What the hell have you been doing?!

 

 It seems I haven't posted here since 2021! What the hell have I been doing since then?

Well maybe it means I've been busy writing!

 And so I have. The good news is I have made significant progress and I'm happy to report that while I have been working on my draft in between all my other activities — teaching online, mentoring writers, planning/running local writer's retreats,  planning/advertising international retreats for 2023/24, etc, etc, I am pretty much finished. I've even sent some pages off to a couple of reputable publishers and got one rejection and one no reply.  ( Update: a year later I got the reply: sorry, not for us)

That doesn't mean I've stopped working on it — I'm still sweeping through again and again, making small changes, adding footnotes (which I just heard most publishers hate), thinking ah yes, this is pretty much done. Then I realise I should address the business of obtaining permission for all the quotes I use. 

My book began as a 15,000 word memoir I wrote for my Master of Arts in Cultural and Creative Practice at Western Sydney University in 2012. In that instance I wasn't required to seek permission as it fell under fair use as long as you reference the quoted sources according to the required academic format.  Which I did. Post Masters, I carried on that way and by the time I got to the end (now around 70,000 words) I noted I had 57 quotes, which added up to 2000 words!  It wasn't until I did the tally that I realised my excess and knew I had to find out the awful truth about permissions and copyright. 

Online there is a fair bit of contradictory info on this topic but I got some good oil when I enquired on amongst a fabulous online group of women writers I belong to.  They told me that in general your publisher will require YOU ( I was hoping they would do the hard work) to obtain from the AUTHOR'S PUBLISHER, permission for any quotes you use (unless the author has been dead for 70 years). And you might even have to pay for them!

My colleague Beth Spencer has a great approach in her excellent essay about her 'permission seeking journey 'as a post modern writer here. Australian Society of Authors has good info here. As does the Australian Copyright Agency here. and Arts Law Centre of Australia here.

Some writers had scary stories of authors being sued by publishers for not getting permission, of unreasonable demands being made and everyone confirms that quoting song lyrics can be very expensive.

So guess what I'm doing now?  Another sweep through, this time to check if I really do need that quote, or whether I can somehow paraphrase, or get around not using it or convince the publisher it falls under fair use.

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