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You know, I’ve always kind of expected it, but it’s still kind of shocking to have it proven. I am apparently cursed.
Rose, here, for the record. First news post ever, and it’s going to be a bitter one.
The problem is this: . A game about a super-secret, ancient organization founded primarily to wage war on the Vampires. The main character? A guy named Jericho Cross.
Is this sounding familiar yet? Maybe not, let me explain. To the left of this news post, you’ll see a little snippet from Chapter 3 of my current original, . I am quite enamoured of this story and its characters. I’m enjoying writing it, and I haven’t yet lost the inspiration for it, which is saying something significant when you consider what KA posted about in her last post regarding the writing difficulties we’ve been having lately.
The problem becomes apparent when you realize that my story is about a super-secret, ancient organization founded primarily to wage war on the dark forces of the world (including, but not limited to vampires). The main character? A guy named Jericho Garcia-Cortez.
I could have killed KA, last night for telling me about this game. This is the second time this has happened to me. For those of you who read – my first and only completed original, old and riddled with errors, but complete nonetheless – apparently Mercedes Lackey got there first. The similarities are apparently striking and it really does look like I ripped off a large part of her work. I can’t say for sure as I’ve never actually read her book, or heard of it until KA brought it up one day and was shocked I’d never heard of it, as even she’d thought I’d ripped it off.
And now this wonderful Dark Watch game is determined to convince me that I am incapable of writing anything that won’t, eventually, look like plagiarism. Which sucks. Royal.
It’s not even that my story has anything even remotely to do with the Dark Watch story. The game is essentially a cowboy shoot-em-up FPS, with vampires as the bad guys (I’m not joking). Their Jericho looks nothing like mine (Cross (Dark Watch) is a wild-west outlaw style guy, with a glowing red eye peeking out under the brim of his black Stetson. He uses a massive gun, which I will assume is supposed to be a vampire killing six-shooter of some kind though how you’d wield something that size with one hand is quite beyond me. Garcia-Cortez (mine) is an upper-middle-class, modern era part-time university professor. He wears wranglers, hiking boots, and long-sleeved, collared shirts, and uses two 1911-A Colts from the era when the Dark Watch game takes place (as near as I can figure). They’re normal guns, though. Not huge). Cross has a girl for a partner, Cortez has a boy. Cross is half-vampire, or turning into a vampire, or something that makes him intimately involved with vampires. Cortez is intimately involved with vampires for different reasons entirely, which I can’t reveal yet because I’m not there in the story. Suffice it to say he’s not about to turn into one. The Dark Watch organization appears to be after vampires exclusively. The Order (my organization) hunts everything and anything related to the supernatural/paranormal. The differences abound.
When you get right down to it, the similarities appear at first blush (which is about as far as I’ve gone with my investigations into the game) to be nothing more than the surface concept and the name – and even then, the surface concept has only been done four million times. If I ripped mine off of anything, it was off of Van Helsing. I don’t know what they ripped theirs off of. Could be anything, really. Which just leaves the name. All I can do is shake my head at the sheer impossibility of the coincidence. Jericho isn’t a popular name. Or even a common one! I saw it flipping through BabyNames.com one day and thought it was an awesome name. The religious imagery was apparent, the symbolism delicious, and it means I can eventually have a chapter called “The Walls of Jericho.” What’s not to love? And maybe that’s why they liked it as well, I don’t know.
It just sucks is all. Like I said, second time this has happened and it kind of makes you doubt your ability to come up with anything “original” at all. It’s like everyone’s High School plagiarism fears made manifest.
“But sir! What if I think of the same thing someone else did?! Is that still plagiarism?!”
“The odds of that happening are a million to one, Rose. Don’t worry about it.”
Turns out the odds are a million to Rose, which essentially translates into: you’re screwed.
♥ Rose
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