Windchaser

We’re a week in, and I guess I’m still feeling a little down. The year hasn’t got off to the most auspicious start, as it started with someone lifting a good chunk of one of my stories and plugging it into theirs.

Perhaps I’m being oversensitive. Too busy with (misplaced?) frustration to look objectively at what it actually is? And cross that such a small thing has blown up to such a big deal in my head.

They didn’t copy it word-for-word, but they lifted enough of the plot / places / characters’ reactions (even the single-sentence blurb I gave it) for me to go “wait… but didn’t… didn’t I just upload this story yesterday?”

I think I mostly feel hurt. It was just a short, silly, fluffy piece, 1700-ish words that took me at most 4 days to write. (Although that’s pretty impressive if you look at what my word counts have been lately…) Within… 24 hours? They’d uploaded their version. I find the idea it’s all a big coincidence a little hard to swallow.

There’s only a couple of people who regularly read my fiction, so I guess it stings a little when something that gets such minimal traffic in the first place gets used as a base for someone else’s work without a credit or even a “by the way do you mind”.

(For the record? I absolutely wouldn’t have had a problem with it if they’d spoken even a single word to me about it.)

I attempted to channel my frustration into writing, and came up with another short that kinda made me feel better, but now I just feel petty. Plus it feels unfair (and unfulfilling) to trash your own characters when you’re frustrated with someone else.
Edit: I should clarify, this was not some angry, angst-ridden piece of fiction inflicting violence on anyone, so I may repurpose it. It could still be an amusing plotless little ficbit, if I can figure out exactly what could have made Skywarp vindictive enough to booby-trap the bathroom...

I suppose perhaps I feel a little put-upon. This was all after I had someone that I don’t recall ever interacting with before post unsolicited (and mostly... well, wrong) writing “advice” on the story, under the guise of a review: it literally said “Nice! Just one thing... said is dead so replace them” then quoted a sentence... which they managed to spell wrong. (You couldn’t just... copy-paste the sentence you were referring to?)

All right. Gripe over. It's been bothering me for a whole week and distracting me from what I SHOULD have been doing (read: writing my own fiction and working on my diploma), and I wanted to get it off my chest. I think I'll be all right now!

Edit @ 13/01/2018 11:24
Spoke too soon! I WAS feeling all right; less hurt, less distracted, getting back on track with my study, even starting to feel slightly more forgiving after having taken the time to think about it a little.

Then hilariously, by which I mean infuriatingly/depressingly/whatever-ingly, the idea I used in the stupid petty ficlet I wrote to get my frustration out of my system... got copied as well! By the same person. *huge frustrated melodramatic sigh*

I'm still not sure if I'm being oversensitive; it just makes me cross that TWO stories I've uploaded recently have had their "take" on them uploaded a few days later. Perhaps all I'd have liked is a little "inspired by" on them somewhere? But then I guess that'd require admitting it wasn't 100% your idea.

Like Warp says in "All Begins with P", it just hurts to have something you worked on claimed by someone else.

Part of me does still wonder if I'm being baited.