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Old 05-25-2005, 11:39 PM
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My only arguement is that guest fivists submit fivers with no expectation of compensation. If Zeke is to get money for his fivers, the rest of us should get some too.
Quote:
Unless submitting a fiver makes it your property (not sure about this), or the writers give permission.
The way I understand Zeke's idea, what is being offered isn't so much the intellectual content of the fivers, since that part is published on 5MV and is made available for free reading to anyone who visits the site. What is being offered is either the physical artifact of his original manuscripts or signed photocopies of those same manuscripts. The attraction, in other words, isn't so much the content as the object itself, written in "the master's hand" (or bearing his autograph, kind of like an autographed Voyager script). It's not compensation for the writer's work, since everyone who has contributed fivers has always understood that there was no remuneration involved other than the satisfaction of seeing one's work published and having it draw some favourable comments from the readership.

I don't imagine there would be anything stopping a guest writer from privately offering his or her manuscripts for auction on a similar basis if they wanted to (assuming that their fiver was handwritten to begin with), but they'd have to see how much demand there would be for it. My own fivers, for instance, were all written directly on my PC, so there are no handwritten manuscripts of them except some occasional longhand notes that I usually discard when I've submitted my finished material to Zeke.

I guess one added attraction that handwritten manuscripts would have for English Majors and Lit Crit types is that one could see from them how the writing process progressed for a particular fiver. One might also find a few draft jokes that ended up on the cutting room floor -- sort of like the outtakes included in the DVD release of a movie. Those could be fun to read...or not, since some of what gets discarded is cut because it simply doesn't work.
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