New Creative Commons
Morsel's final edit, passing through my hag stone and into the future
It was three years ago today, on the then equinox, Morsel's final pen and paper edit passed through my favourite hag stone and sailed out into the world. The product of a creative vision I couldn't get anyone else's head around, I self published her with very specific structure and content to weave a spell all of its own.
I kept the oldest promise I made to myself as a fervent and lifelong scribbler of journals, poetry and short stories. But more than that I stayed true to my ideas, vision and peculiar style to create a perfectly-of-me first reflection of my creative output. It took nearly fifty years to get from head and heart into hands.
Morsel has only ever been a real book. I never e-published because of the extortionate terms of the deal. The "standard practice" of corporate behemoths that can see creatives paid nothing if the e-book is downloaded, read and "returned", the song streamed "for free", the art screenshot or lifted and twisted. Commissions and reductions that commodify creativity and claim entitlement to original expression and imagination.
Beyond that zero sum deal I knew from painful experience that publishing online puts my work and words into places where it is wildly unprotected. The kind of rules that used to apply to published work in terms of copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property don't exist here. This is rip off land. Because the platforms were free, from the start the deeply unimaginative felt entitled to what was posted. Those with means, scale, reach and money could - and did - lift whatever they wanted, profiting handsomely without redress.
Today's highly Mercurial revelation of real world word snatching right across a range of published works by Meta's AI deserves collective howls of outrage but it is hardly news. The genie cannot be shoved back in the bootleg by design. Haven't we all been ripped off a million different ways by these dopamine machines? Frogs in pots everywhere concur. Still it feels like some kind of lovely loop on Morsel's birthing day, a dropped stitch that could unravel great seams of creative consequence.
Another happy tipping point, darklings. Everything always changes from here.
You can still get yer mits on Morsel, darklings! Here for signed copies and shipping worldwide here https://au.blurb.com/b/11090733-morsel
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2025