There seems to be concern about posting work online, see several threads on this subject--even a member only site. I always thought that if you wrote it, you were protected as the author but several other threads have repeatedly warned against doing so. There is commonly a lot of interest in getting readers to read their first drafts, when the general concenus is that first drafts simply suck--a lot.
Threads have strongly suggested NOT registering your work until it is in its final stages. In addition there are legitimate concerns about posting 'ideas' for work as an idea, not registerable. Might be a great idea, but you can't register a novel 'idea' as your own etc.
Here is an alternative suggestion:
If our goal is to improve our craft, we can do that with excercises etc that won't put manuscripts out where something unintentional could devalue the work.
To give due credit to the authors of these works,
we could recap a craft skill to explore--each refer to our own copies of the sources, and then post small segment of current work re-worked or write a couple short paragrahs. We could then critique them in light of the agreed upon reading assignment. This is a heck of a lot of structure to figure out, but not impossible.
Is this something you would like to participate in? If so, I'd post a poll to see how often would be feasible for everyone to logistically be able to complete and explore a craft segment, ie one week, two week, etc. To be honest once a month might be good, slow but good, since we are all working on our own work as well as learning.
What's ya think?
Finally, we could consider a private reading/critique group. Students from an online class I was in set up a yahoo group for posting to invited readers that were known to each other. They alternate posting segments of their novels, everyone reads them, then we organize an hour long chat to discuss. Stict guidelines, ie the author doesn't talk while everyone critiques the work, then after that the author, having really heard the comments is free to discuss the work starting with a repeat of what they have heard from other readers first before 'defending'. Defending is a horrible word as readers are telling you what they 'heard' in your writing. If it isn't what you intended then you'd better figure out how to re-work it so they do. :-) All of this is small in number--otherwise you end up doing nothing but reading and critiquing. Critiquing by the way is the best way to learn the craft from what I've experienced. Therefore critiquing has to be an ESSENTIAL part of the excercise to make it valuable.
