Relay Writing - The legal stuff

Relay Writing is a free writing project intended to demonstrate that we can break all the rules to create a good story, or even a masterpiece. We have no synopsis, no character plans, no long term plot, no particular setting, problem or resolution (yet), and it's going to have a few hundred different authors that don't know each other.

Here's what it is - read the story below, and you can then write the following section. Make it between 800-1000 words, and stick to the rules, and you stand a good chance of it being accepted. If it is accepted, and nobody beats you to it, it'll get tagged on to the story for everyone else to read. If it doesn't get accepted, we'll let you know, and tell you why. It might purely be bad grammar or spelling. You may re-submit after your changes have been made. You will still get a mention in the contributors list, even if your attempt is never accepted.

Simply have a go, and be part of literature history!

Ok, the legal stuff, here we go.

Basically, anything you submit to this site is still your intellectual property, and you retain the rights to it, however there are a few concessions.
In order to market the site, we reserve the right to publish portions of each story, and that may include your submission. You won't get any return for use of your work in this way.
When and if the story is complete, we aim to contact a number of publishing houses to publish the story in any way they see fit and for a fair return. Each author will then be contacted in order to reward them their fair share. The share will be portioned from 80% of the proceeds. I.e: if the story is published, and has 50 contributors, each of those contributors will recieve (assuming they are contactable) 2% of the 80% of the proceeds. Consider that the proceeds run into £100,000 - not an unrealistic amount, but optimistic - each author would receive £1600.

Fancy a go?

For those of you that are wondering, the remaining 20% would go to the creators of the site, and go towards paying some of the development, maintenance and hosting costs.

Anything that you post on the forum is again entirely your property, and should you wish to publish it, you may. You should be aware however, that whatever you post is in the public domain and copyright can be a tricky beast to tame.

If your submission is successful, although you hold the copyright to that portion, we ask that you do not attempt to make commercial gain from that portion, as it may be damaging to the site, and to the story as a whole, thus diminishing the efforts of others. We reserve the right to remove portions of the story should such a situation happen, and to request damages paid as a result should publication of the whole story be hindered or proceeds diminished.

For those with unsuccessful submissions, your work is entirely yours, and we hold no rights to it whatsoever. You may publish it, post it, and do with it as you wish.

The theme and topics of this site are considered copyright, together with the design. However, we welcome design submissions for individual pages, and if you wish to submit a design, we may use it, and credit you for your work, including a link to your site if you wish.

We want this site to be as open and as free-thinking as possible, and will try as hard as we can to not censor or restrict your free speech, ideas, or design. Say what you like in the forum, and as long as it's not 'too' offensive, then it'll stay there. The only things we won't tolerate are:

Obvious and extreme racism or sexism
Libellous or inflammatory remarks about any other person, apart from Bernard Manning.
Threats or malicious comments intended to hurt or cause harm, or induce or encourage others to the same.
And a few others, maybe.

You may sign up to the forum and submit entries without fear that we will:

Send you direct marketing other than information about this or closely related sites.
Sell, give away or otherwise provide your information to other individuals or companies.
Do anything else that you don't like for good reason.

Please feel free to email the administrator of RelayWriting for more information or to clarify any of the points raised.

Click on one of the themes on the front page to view the story so far.

Some useful links for writers: