occur in your mileage.

try to use only copyright free images, and I also fail spectacularly. I've got a few places I go, like the Creative Common Licence Flikr page or the "free to use (even commercially)" image search on Google. Unless they are a picture OF me, they are absolutely not mine, and I will never ever claim that they are. If I put an image up on a potpourri post of comics and humor, it means I discovered them as a meme on Facebook and they had no attribution I could discern. I try my best, but the internet is a tangled thicket and not every image is watermarked.

So if I'm using an image that is yours (or your client's), please just tell me how you'd like me to handle it. (I'll take it down. Give you credit. Make it a link back to your page. Apologize for my impudence. Write a post about how awesome you are for not making a federal case of it. Whatever.) Just let me know what you want me to do, and I'll do it. I'm an artist. I steal, recombine, and reinvent, but I would never do that if I weren't welcome. It's just hard to tell if that's the case in today's online culture.

I really do try to avoid any image with a big flaming "Don't use my shit without permission" sign on the webpage or a clear copyright watermark, but sometimes I end up with such image through an intermediary with less regard.  If I've used a image that I didn't know was stolen, I will do what it takes to make amends.  And I will never pass off work that isn't mine as my own.

Some of my older articles have images from less discriminating places. The first page in a Google search for certain words, for example. This was back when I was excited to hit triple digits on page views in a given day, and before my site had ads. Again, if I'm using a copyrighted image, please just tell me how you'd like me to handle that. You don't even need to get your "kind-of-friend" in law school to write an official sounding Cease and Desist. Just toss me an e-mail, let me know, and I will be so mortified that I will do anything to fix it.

There will be no ads, but I might remind you of the tip jar. Writing About Writing is and will always be free. And these days we don't even have any ads. But I'm a pretentious artiste and I dream of writing paying for more than just a cell phone bill.  Once every month or two, I'll write a post reminding people that if they want more content, well curated menus and web design, professional level proof reading,  more fiction, or "big" articles every day, I'm going to need to work less than 40 hours a week on my two other day jobs. Through the generosity of readers, I've been able to pare down teaching to only once a night a week and get a sitter in for a couple of hours most mornings, and that's why I can write as much and often as I do. More improvements as they become feasible.

I'm not very good at proofing my own stuff.  (~dramatic pause~) Yet.  If you find a mistake, and you want to point it out, I promise I won't be the slightest bit offended or upset.  I will thank you, and fix it.  One of the great things about blogging is I can clean up old entries, and as long as I'm not changing the core ideas, it's all kosher.  I have some help in the form of beta readers, but I often procrastinate too long to fully solicit their help. Sadly, I cannot afford a proofreader as this blog makes an average of fifteen cents a day, and all the proofreaders I interviewed wanted like twice that!  Would that I could though.

In this blog, I mostly talk about creative writing, specifically fiction. While the concerns of other genres of creative writing dovetail with fiction somewhat, and all writing in general has a few things in common (like words and periods and stuff), they are also quite different in form, content, style, and execution. Fiction is not journalism, and neither of those is technical writing. So if you are making a great living gritting your teeth through the boredom while writing instruction manuals for digital cameras and food processors, and wonder what the hell I'm on about when I talk about high passion and low pay, it's not because I think you're not a "real" writer. It's just because "Blogging about Fiction Writing" isn't as catchy of a title, and writing out "creative fiction writing" would be a pain in the ass to write all the time....and I'm really lazy.

I am not very good at computer stuff.  Actually, that's like saying Emanuel Lewis is a little short.  I may have links that go nowhere or images that don't load. I can usually fix that stuff if you bring it to my attention. There are sometimes some weird formatting errors where it looks like some of the text is the wrong font or font size, and I can't seem to fix it, no matter what I do.

There might be some satire in here somewhere.  Maybe. You should probably take a satire class if you don't know how to recognize it when you see it. The Onion offers some online correspondence courses that are top notch. I highly recommend them.

I am not the persona through which I write. I will not use this persona to avoid taking responsibility for my words–especially the way some people excuse their use of harmful jokes. But I definitely turn the snark up to 11, and I don't actually care so much about threesomes. Or maybe I do, but just don't talk about it so much....

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