Voices

Not long ago, the spouse got a job offer. After much deliberation, he decided it wouldn't suit him as well as his current job. But he was haunted by the voice of his father in his head, saying, "You're out of your mind not to take it. It must be because you're scared."

(His actual father, when consulted, said, "There's no sense in taking a job if you're not going to enjoy it.")

I told this to the Tech Goddess. She said, "The voice in my head is my mother, saying, 'No matter how good you are, they can always find someone who's better.' "

I myself have been working for eleven years to silence the voice of my mother in my head, critiquing every damned bite I eat. "You don't need that. You don't need that. Look at you. You don't need that." I was very angry at her for a long time, and then I realized that same voice must be droning on relentlessly in her head, too.

What do the voices in your head say? And have you had any luck in making them shut up?

Plagiarized!

Weird -- this has never happened to me before. But an alert reader just informed me that someone has taken chunks of Transfigurations and worked them into her own story on fanfiction.net, here.

I haven't been able to bear to read the whole thing, but the theft is most obvious in Chapter 2, where the first three paragraphs are lifted directly from Transfig. There's some in Chapter 1, too.

It's a very odd thing to do, studding the story with stolen paragraphs; it's a different setup and a different pairing and goes off in a totally different direction, and she even has the same dialog I wrote spoken by different characters. So all in all it seems like it wouldn't be significantly less work than just writing it yourself.

I've sent an e-mail to the ffn abuse team. We'll see what happens next.

Edited to add: Oh, this is great -- evidently large bits of Chapter 4 were lifted from the script of "Dead Poets Society."

"To fully understand potions, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the potion been rendered, and two, how important is that objective."

I still say it's less work to write your own.