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Mailing yourself something in snail mail is the same as getting a notary stamp once it goes through the US Postal Service. It is a legally binding document at that point so long as you never open the envelope, Magus. Poor man's patents do work very well in a court of law because of the Federal stamping system used makes all things legally binding in pretty much all the nations of the world. I doubt that emailing the original draft to yourself first would be anywhere near so binding because computer time stamps can get changed by a good hacker as I understand things. Suppose I could print out an original copy of my various stories, and snail mail to myself before sharing. Then I would be able to win easy enough were I to share my originals, and they got ripped off. However, I am trying to get back into the business of being published because I really do need the second income. I'm not like J.K. Rowling who is constantly having to smack fan fiction sites and bloggers who decide to play with very well known Harry Potter trademarks by changing a gender or a name out and the rest is her writing skills. Money is always pretty tight in my home. Plus, I don't have a big publisher behind me either. To be honest, the Urbis fiasco was avoidable, but I screwed up big time. Skipping the real poor man's patent because the novel was incomplete is what ruined my chances, and I hold myself fully accountable for the stupid mistake I made. It did not occur to me that the characters and chapters I had posted for initial feedback would be hijacked and used by another person who would take my early chapters and then wrote their own middle and final chapters version of the story I had begun. They did tweak the opening chapters I had shared, but not so much that I could miss my own writing style. To be honest, they ruined the original idea I had, but such is the way of life. My screw up taught me a valuable lesson I will never forget. Guess you could say the first novel was far too close to my heart when it happened to me. Some day, I'll get over myself. ROFL. Just hasn't happened quite yet. I still have the 3 inch binder of the original cast notes, and all the research and biology stuff needed. I have done some tweaks to the character casts and have done a fair amount of biology and history mini documents, name changes, physical looks alterations, and can switch chapters around easy enough to make a new story that is still capable of carrying my original 5 novels through as I want them to be written. Some day I will get the 5 novels intended back on track, but as of yet, I simply have not been able to get past the theft due to my own sloppiness because someone stole my darlings and screwed up my novels due to being indecent human beings. Tearing apart the first few chapters really hurts because I know someone else made money off of my hard work. Guess I became something of a scaredy cat, although I do not think any of the current originals in my computer as anywhere near as great as the chapters I posted on Urbis. ROFL. Goofy me still hurts over the theft by another writer, and probably always will. Some compliments are way too damned painful in the end. The income loss being the worst part when my kid was still pretty young, and I was struggling to feed him every single day. So yeah, I screwed up, and will never skip poor man's patents ever again so long as I live.

The same thing famously happened to AnonyMPC, who one day learned that one of his stories was for sale on Amazon. He chose not to fight it, though, because (as his name perhaps implies) he values his anonymity more than his copyright. I was plagiarized once (that I know of)--some little creep stole two of my stories, changed the titles, and posted them as his own work on DeviantArt. (Fortunately, it only took a threat of reporting him to the site runners to make him take them down.) I got pretty angry about that, so I imagine I would be absolutely furious if someone actually charged people money for my stolen work.

Well what can I say, but excellent as usual. That bit “She can’t have her baby here - tell her to cross her legs or something…!”, is that from personal experience? Great story as usual. I still can't wait to find out what Marge and May are going to do and say when Max and Emma tell them they are going to have twin babies. Should be fun.

Yeah, poor Max is running out of body parts! Thought I should give him a break

Wow, I didn't realize the theft of stories was such a big problem, I'm kinda new to the online posting game. I did do some magazine publishing and the trick there was to send yourself a certified copy of your story to prove you had it before you shopped it out - saved me once. But since I don't really sell my stuff, I'm not that concerned about plagerism, I write more for me now. But if you use a site that doesn't time stamp, email it to yourself before posting it.

Damn! Chaparones...somebody slip 'em a mickey!