Wish me luck: I'm submitting a short story to three publications.  They buy first time serial rights, they accept multiple submissions, and they seem amenable to the kind of absurdist fiction I like to write.

Never done this before.  I researched four Web sites on how to compose a cover letter for short fiction--they didn't agree with each other, so I assimilated the core information and estimated a reasonable margin for personal interpretation.  One congratulatory lunch (pasta and a large glass of wine) later, I'm geared up for the frigid weather and am about to bus to the Loop Station post office, which is unparalleled for speed and efficacy in delivering material.  I'm sure this will be the first of many such trips, but it's my first so I'm making a Thing about it.

In other news: I highly recommend Carlo Rossi sangria, for writers.  It comes in a huge jug with a handle (that's responsible) and it has a sterner, thicker taste--real sangria reminds me of anti-freeze.  Plus... the dog bites, if you know what I mean.

Well, there was a flare-up of activity for my Open Salon post about the plagiarism episode.  Now I'm back to regular blogging and... what I write about regularly isn't as note-worthy.  It doesn't get as much  notice, most people don't comment and few rate it at all.  I need to find something more compelling than my life to write about.

My Blogger account, I think,  is going to see more activity.  From me, anyway.  I have a lot more energy and am having a screwy day today, so I'll probably update it a few times with stuff and nonsense as it occurs to me.

This is a kind of writer's block.  One of my friends would experience depressive episodes where he had to go down to the gym and burn off energy at the expense of a punching bag.  He had more energy when he was depressed.  That's like me with writer's block: I want to chitter away about anything else in the world other than what I should be focusing on.

I just wrote a blog entry about foreign online radio, and I'm about to write one about how to make yams palatable.  I hate yams, but I know they're nutritious so I'm trying to learn to eat them.  I found a way to disguise their flavor entirely: sautee them with onions and carrots, then bury them in curry!  If I ever formalize a recipe, you bet it'll go online.

But I should be applying for jobs.  I should be looking for freelance gigs.  I should be sending out manuscripts and doing research for Helium.com articles.  I should at least be doing tonight's homework!  But I'm doing none of these things, I'm being a flake and looking for ways to expend all this directionless energy.  I may fire up Wii Fit and work out to exhaust my body and then sit down and get some decent writing done.  Maybe.

It's interesting to me that tonight's homework is to write up a short- and long-term writing schedule for myself.  What I'm going to do on a daily basis, and what I hope to achieve in the next few weeks and months.  Irony!

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.

I know a good writer is supposed to take whatever assignment s/he can grab, build on that, use it as a challenge to grow from, &c.  I know a good writer can grab the ball and run with it and shouldn't be too proud to undertake a job.

Gods know I haven't had any assignments lately.  I'm looking for work through various channels and am excited about some of the opportunities, but at the risk of sounding princessy, there is one job I will never accept.

Marketing.  I see a lot of writing positions in the realm of marketing, and as much as I need the experience and would like the money, I can't bring myself to work in marketing.  I see it as a force of evil.  It uses increasingly manipulative messaging and semiotics to exploit an undereducated population while exploring how closely it can skirt technical legal offense.

I see these jobs that start to sound okay, like a blogger wanted for a company-wide intranet blog, but then they mention planning e-mail and mobile phone campaigns.  I'm against spamming (however they want to call it) and I'm particularly defensive against marketing through text messaging.  Marketing sees no boundary, no inviolate personal realm, no inappropriate breach.  There is nowhere you can suggest that Marketing will say, "That's going too far."  All they want to do is sell you stuff that you don't need and, once you've bought it, sell you more of it.

I don't want to use my powers for evil.  It would be a personal failure for me to design an unsuccessful Yo-J or Sunny D campaign, but it would be a larger moral failure for me to write a successful one.  I don't want a legacy in the form of unsolicited and invasive text messages on millions of cell phones, and I don't want all the anger generated from that directed at me.

At the same time... I need a job.

My '1000 Words or Less' class has ended.  Last night was the final night, and we wrapped up with a potluck and reading some past exercises.  (No one touched my corn chips and salsa, not sure why, but now I've got expensive organic chips and salsa sitting in the kitchen.)

One piece I read was an exercise I'd undertaken in writing in 2nd-person POV.  When I dwelled on how it might sound, it seemed obvious to make it into a restaurant review where the narrator guides the reader through the dining experience.  I had a lot of fun with making it an extremely challenging and surreal experience, and my classmates seemed to enjoy it.

My second piece was a challenge.  We designed challenges for each other last week, the entire class collaborating on difficult writing topics for each other.  I knew one woman hated the 'flawed narrator' concept, so I suggested her main character was covering up a significant lie.  Another student liked satire and irony, so he was ordered to produce a non-ironic children's story with Conservative moral overtones.

My challenge wasn't tailor-made for me at all.  It was decreed that I write a 'missed connection' Personals ad written by a man suffering from phantom limb syndrome (but who had all of his limbs), and I could only use two-syllable words and was forbidden from using the letter S.  Yeah, that's difficult, but no part of that is a response to my personal writing style, favored topics, strengths or weaknesses.  I was a little hurt that it was so impersonal, or paranoid that my writing voice is so weak and indefinite that no one could come up with a challenge to meet it.  My wife was indignant on my behalf, calling the exercise "pointless."

Nonetheless, I did write a 374-word Personals ad of duo-syllabic words that never used the letter S.  The solution was to use a narrator for whom English is a second language, and that gave me liberty to play with grammatical structure.  The class seemed very pleased: one writer, whom I admire, did a spit-take on the woman sitting next to him.  I take that as a sign of success.

At the same time, I would have liked someone to key into some signature trait of mine and challenge me pertaining to it.  I think anyone at all could have been given my exercise.