You BOTH ROCK! It would be awful for new fans to come here to see what Jim's talking about and get the 404. *shudders*

Thanks to You, Fred, and all the Mods, for all you do to keep these boards going!

*Standing Ovation*

Thank you for the information, Lee, but unfortunately I won't be arriving in Phoenix until the 7th to speak at a convention the following Tuesday. Would be nice to come in earlier, but I've pretty much already stretched the playtime for this one to its limits.

Heh - I can't say any of the stuff we've seen so far is "bad" at all. There's been a couple that miss the mark, for sure. There's one or two with gobs of errors, grammatical and otherwise, but for that writer, English is not her first language, so I tend to cut her some slack on that. Correct it of course, but it's not a slash against the writer's natural ability.

The things that I have seen that irritate me the most are when writers don't read and follow the submission guidelines. Our Flash Fiction is 100-1000 words. Don't submit a 2000 word story under Flash Fiction and expect me to take 30 minutes to read and critique it if you can't follow simple instructions. The other is writers submitting poetry as flash fiction, or vice versa. Our guidelines stipulate each writer may only submit one story at a time, don't try to pull the wool over our eyes by submitting a second flash fiction piece as a poem... we know the difference!

A couple of the pieces we've seen so far are really good. One was recommended for publication with only a few minor personal suggestions from the editors, one needs minor tweaking before it's ready. And here's an interesting thing to note. Both of those pieces were submitted in a professional layout, typed, doublespaced, formatted like a story ought to be. Many of the other submissions might be entertaining to read, but invariably, the ones that need more work before they are of publishable quality are generally not presented in such a way that helps them to be taken seriously. Hint hint.

I'm not sure if the lack of formatting is a sign of the writer's inexperience as a writer, or not, but from what I've seen this far, quality of work and professional presentation go hand in hand.

Durn it! Will be in Phoenix in June... 

Now there's a thought to give me nightmares! *shudders*

Unless you want to use a definition such as "This story has people in it" as plagiarising the idea of "people", which strikes me as meaningless.

Which I think was the point... the concept of plagiarism can be stretched to an absolute absurd degree.

There is no copyright to a plotline, just to a specific instance of that plotline. 

Perhaps I used the word 'plotline' inappropriately, I meant to refer to the actual created story, which in fact may take many different books to play out.

And again, Noey, Copyright doesn't belong to ideas at all. Only to physical results of those ideas. What is actually written down.

Almost every time a big block buster film comes out, we're likely to see a couple of mock-offs hit the theaters soon after... or in some cases, just before, depending on how long it takes the big studios to get through production. Why? Because you can't sue for copyright infringement and WIN if someone takes your ideas, changes enough elements to make it reasonably dissimilar, and gets to the finish line ahead of you. It's a screenwriters worst nightmare.

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
to use (another's production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.


While fan fiction may not be totally thought of as plagiarism......the ideas behind the character's personalities, settings, etc.

Heh - There's a really great blog on this subject, I can't remember where I saw it, but I think there's a link to it around here somewhere. Anyway, the subject of it is that EVERYTHING written currently is plagiarized from somewhere else. There's nothing original under the sun, my friend. Most, if not all, Marketable plots these days are plagiarised from Shakespeare, and he plagiarised from the writers that went before him. One can even get so technical as to say any written work that uses words found in any dictionary is, by definition, plagiarised. The very words themselves are someone else's product.

So, we have to look to copyright law for an actual ability to redress plagiarism. And in copyright law, only physical end result can be copyrighted. Concepts and ideas, cannot. Hence the stickiness for current successful authors who inspire fan fic. Who owns the copyright to a plotline? The one who wrote it down first, NOT the one who thought it up first.