Happy Public Domain Day 2023

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

1927 was a watershed year in motion picture history. 

Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. 

“Wait a minute…wait a minute…you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

Those were the first words ever spoken in a motion picture. Although The Jazz Singer is now considered insensitive, nevertheless, it stands as an historic moment in 1927 when the first “talkie” rang the death knell for the silent film era.

You can listen to a clip of Al Jolson’s first words here. 

 

January 1, 2023 was Happy Public Domain Day when copyrights ended for movies, literary works, and music published in 1927.

Here’s a partial list of works that are now in the public domain, provided by Duke University.

Literary:

Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Agatha Christie, The Big Four

Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties

Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure (The Hardy Boys #1)

Franklin W. Dixon, The House on the Cliff (The Hardy Boys #2)

Franklin W. Dixon, The Secret of the Old Mill (The Hardy Boys #3)

 

 

 

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger” and “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” the last two stories from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (which means Holmes himself is now in the public domain)

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Franz Kafka, Amerika

Anita Loos, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Films: 

Metropolis (directed by Fritz Lang)

The Jazz Singer (the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue; directed by Alan Crosland)

Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture; directed by William A. Wellman)

Sunrise (directed by F.W. Murnau)

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller)

The King of Kings (directed by Cecil B. DeMille)

London After Midnight (now a lost film; directed by Tod Browning)

The Way of All Flesh (now a lost film; directed by Victor Fleming)

7th Heaven (inspired the ending of the 2016 film La La Land; directed by Frank Borzage)

The Kid Brother (starring Harold Lloyd; directed by Ted Wilde)

The Battle of the Century (starring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy; directed by Clyde Bruckman)

Upstream (directed by John Ford)

Music:

The Best Things in Life Are Free (George Gard De Sylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson; from the musical Good News)

(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream (Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, Robert A. King)

Puttin’ on the Ritz (Irving Berlin)

Funny Face and ’S Wonderful (Ira and George Gershwin; from the musical Funny Face)

Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man and Ol’ Man River (Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern; from the musical Show Boat)

Back Water BluesPreaching the BluesFoolish Man Blues (Bessie Smith) Listen here.

Potato Head BluesGully Low Blues (Louis Armstrong)

Rusty Pail BluesSloppy Water BluesSoothin’ Syrup Stomp (Thomas Waller)

Black and Tan Fantasy and East St. Louis Toodle-O (Bub Miley, Duke Ellington)

Billy Goat StompHyena StompJungle Blues (Ferdinand Joseph Morton)

My Blue Heaven (George Whiting, Walter Donaldson)

Diane (Erno Rapee, Lew Pollack)

Mississippi Mud (Harry Barris, James Cavanaugh)

~~~

Of particular interest to mystery authors, the last two works by Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Sherlock Holmes are now in the public domain. What does this mean to writers?

If you’ve always hankered to feature the iconic Sherlock as a character in new adventures, you are free to do so without violating copyright or worrying about legal repercussions (more on that in a moment).

Here are a few genre possibilities:

Sherlock uses his powers of deduction to solve contemporary mysteries in the 21st century;

Or he time-travels through history in pursuit of villains;

Or fantasy stories might bestow magical superpowers like flying, turning invisible, telekinetically moving objects, and casting spells;

Or sci-fi, where he travels to distant universes—a rocket ship or space station makes a great setting for a locked room mystery;

Or for romantic suspense, he can fall in love.

Although a number of contemporary works have featured Holmes and Watson, there is a copyright backstory that’s nearly as complicated as Conan Doyle’s mysteries.

Even though Sherlock and Watson had already entered the public domain, legal battles over Sherlock’s copyright persisted for years. The Conan Doyle estate claimed various justifications to charge licensing fees to authors and film makers who wanted to use the characters.

Most creators paid the fees rather than endure the time and expense of taking the estate to court. But attorney Leslie Klinger fought back and won.

In one suit, Judge Richard Posner criticized the estate’s “unlawful business strategy” and stated:

The Doyle estate’s business strategy is plain: charge a modest license fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the ‘rational’ writer or publisher asked for the fee will pay it rather than incur a greater cost, in legal expenses, in challenging the legality of the demand.

The expiration of the copyright on the last two works featuring Sherlock has now ended any possible claims by the estate.

Sherlock is finally, unquestionably free for any creator to use.

That means, as to Sherlock’s future adventures…you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

~~~

Just for fun, here’s The Battle of the Century, featuring Laurel and Hardy and the greatest custard pie fight of all time:

~~~

TKZers: Do any stories, movies, or songs from 1927 make your creative juices flow?

Do you have ideas for repurposing works that are now in the public domain?

Please share your ideas in the comments.

January Motivational Words of Wisdom

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Words of Wisdom post of 2023. For me, finding time to write, using that time, as well as wanting to sustain that creativity throughout the year and beyond, is very much on my mind right now. Not only that, but figuring out how better to deal with various tasks and schedule what time you have to write.

So, I searched through the Kill Zone archives for January posts dealing with this and found gold. Three posts, which turned out to be spaced three years apart.

From January 2014, James Scott Bell gives advice on being creative throughout your life. Then, from January 2017 Joe Hartlaub tackles the challenge of time balance and gives some great tips. Finally, from January 2020 Elaine Viets discusses finding your most creative time and how to hew to that. I link to the full posts at the end of each excerpt, and all are worth reading in full.

Fight to be creative as long as you live. Do it this way:

  1. Always have at least three projects going

I wrote about this before (“The Asimov“). I think all writers should, at a minimum, have three projects on the burner: their Work-in-Progress; a secondary project that will become the WIP when the first is completed; and one or more projects “in development” (notes, concepts, ideas, character profiles, etc.). This way your mind is not stuck in one place.

  1. Take care of your body

The writer’s mind is housed in the body, so do what you have to do to keep the house in shape. Start small if you have to. Eat an apple every day. Drink more water. Walk with a small notebook and pen, ready to jot notes and ideas.

  1. Stay positive and productive

Write something every day. Even if it’s just journaling. Know that what you write to completion will see publication, guaranteed. It may be via a contract, like Herman Wouk. Or it may be digitally self-published. Heck, it could be a limited printing of a memoir, just for your family. Writers write with more joy when they know they will be read, and joy is the key to memorable prose.

  1. Do not go gentle into that good night

Write, write against the dying of the light! (apologies to Dylan Thomas). Refuse to believe you have diminished powers or have in any way lost the spark that compelled you to write in the first place. If they tell you that you just don’t have it anymore, throw your teeth at them. Who gets to decide if you can write? You do. And your answer is, I’ve still got it, baby, and I’m going to show you with this next story of mine!

So just keep writing and never decompose.

James Scott Bell—January 19, 2014

Writers are faced with this time balance on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Life gets in the way of writing. Heck, life gets in the way of life. My way of dealing with this has never been perfect and is constantly evolving. I am accordingly going to share with you my current method for coping with the time crunch, which, as I approach the downhill slope of my life, actually works pretty well.

1) Eat the booger first. That got your attention, didn’t it? The “booger” in this case is the task you want to do least. It can be anything from emptying the dishwasher to drafting that letter that contains bad news for the recipient. Do that first. Do it as soon as you get the bad news that you have been appointed to pass on. Do it when the dishwasher light goes on, or it buzzes, or whatever. I have found in most cases that the freakin’ idea of whatever it is you need to do but don’t want to is often worse than actually doing it.

2) List your Big Four. List four things which you try to do every day, regardless of what else happens. Put them in your calendar (on daily repeat) at the beginning of your day. Assign one word to each task — Watch, Read, Write, and Listen, for example — and do each of those things for fifteen minutes each day. If you want to keep doing them, fine, but the first time that you start each one be sure to stop after fifteen minutes. Come back to each one later, if you wish and if you can, but again, in fifteen minute increments. Do it with tasks that you want or have to do regularly, and love or hate (or somewhere in between) , but do each for fifteen minutes at a time. You will be surprised at how long and how short a quarter-hour is, and how much you can get done in that time period. This is particularly true of writing. Depending on your typing speed, inspiration, and perspiration, you can get a couple of hundred words out of you and on the screen in fifteen minutes. What? You say that doesn’t sound like much? Count out two hundred Skittles and throw them around the living room. Now pick them up. See. Two hundred is a lot. Do that for ten days and you have two thousand words or more, where before you had nothing. And so it goes.

3) Schedule things realistically, and adjust your expectations accordingly. It isn’t going to take you fifteen minutes to prepare your income tax return, so don’t schedule that from 10:00 to 10:15 on the night of April 14. You’ll just be making an appointment to be kissed by the goddess of disappointment. Go ahead and block off fifteen minutes for it, across twenty different days, or block off an entire day, if you can do it. You have a pretty good idea how long it takes you, however, from past experience, which is usually a pretty good indicator of present performance. But be realistic in your estimates of how long it takes you and how long you can work on it at a stretch. Think of YOUR abilities and limitations. Mickey Spillane wrote I the Jury in nineteen days, and Georges Simenon could write a book in less time than that, but you or I aren’t going to do that (probably). Don’t get discouraged when it takes longer than you thought it would, and plan accordingly.

Joe Hartlaub– January 28, 2017

 

2) Know your most creative time.
I get most of my writing done between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. After that, I’ll still write, but my work often feels flat. My brain really sparks during those four peak hours. After that, it’s better for editing.
(3) Seize the time you have.
If your husband takes the kids to McDonald’s, don’t use that time to sort socks. Write!
Romance writer Joan Johnston wrote her way to the New York Times bestseller list by writing her novels between 4 and 6 a.m. – while the kids were asleep. Now, that’s dedication.
What if you have a sick spouse or ailing children – or you don’t feel so well yourself?
That’s where your own determination comes in. I’ve written novels by my husband’s bedside when he was in the hospital, and edited proofs for the next book while waiting to hear from the doctor when he was in surgery.
Am I Super Woman? Heck, no! But I can concentrate for short periods. Writing is a way to escape a painful or scary situation. It can be solace.

(4) Make time
Remember the words of that rabble-rousing journalist, Mary Heaton Vorse: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” You need seat time.
Try to schedule time-sucking activities after your peak writing time. If the cat isn’t deathly ill, make her vet appointment at 4:30 p.m. The repairman – if he deigns to show up – will start the repairs after your peak writing time. And for now, I’m ignoring the squeaky dryer.
Be ruthless when you write. Turn off your cell phone. Ignore the siren call of the internet, tempting you with cat videos, unanswered emails and Kim Kardashian’s latest lingerie photo. Use that time to write.

(5) A writer writes.
Make that your mantra.
I love being a writer. I enjoy talking to other writers at the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime meetings, and hanging out with other writers in the bar at conventions.
But writing is a lonely business. Eventually, I’m going to have to go to my office, all by myself, and write. You will, too. Good luck.

Elaine Viets—January 9, 2020

***

What advice do you have on sustaining your creativity throughout the year and beyond?

How do you strike that “time balance?”

Are you making any changes to your writing schedule this month?

 

If you encounter a problem in posting your comment, we apologize. The Kill Zone has been dealing with a few technical difficulties, and we are working to fix the problems. Thanks for your patience and for visiting!

 

 

Getting Back on Track

Nancy J. Cohen

How do you get back on track after being away from home? When I go on vacation, attend a conference, or even do a one-day speaking engagement, I lose about two days of work for every day gone. It’s hard to jump back into your Work in Progress when you have bills to pay, receipts to file, emails that need response, phone calls to return, and household chores like laundry and food shopping to complete. With that being said, the idea of being able to use a shift swapping app when people are away could make getting back into work a lot easier. Plus, people can switch shifts if certain people can’t make it.

Photos from our visit to Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival:

Spaceship Earth  

Scotland

Chocolate Cake

Lamb Chop

Easing into a work schedule is impossible for me when all these things are on my mind. Thus I allow a few days to get caught up, maybe not in everything but at least in the essentials, before turning to the work left waiting for me.

There’s no easy way to get back to the grind. You can reread your material and do some edits to put the story into your head again. Or you can set a writing/editing schedule beginning with a certain date.

I’m expecting line edits on Warrior Lord, #3 in my Drift Lords paranormal series. Before these arrive, I want to move ahead with Peril by Ponytail, my next Bad Hair Day mystery. This story is based on my recent Arizona trip, and I’d like to write it while those details are still fresh in my mind. And yet I have travel arrangements to make for a New York trip in January, bank statements to reconcile, a wedding invitation that needs a response, family visits to plan, and more. Plus the laundry and food shopping must be done today, not to mention paying the property tax bill, etc.

In a week or so, I’ll be caught up. And this is only from going away for four days. So how do you ease into your work schedule after a vacation? Do you jump right into it, or do you allow yourself time to get caught up?

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