First of all I'd like to say YES! Thank you for adding a Writer's Community to Renderosity. Fear of my writing being stolen (still a possibility by users) is less now because I have less to worry about the owner of the site profitting from it. Also I don't have to pay, which is a bonus. And I love Renderosity anyway. Secondly, and more to the point; What is the maximum word length in the galleries? The ones I've seen are short short short. Almost poem short. I only ask because there doesn't seem to be a posting anywhere for max length (unless there is one in the upload section which I've not gone to as I've not yet uploaded anything) and my stories run anywhere frorm 4,000 to 74,000 words (I currently have two completed, yet unpublished novels in my collection). Could someone give me an answer on this? I'd love to upload my work here. Thanks in advance, Cerpher P.S. I had this same trouble in school during my English classes. lol

Right now, I believe 15,000 characters. (I need to double check the number, but I know it's over 10,000 characters including spaces.) That's about 5 pages. If you have something that's longer, you can always do a Part II, Part III, etc. I think breaking things up makes it easier on people to read, any way. I find it hard to read large blocks of text on computer screens.

Forgive me, please - but perhaps it is possible to put this on the wish list: I'd prefer long works in one piece, rather than having to search for parts. That way, I can easily save them to my pc, and read off-line. Maybe this is the wrong week to push, though, eh? We've already come a long way in the last few days (-: Thanks again, Crescent!

Yeah it's 15,000. I don't know if that's words or characters, but I've uploaded 3 stories today one of which had to be over 15,000 characters, but was under 15,000 words. Also about the break up thing; Although it's nice to have it broken up so people can read it in sections I feel the 3 uploads per day makes it hard to upload a story at 15,000 words a shot. Plus it would fill up your gallery very fast and I've noticed people only usually look at the first page of your gallery, whether it be art or writing, unless they REALLY like your work. I dont think Renderosity should make an exception for us on the upload limit even though it's text and not images, but perhaps in the future we can slowly increase the number of wrods available to upload. As well as remove the need of a "filler" image when uploading text. (I got an "Image no found" error when I tried uploading text without an image.) For a note in case people were wondering: Short Story: 7,500 Words Novelett: 7,500 to 17,500 Words Novella: 17,500 to 40,000 Words Novel: 40,000 Words and up. This information was provided by Harlen Ellison through one of his many works and I trust it to be correct.

eek - "filler image" - This WAS a purely graphics site until recently, (I think)! They are doing us a big favor by letting us put more than picture captions up! You might want to look into Author's Den. It's a pay place, but reasonable, and you can probably upload it all there without any problems. Check that out at www.authorsden.com. In the meantime, perhaps you should upload the short story here to familiarize us with your work.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Cerpher

Also I wouldn't MIND paying save for the fact I have no steady income and what little money I do get (from my store here at Rosity) is used for other things.

Also the "Filler image" comment wasn't meant as a "ditch all artists" thing since I make artwork and models for artwork. I just would like non-art based writing or writing without pictures not to require one to upload as it gets in the way. For now I'm using a thumb style "Written Works" image with a little book in it as a filler. So it works.

Filler image? Oh come on, think of that as the image you'd put on your book's cover. That's no filler, that's what sells the book :)

Novel is 40,000 words and up? what is it when you have 164,000 words?

Suggestion to the membership for stories that are too long for the gallery. Post a teaser, then a link to the full thing. Need a place to put the full thing? set up a briefcase folder on yahoo (it's free) and put it in there then post the link for the file in the folder.

164,000 words? It's still a novel, but Holy $#!+. I'd hate to try and print that out for publication submission. I'd be here for a week with my printer running. lol About the posting somewhere else. I did have my stories posted at a Geo location, but I'm wary of having them up as they are easier to copy and paste and sell without alteration than an image might be. Though I realize I'm no great writer I would at least like the CHANCE to sell my own work before somebody decides to do it for me. lol

I'm only going to mention this because I'm an old nag and I love redundancies, but, please, remember that graphic art isn't the only thing stolen from the Internet. Only put up what you can afford to lose. Putting a copyright notice on a piece is not going to keep someone from taking the notice right back off and passing it off as their own. If you have ever been on a joke list, you know how quickly authorship is lost. It's nice that we have a gallery, but I wouldn't put my novel up there nor any ideas I had that I might actually want credit for later on down the line. I know I'm a suspicious old rain cloud pouring gloom on the parade, but it pays to remember that this isn't a "safe" place. It's very hard to recapture credit once it has been lost. And, yeah, you can sue to get your property back but do you have the resources to pursue the legal recourse? This is a good place to get some feedback and encouragement, to exercise your talent, to practice some new things, maybe even break a writer's block free. A lot of people write for the joy of writing and want nothing else but to share their thoughts and feelings with other people And that's great. I know my stuff is unpublishable so I don't spend much time worrying about it...this is the only audience I'll ever have and I'd be shocked and amazed if someone else managed to get money for what I've written. But some of you may have ambitions to actually get paid for your writing. If you plan on selling a piece, or you want to be sure you hold on to the ownership of it, don't post your baby here or anywhere on the Internet. As soon as it toddles onto the World Wide Web, there's no guarantee it will return home.

Cross posted with Cerpher. Sorry.

Not a problem. :p Yeah I'm a paranoid freak when it comes to my writing. <.< >.> Though the stuff I've posted here are things that are either too short to send out or things I've sent out that haven't been recieved well. Or in some cases stories I absolutely despise as being my own and wish to use them for something other than cannon fodder. :) I would LOVE to put my novels up here so people could read them and such, but I know I'd end up seeing a rip of it in a store and I'd have to go home and cry for a year, but that's me. lol So for now it's just my shorts, which are things that get you a few bucks and maybe a name for yourself. My novels... they'll stay here on my HD where they belong.

One suggestion, Cerpher, that I could make about your novels. If you want feedback on them, you might approach someone here whose writing you like or who you respect as an editor, and ask for a friendly criticism. I've done that with people I had confidence in and received some very good information about my writing. In my case, the feedback told me my writing wasn't going in the direction I wanted it to, but I needed to find that out by having a disinterested reader take a look at what I was doing. It helps that it is someone who isn't a friend of yours but is a friendly critic. I'm not much for groups tearing into each other's works either in real or cyber workshops. That's too intense for me. But getting feedback from someone who has shown some intelligence and common sense is not a bad thing to keep the courage level up while the hard part of marketing is taking place. Just a thought. Of course, that assumes you want some feedback. It's not necessarily what an author needs to keep going.

Every author I've ever talked to always says "money should flow to the author, not the other way around." My advise to everyone is to avoid sites that make you pay them for the privilege of posting your work. It's a bad deal in the extreme. And not to be a wet blanket, but if you have something you think you might actually want to sell you should not post it to the web, here or elsewhere, as most publishers will consider that prior publication and not touch it. Excerpts are usually fine, but in general you should only post "throw away" pieces to the web. By "throw away" I don't mean junk, just things that you don't think you will ever want to sell to a publisher. Of course once you become rich and famous then they'll fall all over themselves for the right to reprint all your old throw aways. :-) jon

I've read a few stories about authors and they're not as rich as most people think. Most of thier money (unless they write a book a month and sell them all) come from other sources of income like writing scripts, being paid to show thier faces somewhere, if they live in hollywood then bit parts in shows pay a bit. Writing is a thankless task and though being paid 5-8 cents a word adds up to about 100-600 dollars it's not exactly something you can live off of. Though being paid for something you enjoy doing is a great dream. lol And though they do ask you more often for work or trust you to be a good author since you've had some stuff published no on really "falls all over you". Because there are thousands of wannabes out there (and some of them good ones too) who will gladly take anything as payment as long as thier work is seen and there's always the issue of space. If your name gets you in a magazine by bumping a would be future S.King then hurrah, but I don't think you should rely on that as it's what's currently keeping wannabes like us out of the market. :p Space is everything.

The length is to keep things readable. I know I have problems reading several pages of text on the computer if it isn't broken up somehow. You can always post your story in parts and then go back into the comments area and post the link to the next part in it. I'm pretty sure the image requirement was to keep the programming changes relatively simple for the Writers' Gallery. (Poor Tommy had a lot to do as it was.) I'll see about posting a 100x100 blank gif tomorrow so people can use that. It will offset the first paragraph or so by a bit, but it is one solution. Another solution is to make a fancy first letter of the story as the graphic like Medieval texts did. Cheers!

Nice idea Crescent. I did make a sort of thumbnail (mentioned earlier I believe) and image (same as thumbnail) that has a book and "Written Work" printed on it so that people cruising the galleries can see it's a story. Someone else (can't recall who offhand) did the same thing. (And I thought I was being original) and it was just a thumb and image that said "Story" on it.

Here's what might be a cool idea for those of us who are unwilling to post our complete works, because we are seriously pursuing publication. How about "teasers"? You can post the first five pages (or whatever) and then if people who read them like what they see, they can ask you to email them the remainder of the text. Sending people text by private email is not publication, and you know who has complete copies, and so theft is much less likely and publication rights are not muddled. What do you all think?

That is basically a virtual writers group, and it could work. I'd still be leary of sending off an entire novel to someone just because once you do, it's out of your control. I would be less hesitant for shorter pieces, short stories and poems, simply because they are not so much of an investment in time and effort as a longer piece would be, at least for me. jon