Flight Paths » General

Archived Post: Which CC License? Terms and Conditions?

Kate — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:24:32 +0000

Before we get started, Chris and I need to figure out what kind of Creative Commons License we want to use for this project. We also need to figure out what kinds of Terms and Conditions to ask contributors and participants to sign up to.

Here's the page that describes the six types of cc licenses:
Creative Commons Licenses.

At the moment I tend to think we should use the fifth - Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa). However, this might be too restrictive. Also, it could mean we are allowing people to use our work for non-commercial purposes, whereas we might want to use the project for, eventually, commercial purposes.

But just thinking about the above leads to all manner of questions. For instance, we could take the fact that the project is AC funded to mean that we should make this project entirely non-commercial from start to finish. In other words, any novel or mobile phone content etc etc spin-off, would be given away for free, provided we could raise the finance to create the spin-off in the first place. It might be a useful or interesting principle to adopt for the entire project. But it's also quite a big decision.

However, if we decide that we would rather leave the door open for commercial development of 'Flight Paths', then we should look at using an users agreement like the one Penguin created for the wiki-novel:
Terms and Conditions.
It would be easy to adapt this for Flight Paths, and it would cover us for commercial use of contributions.

We need to decide these things before we start the project. But it is interesting stuff.

Where the idea came from

Kate — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I read this article, 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' back in 2001 and have been obsessed by this story ever since.

Old Radicals

Kate — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:51:25 +0000

I'm interested in what happens to radicals - people who were politically active when they were young. What happens to these people, and their politics, when they get older? These days people who were involved in radical politics in the 1960s and 70s are publishing their memoirs; for the most part, these memoirists tend to be people who were on the left and have stayed on the left. My idea for the moment for the main female character in 'Flight Paths' is that she is someone with a radical past, but someone who has left behind that past, left behind politics, in fact, and retreated into domesticity. Disappointed by the world, perhaps, or exhausted by it, or afraid of what she has seen - what she has done even. Her encounter with the falling man in the supermarket car park wakes her back up once again. She resists but he, whoever he is, can not be ignored. The fact of his life, and his death, can not be ignored and she is forced to rethink the way she is living. So in this thread of the Flight Paths blog I'd like to collect memories, ideas, articles, interviews, etc., with old radicals.

Experiments in Monetisation

Kate — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:15:52 +0000

One of the problems facing all writers who work in digital and multimedia projects where, to date, content has been available for free over the internet is this: how to make money from the creative use of new media. One of the aims of our other on-going project 'Inanimate Alice' is to find a way to generate revenue from it (to date that project has been funded via private money and prize money). We'd like to try out a few experiments in monetisation through 'Flight Paths' as well, but we have no idea what those experiments might be - more on that when our ideas are more developed.

Zombies and Mad Scientists

Kate — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:15:32 +0000

I'm interested in zombies.

I've been interested in zombies for ages, ever since I saw 'Dawn of the Dead' back in the 1980s. I wrote a literary novel about a vampire, 'Where Does Kissing End?', and another novel about a witch, 'Weird Sister', and I've wanted to write about zombies for ages. Vampires are about sex, witches are about scary powerful women, while zombies - what are they about?

Maybe zombies are about the human soul, or absence thereof, and maybe they are also about race. Marina Warner has a fascinating but short chapter on zombies in the last chapter of her new book, 'Phantasmagoria'. Zombies have made yet another comeback in the cinema of late, with 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Twenty Eight Weeks Later' lurching onto our screens. Somehow, zombies are a part of this project for me, though I've yet to figure out quite how and, perhaps, why, and I don't even know what Chris thinks about zombies.

Another thing I'm interested in is Mad Scientists. A familiar character in movies, we haven't seen all that many of late... Jeff Goldblum in 'The Fly' is a favourite, and Danny Boyle's recent movie, 'Sunshine', had a couple of them (given that all the characters were scientists, that wasn't surprising). But they are always male. Can't think of a single female mad scientist in film or fiction. The time is ripe, don't you think...?

Thinking about writing, research, creating…

Kate — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:54:35 +0000

Kate on Point of View

As well as the business of giving characters names as discussed elsewhere in 'Flight Paths', another major issue when it comes to starting to create a piece of work is figuring out what kind of voice, or voices, to use. Style, tone, and point of view all come into play here. Point of view is a particularly tricky one, and something I grapple with in everything I write. The only project where I haven't had problems with point of view is Inanimate Alice, another on-going collaboration between me and Chris. We decided from the very beginning that these stories would be narrated by Alice herself, in the first person, as a young adult looking back on her childhood. Limiting the narrative voice in this way was very important (as was our decision to never show or depict Alice visually - an almost arbitrary decision that proved to be a very important part of what makes Alice work as a piece). But with most of my fiction projects, online or in print, I find it much more difficult to find the right point of view, or points of view, and sometimes find myself still grappling with this issue in very late drafts of a project that should, really, already be finished. For example, I'm currently attempting to finish a novel (also mentioned elsewhere on this website) and the main sticking point was, is, and continues to be, point of view.

So, to point of view in 'Flight Paths'. The bit of text on the About page is in the first person. This is Harriet's (!?) point of view. Now when I think about writing more text related to Harriet, I first have to figure out whether to stick to the first person.

And Yaqub (!?)? Does he get the first person as well?

Have Your Say – ideas, comments, questions, thoughts

Kate — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:55:04 +0000

If the themes and ideas behind this project interest you, please post your comments and responses here. If you have questions about the project, or just want to have your say, this is also the place to do that!

How to Contribute

Chris — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:13:39 +0000

Please read our Terms and Conditions first.

Feel free to join in our conversations by adding comments to anything on this website. You'll be asked to register when you post in the comment box for the first time, and there may be a delay between when you make your first post and its appearance on the site pages.

We would very much like you to submit your own material to this site, including photos, memories, ideas, stories, music, video, or anything else you think might be of interest or relevance to the project.

You can e-mail us your contributions to kate[at]flightpaths[dot]net or chris[at]flightpaths[dot]net.

Or you can upload contributions to this blog - in the Table of Contents you will see posts for each media type - text, audio, video, and images. These posts contain instructions for uploading your work.

If there is a type of media or method of participation not mentioned here, e-mail Kate Pullinger at kate[at]flightpaths[dot]net or Chris Joseph at chris[at]flightpaths[dot]net and we'll see if we can help!