In case you missed it, Neil Gaiman posted recently about what might happen to your collected writings after you head for the Great Remainder Bin in the Sky. It involves writing something. You’ll love it.
Some caveats:
- Neil Gaiman is not offering to serve on your Creative Property Trust.
- It’s best to nominate people who can read, and who have heard of you.
- No-one is going to discover your “forgotten genius” after you die. It’s 50/50 whether the people you nominate to your Trust will even look at it.
- Don’t choose a lawyer who is going to sue everyone who writes a story about “a man and his dog”, just because you scribbled the phrase on a napkin back in 1987.
![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
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Read this this morning.
Invaluable methinks.
You know what’s funny? I read the same article when it was first published, and all I could think of was about the number of wannabes who will go to such insane efforts to protect work that’ll be forgotten a week after they’re dead, if it ever got published in the first place. Me, I’m taking the sane way out: I’m selling my entire archive of published work on eBay while I’m still alive to appreciate the funds. ALmost all of those magazines are long-dead, and while I get lots of people who whine “Oh, but I’d pay for a collection of your work,” I know perfectly well that maybe only about ten people would actually ante up any money to do so. It’s either that or a bonfire to get rid of it: either way, my writing days brought me nothing but pain, and I’m glad to be away from them.
I’m using my collected works to give myself the world’s cheapest cremation. Shit, I might even die first….
Paul, you make a good point. No-one would pay for a collection of your work.
Post updated to include caveats.