Writing a non-fiction about how anxiety nearly killed my creativity. Was thinking I could mention y’all and how y’all helped me. But first I wanted to check if it were OK with y’all. If so, I could just mention the group in general. :3
I wouldn't directly reference it, as it might put people's privacy at risk or throw up some legal complications. I might be completely wrong there. But it makes me think of how Bill Bryson refers to all the places he visits in his books. He references it, but adds enough obfuscation so that it isn't obvious. 'A well known online writer's community' could strike the balance, haha.
Oh, golly. Now you're making me paranoid. I mentioned this forum in the Acknowledgements section of my first novel, and there it is, for all the world to see. Seriously, @Link the Writer, since this is a public forum there's no assumption of privacy, except maybe in the Workshop. The mods can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think the only way things could get interesting is if you disclose your WF screen name in your work and people pop over to check out what you've said here. But I doubt you're doing that.
If its my own name, well, they’d be surprised to see all the posts I’ve made here in the Lounge. xD I don’t think it’s bad to at least mention the forum. I mean, people who read your work and want to write themselves can simply look at the site you mentioned and come here to start their journey. They’re gonna think, “Hey, if that site helped [your name] get published, maybe it can help me?” It’s only if you’re signaling out specific forum members that would become a problem, I think. Because then you’re throwing them into the lion’s den wholly unprepared.
I’m not sure what legal complications people are envisioning from merely mentioning the forums in a book.
Quite The only issue I'd forsee would be one of libel if you said a lot of patently untrue bad stuff about it... The forum exists, so you can mention it in the same way you could mention google, amazon, or microsoft without needing their permission to do so You'd need our (daniel's) permission if you wanted to do something with the forum brand... like you'd written a book about writing craft and you wanted to say that the forum endorsed it, or if you wanted to do anything branded as formal like running a competition in conjunction with, or publishing a book of competition winners work marketing it as winners of writing forums contests xyz Also although it doesnt actually need permission it would be courteous to let us know ahead of time if you were doing something that would lead to a big influx of new members... like naming us in a national press article about writing forums. I can't formally "give permission" as only daniel can do that off site, but I don't see any particular issues with the sort of thing Link and Catrin are talking about
