Twisted Tourniquette

I occasionally Google my work, as I’m not the most prolific of artists, and I like to see where people are discussing it. The thief in question skipped under my radar for nearly a year because I normally search for my title in quotations and add a plus sign and my pseudonym to the search to weed out irrelevant results. Obviously, this was not just a posting of my fiction without my permission, or the thief would have used my name.

So here I am, considering removing the work from the Internet because I’d like to rework it into original fiction or rewrite it or both, and the first link under Google relevant to it is to an author half a world away who has stolen “Land of the Trembling Earth” and stuck it on the most popular fanfic website online.

I’m both flattered that this eventuality finally happened and incredibly pissed off.

Perhaps I should clarify. It’s nice to know that someone values your work enough to claim it as their own. It’s infuriating that the thief used two and a half months of MY hard work to earn a reputation s/he didn’t deserve, however minuscule that reputation is. I’m relatively unknown enough as an author that no one else spotted or reported this.

I don’t know what is more ironic: that apparently my piece has had a handful more fans about whom I never would have learned had this not happened, or that the thief received more reviews for the story than I originally did.

It’s a case of copy-and-paste where the thief split up my work into subsections and put them up as chapters on FF.net. He or she also used an older draft of the work, typos included. Because the story is told fractured into Memento-style sections and out of order, the effect falters in this format. Oh, and the thief also wrote helpful author’s notes to accompany some of the chapters so that people could skip one sex scene (although s/he seems to have missed another one, obscenity here appears to hinge on length of the sex scenes, not dirty word count) and to ask if the story would work better as one long page. Um, duh?

I knew this had to happen at some point, and I’m grateful that it happened on FF.net, where the matter should be resolved within hours, if not days. Still, it illustrates the point of unknown exposure. Suppose you want to erase your fanworks history from the Internet. Depending on how successful you were as an artist, that could be more difficult than you might imagine. I’m relatively anonymous as far as most Harry Potter fans are concerned, and yet I’m still doing recon work to control my presence.

Are your works, your metaphorical gonads, so to speak, hanging out there in the wind and you don’t even know it? Awwwwwkwaaaaaard.

Oh, and if you’re wondering whether my pithy attitude is completely independent of my ire? Yes. Yes, it is.

I am angry. I am fucking furious.

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