public service announcement

Warning: If you belong to any YahooGroups lists, Yahoo has kindly signed you up for a whole bunch of spam without your consent.

To turn it off, log in to YahooGroups. Click the "Account Info" link at the top right of the screen. Enter your password again if asked. On the Account Info screen, right under the list of your email addresses, you'll see a link "Edit your marketing preferences." Click that. You'll see a list of types of spam. You'll see that Yahoo has generously set each one to "Yes" for you. Change them to "No" and click "Save Changes."

I mean, unless you want Yahoo to send you lots of spam, of course.

my girl Edna

I love, love this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), in which she basically says, "I hate the fact that you turn me on. And just because we had sex, don't think I'm gonna give you the time of day if we happen to bump into each other!"

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

whether and how to post fic

For a long time I've been the bane of various listmoms of fanfic lists, in cases where all fics posted to the list are, by policy, archived on the list website. I'm anal and don't want my fic anywhere but my own site. So some listmoms/webmistresses have been kind enough to post links to my stuff instead of posting the actual story; they do this in varying degrees of snarky, which I don't at all begrudge them. And then some of them just do the snarky and don't put my stories on their sites at all.

But with the advent of the automatic-posting interfaces that they're using on several of the Smallville lists and at least one Buffy list that I know of, I'm wondering whether it might be time to change my tune.

The reason I originally developed the "my stories on my site only" policy was basically due to an incident with Siubhan and The Sith Academy, where she found one of her stories floating around the 'net on various lists and websites, credited to "anonymous." Needless to say, that freaked her out and pissed her off, and it really brought home how fragile our control over our own work is on the 'net. It only takes a single unscrupulous asshole to download a story from a webpage, strip off the name, replace it with his/her own, and start disseminating it again. (The current data on how few American schoolkids understand why plagiarism is bad make me find this all too plausible -- but that's a whole nother rant and don't EVEN get me started.)

And certainly, doing the Buffy transcripts has taught me that there are a lot of those assholes out there. You'd be appalled (at least I hope you would) at how many times I've found my transcripts posted on other sites without my name on them, or with my disclaimers removed. I put big disclaimers on every transcript, with exclamation points and red text saying not to post it on your site without asking me first, and people just blithely delete that stuff and post away anyway. Argh! Ahem, but I digress.

So anyway, here are the pro's and con's of restricting my fic to my website only.

Pro:

• Maintain the illusion of control over copyright; can change or remove the story whenever I want.
  
• Drives traffic to my site -- my other fic in particular.

Con:

• Illusion of control is just that: illusion.
  
• A lot more people surf the big archives; not many people are linking to my site. So I'm depriving myself of a much larger readership by not posting on the big archive sites. (At least, I think they have a big readership!)

Basically, I'm conflicted. The logical side of me realizes that it's silly to shoot myself in the foot, and that people are no more likely to steal my work from an archive than from my own site. But the anal side gets all twitchy at the thought of sending my little stories out there into the cold cruel world.

When it comes right down to it, I guess I should just get over myself. What do you think?