FUN WITH NIK AND JANE

(sorry people, this is an essay… but it is, I think, worth reading)

Jane:

There’s a writer I know who gives advice to other writers. She has a blog that provides an insight into how the publishing industry really works. But her advice wanders beyond her sphere of expertise sometimes. Maybe we all do that. She says in one of her blog posts to do your research thoroughly and to double check your facts. I have done this here.

Last January, Jane set up a collaborative fiction site with herself as editor. She invented a place and invited writers to send flash fiction pieces to populate her town with characters and places and happenings. I played and very quickly had four pieces hung up on her site (and one rejection). Then something happened that made me question an editorial decision she had made which was against her own stated rules – I wasn’t the only one who thought this was the case. I don’t think Jane liked that I was so public in defence of my point of view. She sent me an e-mail that said she didn’t know whether to kiss me or slap me (kiss me for my beautiful words or slap me for publicly calling into question her editorial ability or arguing so strongly for a better decision). She said that she would have to cool off before deciding whether or not to use any of my other subbed pieces. She was very cross.

Then she helped make very public a charge of plagiarism against me.

Things crumbled a bit after that, with her collaborative fiction site stumbling forward for a month or so before finally coming to a halt. A while later she removed my pieces from her site and in their place made public the idea that I was a bad sort.

Jane also sent me an e-mail warning me against using the idea of an invented place like hers and populating it with my pieces and more. It was a long, calm and very threatening communication. She had sued the Daily Mail, she said, and won tens of thousands of pounds in damages. I should be careful, she said. She was serious. Even the pieces that she had not hung on the site, because they were originally written for her project, might not be mine to do with as I pleased. I thought the world had flipped and gone mad and that this was totally unfair.

I have blogged aplenty on this site in defence of all my writing. Jane was wrong in the charges she made against me. So very wrong. My ‘offending’ stories are clearly visible now (through a blatant infringement of my copyright and accompanied by a stream of misrepresentation and lies). The stories are called ‘Waiting in The Scriptorium’ and ‘Mondays Smell of Burnt Toast’… you can read them if you search for them – please read them, for it is clear that my stories are not examples of plagiarism and Jane should think so too.

(Now to my research) On Jane’s publishing advice blog site one of her very first posts points out that: a) ‘there is no copyright on ideas’, and b) ‘specific arrangements of words can be protected’ but ‘the idea (storyline) will not be, as ideas are fair game’. All those words are hers, including what is in parenthesis.

Read my stories and it is clear that no specific arrangements of words have been stolen. I have admitted to having sometimes found inspiration elsewhere and used ideas from other sources and made them my own by what I have done with them. That’s what artists do, don’t you know. But I have never taken another's words and pretended that they were my mine.

Despite this, Jane still maintains that I have transgressed! This does not fit with her definition of what is allowed, her understanding of ideas as ‘fair game’ as expressed on her blog.

She now claims that with my Port Brokeferry project I am thief again, now stealing from her.

Jane got the idea for her January 2009 collaborative fiction project from other projects she had seen including a project called ‘Blue Rock’ where a writer had set up a very similar collaborative writing project, inventing his own fictional place and inviting poets to write poetry to populate his town with characters, places and happenings. Jane took this idea and, not wanting to merely replicate it, tweaked the idea, asking for 500 word long pieces of flash fiction instead of poetry. (Am I wrong or is flash fiction not sometimes seen as a sort of prose-poetry?).

I do not say that in doing this Jane was doing wrong. I agree with her that ‘there is no copyright on ideas’ and ‘ideas are fair game’. But why does she get so irate then when I set up my own fictional place (not collaborative, but just me) and populate it with characters I had invented initially for her now floundered project, and other characters I continue to invent?

Could it be because she has decided to slap me instead of kiss me? And slap me and slap me and slap me.

Jane has recently said she is too tired to be bothered with legal action against me over Port Brokeferry. Or maybe she realises that in this instance and by her own measure of what can and cannot be protected, she is WRONG. (see Malcolm Gladwell below and my other ‘essays’).

Nik:

And Nik: a knight to Lady Jane and all those other women who have attacked me. Nik posts my name on his blog last week and calls me vile and thief and hangs lies about me on his page.

I do not know why Nik reminds me of the Andrex puppy – blundering through reams and reams of toilet paper and making such a mess and everyone going ‘awww’ because the puppy is so cute.

Nik blogs about the pen he writes with, and the colour of ink he uses, and his handwriting; he blogs about taking off his beard and his lack of success in love. And now he blogs about me. That would be fine if he had anything real to say on the matter, but he tells lies about me. He did it before on another site. I thought those lies the blundering of an Andrex puppy, so I sent him a polite e-mail putting him right on the details he had got wrong. Now he reproduces precisely the same lies, and so I think him malicious, and a nuisance.

The Fun:

To be honest, there has been no fun for me in this. (sorry if the title of the post made you think there might be). I have been labelled as ‘criminal’ without trial. I have been called 'low' and ‘bloody low’, by people who have believed what Jane has said, or people who have gone on the say so of other shouty voices. For over six months I have had people think me bad, the worst that ever crawled the planet. Read my work and you will see that I am a writer who is worth reading (I hope) and not a writer who takes others’ words and makes them my own. Read my work and see sense, not the nonsense of others. Do your research and check your facts before making judgement.

(I am adding a footnote to this post. Today, Saturday 30th January, there have been developments. Someone spoke up to say that my stories do not represent plagiarism. This person even added a comment on Jane Smith's blog. Look up 'How Publishing Really Works' and look at her posts on the subject of plagiarism. Jane's answer was to say that this person speaking out in my defence was the same person as me. Jane had, she said, used fancy computer gadgets and her technological wizardry to establish that this person shared the same IP address as me. This is a lie. This supportive person has posted his whole profile up for people to check. He lives in England; I live in Scotland. He is young; I am not. How could Jane have established that we shared the same IP address? Fact: she couldn't have. Jane Smith Lies. This should be shouted loud. Jane Smith lies. If she lies about this, then how much more of what she has said is a lie? In a court of law this would be the point at which her entire testimony would be thrown out and the jury directed to totally disregard anything she has said.

There is still no fun for me in any of this.)