Room For All Of Us

I am going to try to keep this from the realm of ranting, but I will tell the story behind this post first.  I found myself with nothing but write, clean and practice piano over the last week, so I asked a friend to issue me a challenge.  Since she had read parts of Lest Ye Be Judged and The Other Half, she knew that I had experience writing legal drama.  She issued me the challenge of writing the story of Katniss Everdeen's war crimes trial in Mockingjay.

I had fun writing this week as a result of this challenge.  I reread the book.  I researched law texts.  I came up with arguments for the prosecution and defense.  I have a story planned that will demand a lot of me as a writer because of its emotional range and ensemble cast.
an
I put up the first chapter last night and, because I suck at titles, I named it "The People vs. Katniss Everdeen" as it would appear on court documents.  I posted it and went to bed.

I woke up this morning to four reviews, all of them telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for plagiarism.  My story "totally ripped off" "The People of Panem vs. Katniss Everdeen" and it couldn't be a coincidence.  I should change the things I had read in the original story so my story was "truly original."  One person PMed me to say that I would be pissed off if "some idiot just copied and pasted my story and claimed they wrote it."

I went to the story in question and found that, yes, my title shared 5/7 of the words in the title.  It also is going to deal with the war crimes trial of Katniss Everdeen.  It uses the characters from the book.  I wrote the first chapter from the perspective of Haymitch because there weren't many characters conscious during the scene that I was writing.

The author herself couldn't have been nicer.  She PMed me around the same time that I was reading my morning dose of abuse.  She said she gave me the benefit of the doubt.  She did ask if I had read her story and when I confirmed that I had never heard of her or the story before this morning, she explained that she had posted on her Tumblr account to ask people to stop harassing me because I was innocent of ripping off her story.

She then made an excellent point that I wish I could just copy and paste to everyone who harassed me this morning.  She said that there are hundreds of versions of the story between the final chapter and epilogue of Mockingjay and no one takes issue with that, so she had no problem with the idea that the trial could likewise have different versions.  We agreed to read each other's stuff and parted ways amicably.

First off, let me say to the fanfiction community at large, if you're so obsessed with not "totally ripping off" someone else's work, don't write fanfiction.  Don't read it because fanfiction is playing around with the characters, plot and world of someone else.

Second, let me give you some other examples of "plagiarism."  In the '90's, a guy won a Pulitzer for ripping off La Boheme.  It was called Rent.  A few years ago, the Pulitzer was awarded to a guy who wrote Little Women fanfic and called it March.  George R.R. Martin is making millions by ripping off the War of the Roses and replacing the Yorks and Lancasters with Starks and Lannisters.

I once saw a Pride and Prejudice fanfic in which Elizabeth became a governess to the ward of a bitter man who revealed on the day of their wedding that he had a wife locked away in his attic who had gone mad.  Mr. Darcy's wife burned the house down and blinded him and Elizabeth reconciled with him.  That's called ripping off Jane Eyre.

But the point of writing is that there is room for all of us.  There is a place in the world for every story that a writer comes up with.  Some of them are better than others.  Some of them are more original than others.  Fanfiction takes this to a whole new level.

To respond to the person who called me an idiot and a few other things that I won't post here, I would be pissed if plagiarism happened to me, but if creativity takes a writer in the same direction that my muse indicated, I say let them live and let live. 

Back in the Marginally-paid Saddle Again

I've been following Authors Publish for a while, since they have some great suggestions for querying authors and, even more frequently, interesting articles on writing.  A few weeks ago, they sent out a call for article ideas.  I pitched an idea and got "What Gail Carson Levine Taught Me About Writing" (Their title, not mine) accepted around the middle of August.  They paid $20 and encouraged me to keep them in mind for the future.

I just sold them one on naming conventions that I call "How to Name the Voices In Your Head."  It's really nice to be contributing things to more than my blog, my whatculture.com site and my laptop's hard drive.

In the meantime, I have 6 days left before my new job starts and Katey has issued me the challenge of writing Katniss' trial from Mockingjay.  This is going to end badly--long and complicated and really emotional.  At least it will keep me busy.

Update on quite a few things

I've been too distracted to update here for a while, but I figured I should give you some newsflashes.

1)  Kate got me the edited version of Wingspan back with two days to spare before my vacation.  I had told her that on the day that I had to leave, I was taking the copy back no matter what and working with what she had so far.  She cleverly kept telling me that she was reading one book or another while she was really scribbling comments.  I read the comments and the book all the way through while I was in New York City to see Swan Lake at the ABT and when I got home, I set to work again.  I am a couple of scenes from finishing it.

2)  In the meantime, I haven't been blogging much because I write for whatculture.com.  So far, my entries aren't all that profound--"5 Transformers characters who deserve more stories" or "6 No-Fail Funny Websites"--but they're very fun to write and invariably put me in a better mood.

3)  A friend has asked me to co-author an allegorical children's book.  We're very much in the planning stages, but I'm looking forward to it.

Stage fright

So, I finished Wingspan a few days before going to San Diego.  Now I have read it through and am pretty sure it doesn't suck.  Now I need to have it proofread by that wonderful person who made my first 50 pages worth reading.

The problem really is stage fright.  I am the kind of person who wrote all their stories in a notebook in middle school and never let anyone read them.   The least in-character thing I did in the first half of my life was start posting fanfiction, where people could not only read the crap I came up with but comment on it.  The fanfic people have been very kind to me.

On the other hand, everything in this book is either something that I've come up with or something that I've reinterpreted from a friend's brilliant idea.  The proofreader is one of those friends.  In fact, she told me, "It can't suck.  It's got too much of my stuff in it."  I laughed and agreed on principle.

So, goal for this week is to read it through and then send her the email.  Heaven help me.

Incentives and Progress

So, I'm used to keeping a tally on the site of how many words I've written, how many queries I've sent, etc.  Let's just leave it at this for now:

I have added almost 17,000 words to Wingspan this month.
I have cut out a lot of stuff as well.
Therefore, I am around 44,000 words.
I'm writing every day for Camp NaNoWriMo.

So, I'm closer, but probably not close to that elusive dress that's still in Katey's closet.  But!  I did buy myself some new tennis shoes today to celebrate the 15,000 mark.  When I hit 20,000, I'm going to buy some sorbet.

So, now that I've shared the ways that I'm going to shamelessly reward myself for doing my job, here's more information on how it's all going.

I have been writing a lot of the mushy stuff.  It's been hard to sit alone in my room in my singles housing apartment, knowing that no guy actually looks at me unless I'm leading music in church.  I'm not bothering to get over it right now because I'm too depressed by other things to even care.  I have written too many things out of order, which means that, while I've written a breakup scene, I've also written the scene where the guy first asks the girl out this week.

I wrote an amusing scene and then forgot that it was in one of my shared documents on Googledocs.  Katey mentioned it, I got her honest opinion and then at her suggestion added a character to aforementioned scene.  Scene has been completely transformed and I want to use that character more.

I'm trying to build up more of a relationship with the parents.  Again, not the easiest thing to do when there are so many other things that need to be dealt with in the storyline.

Incentives

So, The Summer of Finishing Wingspan is in its last month and, you guessed it, I have not yet finished Wingspan.  So I took drastic measures.

Step 1 was resolving to write something, ANYTHING every day.  Even if that meant 200 words per day, it was something.

Step 2 was letting my friends convince me to sign up for Camp NaNoWriMo.  50,000 words in August.  Not sure how it'll work out. 

Step 3 was setting up incentives.

Step 2 is going fairly well.  It has a stats page where you can see how close to September 1 you are, meaning whether you'll finish on time or in December.  I am now at September 6.

Step 3 isn't very developed yet.  Mostly, it has been things like, "I finished my wordcount for the day.  Now I can have my popsicle!"  But I have something fun waiting for me at the end.

Last week, Katey and I went dress-shopping for a trip to see Les Miserables.  That show was amazing the fourth time around...  But back to the story.  So, we agreed to share opinions on dresses.  At one point, we stepped out of opposing dressing rooms to find that we were wearing the exact same dress.  She immediately said, "I saw it first!"  (Sometimes, Katey is like a little sister.)  Neither of us actually got that dress, but it made an impression.

So, today, I went back to that dress store and bought the dress.  It was 30% off as well, so that made me feel even better.  Then I handed the bag to Katey and ordered her not to let me wear it until the Sunday after I finished Wingspan.

I have graciously allowed her to borrow it until then. 

Writer's Retreat

I am an introvert.  That means that sometimes, many times, it is exhausting and headache-inducing for me to deal with people.  At those times, I tend to hole up in my room with a lot of books or my computer.  Sometimes, I'm tempted to get a hotel room and just not have human contact for a weekend.

This weekend, I get to have one of those times.  A friend of mine, the one with whom I escaped to Philadelphia, is off to the beaches of California with her very lovely family.  They couldn't bring the dog or cat and wanted people to water their garden.  Enter their friends who like their gardens and really like their house.

I firmly put my foot down about scheduling and said that after I went to see Brave and ate lunch with friends, I was going to have some time to myself with my novel.  I have enjoyed it so far.  I got a lot of good work done; the newly-christened Nathaniel is turning out to be a really fun character to write and I'm starting to really write the differences between Aislin and Maeve.  I developed some more of the relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Byrne.  

I feel a little better than I have done for the last three weeks, in which I have written almost nothing due to overwhelming depression.  A couple of years ago, my depression was so bad that, for a summer, I couldn't find joy in music, in dancing, in writing, in work, in anything.  I've been very close to that and because I remember what that was like, I have been getting very panicked.  Not a good combination.  I've also contacted a friend who is a psychotherapist to get a referral to a psychologist who can meet with me on Saturdays.  I've been working such crazy hours that I can never fit therapy into a schedule, but it has to be done.  I'm not good at expressing emotion (Well, other than anger and general stubbornness), but when I'm so depressed that having someone forget to say hi to me on a day makes me cry for an hour, it's getting out of control.

It also doesn't help that I have a recital on July 20.  I have done many recitals, since my parents let me start taking violin lessons when I was 3, but this is the first solo recital I've done since 1999.  It's also the first time I've ever done a piano-only recital.  I am playing everything from a Mozart piano concerto to a piece from Transformers.  My current choice of an encore piece is actually something that Katey, my ever-patient roommate in whose room my piano currently resides, agrees sounds like the themesong for Wingspan.  

So, I'm having a good, alone night to myself.  Tomorrow, I get to hang out with my friends, but for now, I can have some real me time.