Yesterday I posted a question about whether publishing something on a blog meant that it was considered “already published” for the purposes of trying to submit said work elsewhere.  In particular, I wanted to know whether publishing a short story on my blog meant that then I could not submit this short story to literary magazines.

Later in the evening, I spoke with LawyerFriend–who knows all about copyright and publishing stuff.  He said that yes indeed my assumption was correct.  If you put something on your blog, it’s considered “published material” so if magazines want First Rights to your piece, you can’t submit to that magazine.  He went on to spout a lot of other legal garble that was somewhat complicated and I didn’t quite understand.  The long and the short of it is: if you think there’s a chance you may want to submit a piece somewhere, don’t post it on your blog first.  Thanks LawyerFriend!

That said, I still like the idea of posting some Story-A-Day work because it’s the thought of knowing that someone out there might be looking at my stories, thus keeping me accountable.  Which is when I got this idea:

Anyone out there wanna play catch?

Here’s how it works:

• I toss you a story via email and you catch it.  You can toss a story back if you like, too.
• As for what to do with the story: you don’t have to read it (though you’re welcome to if you want).  You certainly don’t have to critique or comment on it.  You just have to catch it.  And know that your story will be caught on this end.
• If more than one person decides to play, then I’ll put an email list together and we can toss to the whole group.

If you want to play, comment below then send me an your story at: iggingabi.catch@gmail.com

p.s. If you want to keep the game separate from your regular email, just open a new gmail account and use that for catch!