Not accusing me of plagiarism, exactely...BUT

KTC said:

Just how many times is that fish gonna jump outta the watta?

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You're right. I ought to change mascots. That one's getting tired. I'll freshen up the scenery in future posts.

Silver King said:

Sure thing. (Hope Trish or Rob don't decide to ban me from Poetry.)

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Dude, to the contrary.

You are hereby under Poetry House Arrest - you may not leave until you have read, from cover to cover, Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America.

After that, you won't want to be anywhere else.

You're welcome.

Scott, I can understand how you felt. A vague, unspecified allusion like that is completely unhelpful, and it would be a burr under one's blanket.

[ETA: Just saw the part about how it's all been resolved. Glad to know it! Memo to self: Read past the first line of every post.]

Trout Fishing in America?

I love that band!

I'd heard of Trout Fishing in Quebec.

Hmmm. I sense a new Office Party thread: Bands Named After Books. I'll add:

The Fall.

(Surely there has to be a band called The Fountainhead somewhere out there?)

skelly said:

Honestly, I knew that I hadn't purposefully lifted anything from anyone....but there is this lingering doubt where it concerns the concept of writing something and claiming it as your own, only to find out that it was something that you read once, twenty years ago, and somehow got lodged in your brain.

That terrifies me, because I've read A BUTT LOAD of stuff.

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It does happen. For instance, I believe Colleen McCullough when she says that she didn't consciously plagiarize L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle for her Ladies of Missalonghi, but there's no way you can read LoM without thinking TBC was at least lurking in her backbrain somewhere. (IMO, anyway.) The thing that would bother me most if I were McCullough is that (IMO again) TBC is infinitely better than her book.

All you can do is to be as honest as you can. There's no way you can be a writer and not be influenced by what you've read; all you can do is mix the ingredients and make the flavors your own.

Ugh . . . this takes me back to my undergrad days when I was "sort-of" accused of plagiarism in my first fiction workshop. While we were discussing my story, some guy, in front of a room of 15 people, starting going on about how he'd seen it before "somewhere" in "some book" he had at home (in another state), blah blah . . . but it was "okay" because "[my] version was actually better." I actually had to go make an appointment to see the instructor in her office about it. It was so humiliating. This guy had only a vague idea of the title (which I tried to look up and failed to find . . . this was in the pre-internet days ), no idea of the author, and no copy of the book at hand. So when the prof realized this was getting us nowhere, she gave me a gentle lecture about how my story was hackneyed (eh, it kinda was, in an "I'm 18 years old and writing a horror story" kind of way, although I didn't plagarize a damn word) and I needed to "be more original." I don't know which was more depressing . . . being accused of being a thief or being accused of being a hack.

I read a story here back in Dec, forgot about it, reread it a month or so ago, and told the author I'd read something very similar but I forgot where. Then it hit me... Combining 22000 members, hundreds of thousands of posts and bouncing all over to different areas of interest--it can happen. I apologized--all's well.