The six months we budgeted for my writing career didn't yield any breakthroughs.  I was not published anywhere, and I realized how hard it is to stare into the face of Abundant Free Time and still sit down and write seriously.  Other people have said as much but there are some lessons, unfortunately, one must experience for oneself.

On the other hand, I have been published twice in my university's literary magazine, which can still go on a resume.  I found a job as a proofreader at an advertising firm, and they've asked me if I'm interested in copywriting at all.  (One case in which "yes" is not a strong enough word.)  And a week and a half ago, I concluded a gruelling, sporadic 16-year undergraduate battle and walked across the stage to receive my Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing.

So I've tacked on some achievements and I'm in a good place.  Now that I'm out of school (for now), I have to work on my self-discipline and start churning out bodies of work.  In reading Gene Wolfe's retrospective on his own career and technique, he cited a story about Harlan Ellison, instructing his writing classes to write one short story a day for a year.

It was not hyperbole.  One short story per day, for 365 days.  Can you imagine?  If you could keep up with that, at the end of that year you would have a wealth, a plethora, no dearth of rich material with which to work and ramp up your career!  I tried it for two weeks--my interest in new projects usually flares up and dies down in two weeks--and it was hard, but I did it.  I surprised myself with what I could produce at 11:30 PM with absolutely no ideas, when I'd just start typing random words and those words would coalesce into a reasonable idea--springboard.  I invite anyone to try this exercise to prove their dedication.

So rather than being overwhelmed by a limitless horizon of options, I'm emboldened.  I talked with a couple of my favorite classmates and we will form a writer's group.  My professor has expressed interest in coaching me in writing even after I've left the school.  I'm exploring a couple literary contests--Minneapolis is an intensively literate city.  Things are looking very good: all I have to do is bother to reach up and pluck those apples off the tree.

More adventures as a writer: one job, one refusal.

I received a solicitation from someone who found me on Monster.com, asking if I were interested in applying for a position as editor with a marketing company.  Excited, I leapt through all the hoops, tuned up my resume, contacted my references, and gave three strong interviews.  It wound up in success and I was hired!  I went in to work last Friday, a slow day for the office, and practiced my chops on a couple proofs.  It felt good.

But my boss kept referring to me as a contractor, which confused me.  No one at any point of the interview or application processes suggested this was anything but a permanent hire.  I'm meeting with HR on Monday so I'll have to get the definitive answer then.  I may have to research what it means to  be my own business.

And I submitted a short story to three periodicals I found on this site.  I set up markers in my online calendar as to the earliest dates I could expect to hear from each of them.  There's been no word so far from two; as for the third, they returned my unopened manuscript back, heavily stamped REFUSED.

I don't know what that means.  Did I do something wrong?  Was I ineligible to submit, being out-of-state?  Was my envelope not pretty or professional enough?  Am I too fat?  The only feedback I have is some angry Sharpie.  I came here to look the publication up again, find out if I missed anything in their requirements, but the search function is down and apparently the directory is too.  It will be some time before I can investigate this mystery further.

In the meantime, I wrote a successful blog post on Open Salon.  Unlike other material I post there, it was popularly received and still garners some attention.  It's been a very positive experience, but a concerned friend of mine e-mailed me to suggest I not throw my best material away like that.  She said it could have easily been published (and I could have been paid for it), and that's true but how was I to know?  I think I've written much better stuff and posted it, and it's been completely ignored: I have no idea how people are going to respond to my material.  And I could have written it and sent it out for publication in a local magazine or newspaper, and after it was systematically shot down or ignored I could have posted it online, and it would no longer have been timely.  It wouldn't have gotten the attention it did when it was fresh.

I really don't want to argue in defense of my weaknesses.  Maybe I should have dressed it up and sent it out, but the thought really didn't occur to me.  I wouldn't know where to send it around here, and I couldn't imagine that it would survive the slush pile to actually be scanned by human eyes, and if it got that far there's no freakin' way someone would've said, "Yes, we need to print this."

On the other hand, I ran it online and a couple dozen people have been highly complimentary.  I feel better as a writer after this experience.  What would I have gotten if I'd run it in a print publication, ten bucks?  Less?  I'd rather have 24 hours of feeling good about myself.

You know?  I'm just some rinky-dink little writer, starting out on the beginning of my career.  Blogging, knocking out short stories, sending out queries for articles (and being ignored).  Who am I?  I'm nobody special, just an earnest writer, better and worse than thousands of others.

So imagine my surprise when I found out someone had attempted to rip off my writing.

I posted this blog entry on Open Salon.  I was digging through old photos (on my hard drive, not in an album--how the times change) and found it, remembered the humorous circumstances around it and then recalled everything that happened afterward.  I thought it would make a good essay so I hashed it out and posted it.  A few people enjoyed it and I was satisfied.

Then I got a private message from a user who said she enjoyed my article the first time she read it.  But she didn't think it sounded like the other articles in the blog--it turned out that she had read my article in someone else's blog.  She did a quick Google search for a line of text and found the original source, my Open Salon post, and that's when she notified me.

I ran back to the plagiarist's blog.  There it was, a near-complete cut-n-paste job, with "Marilyn" substituted everywhere I'd written "Christian," my own name.  References to the photo I'd included had been deleted, and the length of the post was truncated due to her blog's restrictions.  She had started to receive some compliments over her thoughtful post.

My heart began beating hard and my hands trembled.  I was shocked.  Someone actually plagiarized my writing.  Why would someone steal my writing?  Who was I, that someone would want to steal my writing?

I notified the plagiarist and the admin of the Web site--Match Doctor, a singles Web site with a blog forum.  In order to do that, though, I had to create an account there.  It was free, but it required a lot of information: it would not let me take action until I'd reported my hair and eye color and what I thought constituted a good first date.  For the love of St. Catherine...  That done, I wrote up a blog post, introduced myself, and stated my case with an electronic paper trail.  Here was my original post, and twelve hours later there was her word-for-word ripoff of my post.  I replicated the story on Open Salon, as well.

A few people on Match Doctor were skeptical.  One woman wondered what made the original post about the cantankerous neighbor mine any more than it was the other user's.  A couple others suggested the plagiarist wasn't intentionally malicious but wanted to share a good story (they overlooked the removal of my name in the essay).

But everyone else?  I received a tremendous wave of support from dozens of strangers.  All these writers stepped up and expressed their rage over plagiarism.  It didn't matter if I wasn't earning money on my post, and that the usurper wasn't earning money on the ripoff: plagiarism is inviolate to any degree.  Writers shared their own stories: bloggers ripping off other bloggers, journalists ripping off bloggers, professors claiming students' work as their own.  Everyone came together in sympathy and community.

I was touched and overwhelmed at this show of support.  I felt guilty that I'd been writing in a vacuum, chucking my posts out into the void, rarely reading others' works.  That's going to change: I'm going to support my writing communities and encourage other writers.  I really feel like a part of a cohesive whole and I'm going to act on that.

The plagiarist deleted the post in question (and another, in which it had been proven she'd stolen from another Open Salon writer) and deleted her own account.  The forum moderator of Match Doctor told me that normally they don't permit posts to stand that identify and attack one particular user... except everything I'd said was demonstrably true, and since the user had terminated her account, she technically was not a user any longer.

In the end, no real damage was done, and I came away with some important lessons.

- As a writer, your thoughts and ideas are valuable.  Whatever you think of your own writing, there is always someone who admires you... and someone else who envies you.

- It's worthwhile to indulge in a little "ego surfing:" select a line of your text and run it through a Google search.  You might discover where it has been "borrowed" without your knowledge.

- Your writer's voice may be the very thing that saves you.

Yup, productivity abounds.  Yesterday I got some more writing done and submitted a query: I interviewed the host of a local drunken spelling bee.  I had a blast at the event and hit the host up for a quick talk, I think it's newsworthy.  I hope to hear from this magazine soon, though I haven't in the past.

Today I got my half hour of yoga done, talked some more with our potential car buyer, and drove the Prius out to the gas station to get it vacuumed.  The buyer's going to check it out tonight, and I'll probably take it to his preferred mechanic tomorrow or Sat. morning, and... if all goes well, we'll have an amount of money to throw into savings and the security that comes with it.

A friend's birthday is coming up, and historically I've been very poor at remembering or acknowledging the birthdays of friends.  I know that's something I need to work on.  Everyone likes their birthday remembered--if not for the fact that they're getting older, then just for the reassurance that they're surrounded by people who give a rat's ass about them.  I'm trying to tighten up my online address books, fill them out with complete name, address, and phone information, and now would be a good time to check everyone's birthdays, too.

Finally, every morning during my blogging routine, Bella hops up into my lap and extracts some cuddle time, about 10-15 minutes.  I don't mind this at all, but I don't get much writing done.

I think it's good to get out of the house once in a while.  Sounds patently obvious, but it can be hard to put into practice.

Today it was easy: I had to bring the Prius in for maintenance.  I warmed up with half an hour of yoga on Wii Fit, washed, dressed, and drove down to Burnsville.  The Toyota dealership has decent recliners in the waiting room, and I only took two chocolate chip cookies and a cup of coffee as I stretched out and listened to some Penny Arcade podcasts.  They're not producing any more podcasts, unfortunately: only they and Ricky Gervais have ever made me laugh out loud.

I got a couple ideas for short stories so I foraged around for a business reply card and scrawled them out in my backhanded automatic writing script.  You would never guess I practiced calligraphy for a year.  i'll develop these ideas soon, I'm excited to get new story ideas.  For my Creative Writing classes I've been plundering the stacks of dilapidated notebooks I've been hauling around from apartment to apartment.  When I was in college, and before my depression was diagnosed, I used to write down manic, wild story ideas that wouldn't stop coming.  Rarely fleshed them out but that's what I'm doing now: stealing from myself.

Currently I'm writing from my apartment, and I'm only picking and choosing which blogs I'll update.  That's my writing exercise, you see, updating a dozen blogs. It forces me to approach the same topic from several perspectives or come up with a dozen unique ideas.  But when I'm at the cafe, I'm more inclined to fill them all out: it feels like a special treat to go out and sit in a wi-fi cafe, hacking copy out like an updated William S. Burroughs in Morocco or something.  (I do have a travel typewriter, as a matter of fact.)  And to fully indulge in this special treat, I'll write in them all, but I don't feel the same impulse when I'm at home.  It feels like I only need to write in the important blogs and can let the rest slide.

I'm not going anywhere with this.  I just noticed it and had to remark upon it.