"Due to the whole situation with Geocities/Yahoo I have decided not to put Liz The Forever on the World Wide Web.

I am aware that this page is not hosted by Geocities/Yahoo, but instead Tripod, and I am also aware that Tripod's terms of service differ from those of Geocities/Yahoo.  And I am also aware that Geocities/Yahoo has also changed their terms of service to comply with consumer and legal pressures.

However, what this situation has done is opened my eyes to the fluid concepts of "ownership" on the internet.  I have always been aware that "ownership" is a very slippery political and, in many cases philosophical, concept but, for some reason, the full extent of it's fluidity it had never really penetrated my thick skull before the Geocities/Yahoo debacle.

I am not in favour of total and complete "ownership," let me make this clear now.  I believe that once the awareness of an individual's work reaches a certain level, said work has by virtue of its very omnipresence become cultural ambiance, and therefore should be considered to be in the public domain.  Before this point, though, the concept of "ownership" must be protected.  Unfortunately, there is a very strange and fuzzy line of demarcation between simple fame (where ownership would still apply) and totally permeating and dominating a culture from top to bottom.  And let me be the first to say I cannot locate this line and really would not want to.  I'll let someone else do it.

And I am not famous.  I am not even known.  I am a total nonentity in the literary world.  Therefore I must look after my own personal interests.  I have not reached the level of, say, a Stephen King (nor will I ever, probably) or even a Thomas Pynchon and therefore I must demand and protect the ownership of certain key works of mine with, well, let's be honest here, an iron fist.  Therefore, we will not be seeing Liz on the Web any time soon.

But:

It's not for Liz's sake that I'm doing this.  Frankly, I've come to hate that novel.  The only reason I wanted to post the novel was that I'd spent over six years on it before realizing that it was unpublishable dreck but still, six years is a long time so dammit it's gonna see the light of day one way or another.  And frankly, if not for one thing I'd public domain it in a second and fling the stupid thing off a bridge.  But that one thing is the possibility for the creation of derivative works from Liz The Forever.

There is so much other writing that has sprung from the pages of Liz The Forever that if someone, anyone (I'm not saying Tripod here, I pretty much trust these guys), decided to lay co-claim to the contents of Liz The Forever, for any reason, an argument could be made that these other works (which I deem to be much more significant, and of a much higher quality than Liz), being so close to the content of Liz, would belong to them also.  I do not want this to happen.  Or, if this is going to happen, let it be in a contract I have entered into with a reputable publisher who can offer me a more than adequate recompense.  Not some guy with a stack of ten-gig servers who wants to see what he can get away with.

Once again, this is not an issue I have with Tripod, or Lycos.  I'm not saying that they are doing this, I'm not saying that they will.  But others might.  And I have to look after myself  And I have to look after all this other quality writing that has come out of the mind-numbing failure that is Liz The Forever.

Don't worry, there's plenty of other stuff to see on Cottsweb.  I'll be doing *30*s for quite a while.  And also, there will be chapters from another novel for all to see in short order.  And, I do have a very long, rambling, autobiographical essay about the making of Liz The Forever that I will be posting soon enough.

But, not Liz.

Sorry about that, but it's gotta be that way.  For the foreseeable future, at least.

And besides:  Liz The Forever was a pretty crappy novel anyway."

Brian Cotts.