I'm glad you both enjoyed it. I'm fine with people translating it for non-commercial purposes, so please do feel free to do this. If you end up doing so then it would be great if you posted a link here so that people could find the translation more easily (and, assuming I remember at the time, I'll edit the post to include links to the translations).
I've come across academic journals that allow you to post drafts pre-submission but a condition of acceptance is that you remove these before publication. But if these drafts were now CC-BY licensed, you can't be sure you'll have the power to do this. (In practice, you might get away with simply ignoring this, but that depends on your willingness to lie, and your willingness to do so in the context of a legally binding contract).
More generally, public sharing of drafts is pretty common in academia, but publishers often want exclusive commercial rights to use the material (at least for some period/without permission being sought). So a CC-BY license that allowed commercial use would preclude publication in some academic journals, in a way that posting to the forum previously would not have done. (Likewise with posting some already published papers, where exclusive commercial use has been granted to the publisher but non-commercial sharing is allowed).
Posting the first chapter of a fiction book might not preclude publisher interest in buying the book. But it might preclude publisher interest if doing so now means that the characters can be used for commercial gain by anyone. For example, the publisher might want the exclusive right to create action figures of the character. It's at least unclear to me that this wouldn't be undermined by the first chapter having been posted under a CC-BY license.
I guess as an academic and a writer, if I were forced to accept a CC-BY license I'd be much less likely to post things directly to the forum, because I wouldn't want it to come back to bite me later, taking away some opportunity. (That said, I'm an infrequent poster in any case)
So it's the fact that the license removes the ability to assign commercial exclusivity, involves assigning multiple rights at once (for example, in posting a story one would automatically give permission to create films based on that story, which might preclude some options), and takes away control of the material (which might be important if a publisher would later want the writer to remove it).
I agree that there's a case for an opt out option here. Imposing a CC license on writers would effectively preclude certain sorts of material being posted to the forum.
For example, if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues. Likewise, it might make it hard to post drafts of things (fiction, nonfiction) that one later plans to submit to magazines (of course, a certain amount of this might already be precluded, but I think requiring a CC license would intensify the issues here). Or it might be hard to post material that's already published, where the agreement allows reprints (because the agreement might not allow one to give others commercial rights over the material).
I suppose people could possibly get around this by posting links to Google Docs that have their own copyright conditions, but this doesn't seem ideal.
Only a very boring one. No publications so far, though I continue to send things out.
Also, it's perhaps worth noting that it's unclear to me that people who enjoyed the story posted here will necessarily enjoy my other stories. I have different motives in writing different things, and I think that one consequence of this is that different stories I write might appeal to different audiences.
But in any case, if I do get something published I'll post a link here and people can decide for themselves whether they enjoy it!
My guess is that when you factor in lead times on writing a book, this starts to feel a lot more plausible. The book could easily have been finished nine months before it came out. It could easily have been started a year before that. And its basic shape could have been mostly settled six months before that. So I think we could easily be talking about a book the shape of which should be dated to sometime in 2013.
Which isn't to say none of those threads were starting to emerge in 2013 (or, indeed, quite a lot earlier), but my sense is that they lacked anything like the prominence they have now.
You're right that there's something that doesn't work about this. Thanks for the helpful feedback.
That said, I'm not going to make edits here right now, because I haven't managed to figure out an edit I'd be happy with. I'll keep mulling, and perhaps I'll make edits at some future time.
Just to explain the intention of the line, "moving towards another's pain instead of away" is intended to ambiguously refer both: (a) to adopting a mindset that allows you to mentally grapple with someone else's pain without psychologically flinching away; and (b) to behaving in a way that aims at ameliorating the pain rather than physically fleeing.
As you note, the downside of ambiguity is that the phrase might either be unclear or it might have additional undesired disambiguations (perhaps reading as if it means "feeling a pain more deeply rather than less").
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. No other writing yet, but a few things are under consideration, so if they get accepted I'll try to remember reply to this comment with a link.
Thanks for reading and for taking the time to write up your thoughts.
One thing to note is that there are presumably things that witch knows that the reader does not. So while the story itself might not give us enough detail to conclude that there is no afterlife in the story world, the witch may have additional information that allows her to reach this conclusion with some fair confidence.
Yeah, that sounds plausible. When editing, I find it really helpful to read my writing out loud. Listening to someone else read it might have many of the same benefits, and some additional ones besides.
I'm glad you both enjoyed it. I'm fine with people translating it for non-commercial purposes, so please do feel free to do this. If you end up doing so then it would be great if you posted a link here so that people could find the translation more easily (and, assuming I remember at the time, I'll edit the post to include links to the translations).
Some examples.
I guess as an academic and a writer, if I were forced to accept a CC-BY license I'd be much less likely to post things directly to the forum, because I wouldn't want it to come back to bite me later, taking away some opportunity. (That said, I'm an infrequent poster in any case)
So it's the fact that the license removes the ability to assign commercial exclusivity, involves assigning multiple rights at once (for example, in posting a story one would automatically give permission to create films based on that story, which might preclude some options), and takes away control of the material (which might be important if a publisher would later want the writer to remove it).
I agree that there's a case for an opt out option here. Imposing a CC license on writers would effectively preclude certain sorts of material being posted to the forum.
For example, if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues. Likewise, it might make it hard to post drafts of things (fiction, nonfiction) that one later plans to submit to magazines (of course, a certain amount of this might already be precluded, but I think requiring a CC license would intensify the issues here). Or it might be hard to post material that's already published, where the agreement allows reprints (because the agreement might not allow one to give others commercial rights over the material).
I suppose people could possibly get around this by posting links to Google Docs that have their own copyright conditions, but this doesn't seem ideal.
Only a very boring one. No publications so far, though I continue to send things out.
Also, it's perhaps worth noting that it's unclear to me that people who enjoyed the story posted here will necessarily enjoy my other stories. I have different motives in writing different things, and I think that one consequence of this is that different stories I write might appeal to different audiences.
But in any case, if I do get something published I'll post a link here and people can decide for themselves whether they enjoy it!
My guess is that when you factor in lead times on writing a book, this starts to feel a lot more plausible. The book could easily have been finished nine months before it came out. It could easily have been started a year before that. And its basic shape could have been mostly settled six months before that. So I think we could easily be talking about a book the shape of which should be dated to sometime in 2013.
Which isn't to say none of those threads were starting to emerge in 2013 (or, indeed, quite a lot earlier), but my sense is that they lacked anything like the prominence they have now.
You're right that there's something that doesn't work about this. Thanks for the helpful feedback.
That said, I'm not going to make edits here right now, because I haven't managed to figure out an edit I'd be happy with. I'll keep mulling, and perhaps I'll make edits at some future time.
Just to explain the intention of the line, "moving towards another's pain instead of away" is intended to ambiguously refer both: (a) to adopting a mindset that allows you to mentally grapple with someone else's pain without psychologically flinching away; and (b) to behaving in a way that aims at ameliorating the pain rather than physically fleeing.
As you note, the downside of ambiguity is that the phrase might either be unclear or it might have additional undesired disambiguations (perhaps reading as if it means "feeling a pain more deeply rather than less").
Anyway, thanks again. Will think on this further.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. No other writing yet, but a few things are under consideration, so if they get accepted I'll try to remember reply to this comment with a link.
Thanks. Fixed.
Thanks for reading and for taking the time to write up your thoughts.
One thing to note is that there are presumably things that witch knows that the reader does not. So while the story itself might not give us enough detail to conclude that there is no afterlife in the story world, the witch may have additional information that allows her to reach this conclusion with some fair confidence.
Yeah, that sounds plausible. When editing, I find it really helpful to read my writing out loud. Listening to someone else read it might have many of the same benefits, and some additional ones besides.