It’s been another quiet week here, and I made good progress on figuring out my WIP. I don’t have a word count this time, since a lot of what I did included deleting and changing. But that doesn’t really matter since it’s just notes. I have not yet figured out the ending, but that usually comes to me as I get closer to it, so at this point, I should have enough to break into a list of scenes (i.e., outline) and get back to the writing.
It’s now the start of ROW80 Round 2 and the second quarter, so time to review my goals. Last quarter, my writing goal was to add 16,000 words to the WIP. I ended up with about 13,000, which is a lot more than I thought I did, so I’ll consider that “failing to success.” I also met my learning goal of completing two online workshops. I ran a little behind on my goal of learning something about copyright once a month, but I did that this past week, and summarized what I learned below.
This quarter/Round, I’m going to stick to the same goals:
- 16,000 words on the WIP
- Two online workshops
- Learn about copyright once a month, or three times
- I also want to choose a theme for my website revamp, which was a bonus goal last quarter (obviously not done)
More on Copyright
Most of this month’s reading on copyright had to do with registering collections of items, such as newspapers or magazines. Items published within a single calendar year can be registered as a group, but how many and how often depends on how often the periodical is published. A daily newspaper should be registered once a month, after the last day’s articles are published. A magazine that only publishes once a month may wait until the year is up, but it’s recommended to register every three months, so that the registration is “timely” and provides all the protections in case of infringement.
The part of this that’s more likely to apply to fiction writers is the fact that we can register multiple short works together–for example, short stories that appeared in different anthologies, magazines, etc., for a single registration fee. Like periodicals themselves, these stories/articles could be copyrighted as a single group that’s been published within a calendar year. And the same caveat applies where the author may want to register few items every three months to ensure that they are all registered in a timely manner to provide maximum protection.
Something else to note about group copyright registration is that the claimant (author or rights-holder) must be the same person(s) or entity.
What I’ve Been Reading
I still haven’t finished the novel I started last week, so nothing to report here.
What I’ve Been Writing
As noted above, more notes. This week, I want to break down my notes into a list of scenes (outline), and start back into writing. For learning, I want to do Week 2 of the WMG Workshop I started last week on studying fiction.
What about you–how are things going where you are? I hope you’re staying healthy! Has the pandemic made it more difficult to work on your goals, or has it given you more time–or like me, not affected things so far? How are you doing on whatever goals you might have, whether writing or otherwise? Please share in the comments–I love to hear from you!
Jennette Marie Powell writes stories about ordinary people in ordinary places, who do extraordinary things and learn that those ordinary places are anything but. In her Saturn Society novels, unwilling time travelers do what they must to make things right... and change more than they expect. You can find her books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and more.