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Caveats / Creative Commons Info. All the text possible (which generally means, anything I'm not actively trying to submit to magazines who want to purchase the only rights) on my site is freely available under a Creative Commons license (see particular licensing info. at the bottom of the page). You can read more about Creative Commons, and why people use it, on their website. But what am I saying by releasing my writing under such a license here? Why don't I just copyright it completely the way writers were taught back in my school days? Well, let me put it this way. Back in my university days, I was really into wolves and werewolves. Still am, to some extent. I wrote a few stories and quite a few poems about them, and since I wasn't sending my writing out to magazines or publishers at that point, I simply passed them around newsgroups and websites, hoping they'd be enjoyed. One poem in particular seemed to catch people's interest. A lot of websites 'reprinted' it, generally giving the best attribution they could. Several of them created graphics to go with the poem. One translated it into Italian. People who have never read any magazine I might ever be printed in, or see a play of mine, know that poem. There are as many results on a Google search of its first line as there are pages that reference me in any other way combined. Last year, a company that puts together elementary school textbooks went to the trouble to track me down (not easy to do -- I used a pseudonym) in order to ask my permission to include the poem in a literacy text for fifth and sixth graders. To this day, I'd consider it my most successful piece of writing. It's far, far from my best -- I cringe a little when I read it now, honestly -- but it's traveled further than anything else I've put on paper or screen. I can't help but think that's because I let it fly where it would. So, while I'm still submitting my stuff to magazines (online and off), and I still dream of seeing my name in bookstores and on theatre marquees, I'm gonna try to let my words fly more often. Read them, share them, play around with them if they inspire anything of your own. Let's see where they wind up.
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