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Wednesday, 1:58 pm in Urban Nordica

What an exciting morning.

It all started with that stupid fic meme the other day.  In one of the comments, ~nounbeast [h] mentioned that she’d been looking for Urban Nordica in the past and had always found people plagiarizing it instead of the real thing (for the record, an early draft of the first book can be found at FictionPress).  Curious, I went and googled 'urban nordica' and lo and behold, one of the results was from a Teenage Writers forum with some user called SnipSnap claiming to have ‘finished their fourth book’.

It’s 302 computer pages, single spaced …

It’s the sequel to my very first novel, “urban nordica” … This one is entitled “Urban Mythica”

So you’d have to finish reading urban N to read this one … and i won’t be posting anymore of that publically *sigh*

Quoted From: SnipSnap

I was like, “… is that so”.  I mean, for starters, Urban Mythica isn’t the sequel to Urban Nordica (UM is the original universe which, along with Corner make up the crossover for UN), and for seconds you didn’t fucking write either of them.  ~Random [h] and I did (well, UM is Random’s alone, obviously).  I did some more searching on the forum and found out that SnipSnap has apparently been going around serially claiming to have written UN/UM for a while, including claiming that it was inspired by watching The Incredibles (needless to say it pre-dates that film and is more a combination of Buffy, Silent Hill and Hellboy).  The mother of all threads, however, was this one in which he actually started posting whole chapters under his own name.  The fact that people bought it kinda makes me shudder, especially seeing as how… illiterate the guy sounds in his ‘talking’ posts and the fact that the early beta versions of UNI are obviously written by two different people.  Well, I think so; the characterisations are so inconsistent!  It took us both a while before we really got ‘into’ each other’s universes.

I think the thing that really got me, though, was how obviously arrogant and defensive SnipSnap is.  In his post of Chapter 10, he’s missing the starting ‘I’.  I’m not sure if this is because it’s like that in the original document (these early drafts have a lot of typos in them) or he’s just a shit copypasta, but later on when someone points it out his answer is:

no … that’s right. you’re forgetting it’s dialogue and ur not remembering some odd rule of grammar i used there called double infinitive. But yep, pretty sure that’s correct.

Quoted From: SnipSnap

Okay, for starters no, it’s not dialogue, it’s first person narration (and these people are supposed to be writers?) and for seconds there’s no such fucking thing as a ‘double infinitive’.  The fact that this guy can’t own up to a typo he didn’t even make really says volumes about his mindset.  The whole thing just screams insecurity; he’s having trouble getting praise for his own work, so instead he takes a story he personally thinks is good and starts posting that instead.

After a brief debate over which thread I should jump into, I eventually decided to post here.  The mods came down pretty quickly, and I threw up a score of collaborating evidence from both myself and Random.  I mean, it’s pretty obvious that from late 2004 to early 2006 there were these two people whose lives were consumed by this creative endeavour called ‘Urban Nordica’.  There’s art and fics and websites and comments on journal entries; if we were plagiarizing him it would be the most elaborate retrospective plagiarism in the universe!

Thankfully, this sort of thing is generally taken pretty seriously is armature writing societies, and it’s not like the guy wrote a story which was passingly similar to ours; he copied the whole damn thing.  It’s pretty obvious who’s at fault.  There also seems to be some kind of ‘mod election’ going on, so a couple of candidates swept down and were very apologetic.  Like I said in the thread, I’m not one of those people who gets hyper-sensitive about people sharing my writing/code/art around, but I do like to be credited as the original (co-)author.  If people are arrogant enough to think that Google won’t catch them and that authors don’t search for their own stuff occasionally then that’s their stupidity.  The fact that he’s been exposed and had his reputation ripped to shreds is enough for me.  That and the fact the mods are apparently going to give him one of two options; publicly apologise or get banned.

So anyway, that made for a pretty amusing morning.  On the (other) plus side, it gave me an… excuse to contact ~Random [h] again.  Losing contact with him (it was my fault; I’m not necessarily saying I thought what I did was wrong, but it was my fault) and in turn losing Urban Nordica are probably two of my biggest regrets.  Nothing I’ve ever done before or since has quite been able to capture the delicious, manic creative energy of my UN days and differences aside I did really value Random as a friend.  Besides, unlike me, Random does plan on writing UM professionally so values his intellectual property; I respect that, and will defend him to the death in that regard.

So UN got one last hurrah.  Rest in peace, old girl.  Your parents both still love you.

• Tags » deh lulz, nostalgia, plagiarism, random, urban nordica, writing
• Mood » nostalgic