The threat of theft...

no offense, but that's just ridiculous.

mirrorkisses said:

check this one out:
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2007/06/mums-word.html

Click to expand...

That's talking about a different issue--publicly bloggging about where a manuscript's been submitted, and what the editors said--and that makes sense.

You don't want to splash your novel all over the internet, of course. But there's no harm in posting about process or progress, or participating in password-protected critique groups. Theft of unpublished fiction is vanishingly rare, if not nonexistent.

There's no reason a writer *must* blog about it, but it's more a matter of comfort level than harming your chances of publication.

I haven't heard of anyone stealing my stuff on this site. Not unless they prevented me from learning about it.

I have had people, in my life, not on this site, take ideas from me in ways that really bugged me. For a time when I was younger I wanted my pen name to be "L.D. Kimberly" which is my first and last initial, then my middle name. And I had a friend start calling herself "T.U. Marie" and everyone telling her what a clever idea that was... that miffed me quite a bit. And I have had online writer friends blatantly steal my titles, or say I wrote a story based on a song lyric, they would write a suspiciously similar story based on the same song lyric... things like that are just bound to happen, and for some reason, the person who steals you crap always gets more recognition than you ever will.

But that's my tirade. No, nobody HERE has ever ripped me off that I'm aware of.