brenda, I'm betting it's War of the Flowers?

Yup. I'm not very far along because it's my bus book (i.e., I read it only on the bus on the way to work) but it's very intriguing so far.

The whole Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy is huge, but I never found it anything less than readable. I don't mind wordy as long as I'm entertained.

I found some of the insanity parts in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn a bit repetitive. When I re-read, especially when I re-read To Green Angel Tower, I skip past a fair amount of Characters A, B and C in the midst of their depersonalization crises.

I understand how the crises are necessary to cause the transmission of information and objects that allow the plot to come to completion, but the POV rambling gets a bit tiresome, to me.

I love Nutty. That is all.

Yeah, fair enough. You can probably skip over 100 pages of Simon and Guthwulf wandering around under the castle.

Right. Especially cause Simon already did that in Book 1, and a little bit of it in a different setting in Book 2. Simon was particularly prone to that sort of behavior.

Well, you know, he was a teenager. He had a hard life.

God, he did do that in all three books, didn't he? See, if I stop and think about it, yeah. But reading it, it's never bothered me.

Sorry about this - it's a crosspost from Bitches, but NovaChild asked a specific publishing question, and I was afraid the answer, in Bitches, might be missed. So... Also, I'd love some other takes on this question, which is a good one.

For NovaChild:

Current American copyright law says that a copyrighted-protected work is protected for life-of-the-author + 70 years or, in the case of corporate works, 75-95 years. I am of the opinion that this amount of coverage is completely ridiculous, and is bad for the country both economically and in terms of easy access to information.

What I want to ask deb, as the only person I know who makes her living creating works that are meant to have a more than ephemeral life (well, Tim too, I guess. Maybe I'll X-post this to Minearverse.) is: how do you feel about this? Are your works so important to you that you think they deserve to continue providing income and respect to your family and estate 70 years after you die? I just don't feel I really have the perspective to judge, and would like to hear an opinion from such a sensible-seeming creator.

NovaChild, I'm not sure I understand - are you separating the question of income from the question of public use? Because, if so, do you feel all books older than 20 years after the death of the author should be given away free? Because if they're being sold, income is being generated, and that income has to go somewhere. And I'd rather my family got it than a nameless conglomerate publishing company.

A hypothetical example: A woman writes an amazing novel at 18, while pregnant. She dies in childbirth. Her husband then spends the next ten years shopping it around, trying to sell it as a memorial to her. He finally does, for a modest (say, $1000) advance. It becomes a cult favourite; ten years after that, it becomes a best-seller.

Using the 20-year mark, her family sees that $1000 advance, her child is 20, and the publishing company - none of whom likely even knew her - starts having caviar for lunch.

On the public availability issue , I'm somewhere in the middle. I'll probably incur screams of wrath from other authors I know, by saying that I think the current allowance of copyright is in fact too long; I ran into this personally, when I wanted to use quotes from Edna St. Vincent Millay (whom I adore) as chapter headings in And Then Put Out The Light. The dance I had to go through was nuts, not least because the "estate" in question was the niece of a second cousin, or something, and we actually had to find her. I was perfectly willing to pay Millay's estate a royalty, that wasn't my issue, but if I'd used those quotes without permission, I'd have been in trouble. As it happens, I got lucky, because she liked the book and signed a waiver, but still. Second cousin's niece?

So I'm somewhere in the middle. But I do think you have to separate the copyright issue from the royalty issue.

Question: just how far has copyright gone? I've given up my idea of using song lyrics as titles for my book. What I'd have to go through to get permission is time better spent on research and writing.

A related thought has occurred to me, however. I'm planning on calling one chapter "The Plural of Apocalypse", with full credit to ME and Jane Espenson of course (A New Man - Season 4). Is this fair use - or do I need permission here too? Not quite so big a pain, cause ME is an ongoing concern - so no tracking concerns. The worst they can say is no. But, I hope a four word quote from a 40+ minute television script does not require permission, or royalties.

TB, honestly? I don't know. It's not something I've had to deal with, since what I wanted to use was individual lines from Millay's poems as chapter headers, and her estate, down the line, is famous for blanket refusal to use anything except the full poems (I believe Jill Balcon, Cecil Day-Lewis' widow, is equally fierce about usage of her husband's work).

That's one of those things where I'd ping the writers and ask, either what their policy on fair use is, or whether they'd waive it and let you use it.