Trademark "Spark", "Sparky", or "Sparky Clan" for SF Series Name

I am not a fan of intellectual property, either as a concept or an instance thereof.

I do recognize the need to protect yourself when you provide a service or product and someone else tries to use your good name to sell a poor imitation of the same.

That does not extend to titles of books. The existence of that kind of intellectual property would have the effect of forcing authors in our day to use nonsense words as short titles, because all the meaningful short titles would be used up -- and many reasonable longer ones would be used up, as well.

Just think. If I had an author ancestor who wrote a novel called Wind a hundred years ago and trademarked the name, and I inherited the trademark, I could keep you from writing a modern novel called Wind, and my ancestor might well have been able to prevent a certain well-known novel from being named Gone with the Wind.

Series of novels are a somewhat different matter, but I'm not sure they should be. At any rate, the courts currently accept that titling a series is more of a business practice with need for protection. Fortunately, the preexistence of the use of a word or phrase limits the reach of a trademark here, as well.

Now if I wrote a series of books about a family of inventors named "Sparky", perhaps I'd want to prevent other authors from pretending to write books in my series by trademarking the name for use with a series of books.

I would almost call that reasonable.

But here's the question:

Trademark "Spark", "Sparky", or "Sparky Clan"?

"Spark" and "Sparky" have prior use, and will have a lot of reasonable exceptions (prior use, literary, etc.) to my control. It will also tempt me to waste money and time in trying to enforce the trademark on things that I should leave alone.

"Sparky Clan", trademarked for use with a series of science fiction novels, would be pretty strong -- specifically because it is narrow. Judges and juries are much less likely to doubt my intent, in no small part because I'm going to be much less tempted to bring claims in bad faith.

Advice, if you're going to trademark the name of a series of novels or such:

Keep your trademark claims reasonably narrow.

Yet Another WIWDIIWTLWPI

This is yet another "What I would do if I won the lottery without playing it" post.

I don't play the lottery, but sometimes I daydream about what I would do if I were able to suddenly have a large amount of discetionary spending money -- millions of dollars worth.

Most of those daydreams have been about rebooting the computer/information industry with better information encoding schemes, better programming languages, better processors, better operating systems, better network protocols, etc.

Lately, my dreams have been a little less extravagant and a little more concrete.

Facebook has evolved, but it's still unstable. It works for a lot of social purposes, and a lot of marketing purposes, but lacks support for the sort of interactions authors helping each other need.

There are several authoring platforms available, but most tend toward rich text, meaning formatting.

When you're in working in the deep internals of a fiction, you don't want to be distracted by formatting. All you want to focus on is constructed of undecorated text -- typing text in, saving it in units of chapters and sections, reading what you've written, comparing what you have with what you had.

Raw text and version control.

Linux and BSD OSses provide raw text tools of various usability. Gedit is what I usually use, but friends tell me Geany is better. In a pinch, there is always vi (vim), and some prefer emacs. Lots of choices.

They also provide version control systems that work quite well with raw text. Git is popular now, and it's my current tool of choice.

Decorated text, by the way, gets in the way of version control. Someday I'll write a post in one of my programming blogs to explain why.

Someday I'll write the tools needed to wrap raw text with proper style definitions. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML are not those tools, they just add more fragile layers of fragile decoration. I only hope I'll have the time to write those tools in this life.

In the meantime, text decorated with TEX or markdown gets close to the level of integration with version control that I would like.

So, if I had ten million or so dollars, I'd set up

• a public repository like github.com or sourceforge.net or osdn.net, 
• mashed up with social interaction functions like Facebook's -- or, more likely, slashdot.org, 
• with a publishing platform like Wordpress or Blogger (but better).

And git being as it is, authors could keep local copies of all their versions on their own computer systems.

I'd integrate version control with the publishing platform so that authors and their critique groups would be able to select specific points in the rewrite process to read in context.

And, open source being what it is, authors would be able to replicate the publishing on their own computer systems.

Of course I'd set up domain name services so authors could have novels published as subdomains of their authoring domain name without too much fuss.

For instance, instead of

• reiisi.blogspot.jp/search/label/book review and 
• joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/search/label/Marriage%20of%20Inconvenience and
• joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/search/label/Water%20and%20Earth

and such, they could be grouped as

• book-review.joelrees.reiisi.net and
• Marriage-of-Inconvenience.joelrees.reiisi.net 
• Water-and-Earth.joelrees.reiisi.net

or something similar.

I'd set up an interface to the access control mechanisms to make it easy to give read/write and read-only access for specific works to the author's choice of critique groups, writers' communities, and ad-hoc groups.

And I'd include tools to help bundle up specific versions of a work in formats acceptable by the copyright offices of the various countries.

Daydreams.

Back to work. I need to finish six novels -- or is it seven, now? -- while teaching English and working other jobs to put food on the table. C'est la vie.

Beta Reading and Unpolished Gems

I've spent much of this past Golden Week vacation, more time than I could afford, really, beta reading for friends from the LDS Beta Readers writers' group.

One manuscript was a billionaire romance in early beta condition. It was very entertaining, and the story itself was rather well laid out. My primary suggestion was that I wished the pace had been slower. But slowing it down would require altering the premise significantly, potentially making it less interesting. Anyway, this author is experienced, and I am confident she will get this one on the market in good shape and good order.

Another was a tale of leprechauns, witches, dragons, and some other more exotic creatures, from a less established author. The tale was engaging and even somewhat instructive. It was significantly better than most of the fantasy that gets turned into published anime. I am procrastinating the feedback because I like the story and the execution, but I know I have to tell the author it's not very marketable as it is. I want the author to be able to bring this book to publication.

A third was a Regency period romance, a tale of innocent deception in the face of sibling rivalries that go too far. It is in a close-to-period vernacular, but the reader's modern vernacular shows through at distracting points. I like the story and the layout, but the execution gets in the way a little. And I am procrastinating this one, as well, although I think I know what to focus on, to encourage the author to finish.

I hope, eventually, to be able to post reviews of the published versions of these (and many others that I have beta-read since joining this group). They have great potential.

These are beta level, so execution issues (grammar, word choice, phrasing, some minor structure issues, etc.) are to be expected. This is always something of a quandary, because we have the instinct to offer editing services and opinions that the author has not requested, and that we cannot afford to give. And if we start offering unsolicited editing, it's easy to start trying to re-write.

But rewriting somebody else's work without permission is rather a breach of ettiquette and even a discourtesy. (Publishing such rewrites could even constitute a crime against copyright law, is how discourteous.)

Beta reading is a privilege with accompanying responsibility.

Now, if you understand the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi, you might understand my following comments on the privilege:

These are all unpolished gems. Very rarely do I get to do a beta read of a manuscript that does not need editing. Often, the various errors of execution make it difficult to get started into a story.

But once you get into the flow of the author's story, the rhythm of the author's voice, the story itself comes into focus, and finishing the manuscript is usually a pleasure.

Preparing a manuscript for market almost always requires "cleaning out" the rougher aspects of the author's modes of expression. Sometimes it requires cleaning out substantial parts of the author's vision for the story, and worse.

Editing a manuscript to make it marketable requires denaturing the story.

Think how it would be if all restaurant food were subjected to the same marketing processes as the McDonalds' menu.

Do I need to map this allegory? No? You do see it, right?

Sometimes, it almost breaks my heart to beta-read. Not because the writing is bad. I haven't yet seen a manuscript that is that bad, though I have seen some that need a lot of work.

Now editing can be done with light hand. Not all edited works are comparable to McDonalds' food. But market forces tend to motivate the heavier hand more often than not.

That means that, even if you do get a chance to read the novels I have beta read this week, you will not see the rough beauty I see. It will probably be polished and palatable -- easy to read. And it may have lost significant portions of the meaning that I enjoyed reading in them.

Sometimes, the difference I expect almost breaks my heart.

Do I recommend joining a beta readers group? It depends. They do require time -- and learning to read through rough writing.