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Writing Quandary
Feb. 6th, 2025 02:45 pmAbout two days ago a narrative in my head got vivid enough I thought I’d better start writing it down. I might be able to incorporate it into a multi-chapter fic I’ve been working on—it fits with some imagery from earlier chapters and might provide some much-needed backstory. And I don’t want to get side-tracked from the multi-chapter fic, and it’s due a new chapter, and I don’t want to let down myself and the two people reading it.
Howwwwever, the idea is also showing signs of developing into its own stand-alone short story, possibly even something I could try submitting somewhere. I think it’s been a decade since I bothered trying to submit anything anywhere, but I can dream.
The obvious solution would be to write both versions—but I saw a tumblr post a few weeks back by a professional writer whose novel got flagged by her publisher’s anti-plagiarism filter, whereupon she had to explain to her editor that the reason her novel shared a couple sentences with a very sexually -explicit LotR fic posted on Ao3 a couple of years back was because she was the author of both, and had figured those lines were too good not to reuse in her professional work.
I wonder if simply setting the multi-chapter fic to members-only would be enough to keep it from being spotted in the admittedly-unlikely event that I try to get the other version published someday. Both my readers are Ao3 members, so it wouldn’t inconvenience them.
I wonder how often this kind of thing is going to be a problem, now that there’s an option to check for plagiarism by having a computer check every word in a work against everything else findable on the internet? Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…
Howwwwever, the idea is also showing signs of developing into its own stand-alone short story, possibly even something I could try submitting somewhere. I think it’s been a decade since I bothered trying to submit anything anywhere, but I can dream.
The obvious solution would be to write both versions—but I saw a tumblr post a few weeks back by a professional writer whose novel got flagged by her publisher’s anti-plagiarism filter, whereupon she had to explain to her editor that the reason her novel shared a couple sentences with a very sexually -explicit LotR fic posted on Ao3 a couple of years back was because she was the author of both, and had figured those lines were too good not to reuse in her professional work.
I wonder if simply setting the multi-chapter fic to members-only would be enough to keep it from being spotted in the admittedly-unlikely event that I try to get the other version published someday. Both my readers are Ao3 members, so it wouldn’t inconvenience them.
I wonder how often this kind of thing is going to be a problem, now that there’s an option to check for plagiarism by having a computer check every word in a work against everything else findable on the internet? Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…
