It’s been a while since I posted here, but there hasn’t been that much new to report. I’ve been making steady progress on the first draft of The Curse of Steel, and I strongly suspect I’ll be finished sometime this holiday weekend. At that point, I’ll be taking a short break, and then launching myself right into the second-draft rewrite.

Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about reviving my Patreon account. The main reason I let that lapse, a few years ago, was that I wasn’t producing content consistently enough to warrant asking anyone to pay me for it. I was mostly writing fan-fiction (which I can’t legally accept payment for), or doing research for the Architect of Worlds project (which didn’t give rise to useful content on a consistent basis), or generally messing around with one-off world-building or writing projects. Why should anyone want to support that kind of desultory work?

On the other hand, now I have this novel I’m working on, and world-building and constructed-language material to support that. Since I’m going to be self-publishing the finished work, patronage could help me gather an audience, and might also help offset some of the costs of professional support. That might be a thing in the new year.

One odd thing did come up over the past few days.

Apparently, about a year ago, someone downloaded the complete text of one of my fan-fiction novels (Memoirs: The Reaper War), reformatted it as an e-book, slapped a cover image on it (also stolen), and published it to Amazon UK under their own byline. They even stole my blurb for the novel! Naturally, this did not work out well for them. Within a few days, someone noticed that the e-book was fan-fiction, with no sign of consent from the Mass Effect IP owners. The violation of Terms of Service was reported to Amazon, and the e-book was taken down in short order.

(It still appears to have a Goodreads entry, though. I wonder if Goodreads has any mechanism for taking those down, if the book turns out to be fraudulent?)

One annoying part is that I didn’t hear anything about the incident at the time. Several people apparently looked closely enough at the plagiarized e-book to recognize that I was the original author, but none of them thought to let me know what was going on. I only came across the discussion on Reddit by accident, earlier this week while I was searching for something else entirely.

More annoying is the thought that this could put me in a very bad position someday. Suppose Amazon puts two and two together and concludes I was the idiot who tried this in the first place. The last thing I need is for them to decide to pull the original work I’ve actually published with them!

No news is good news, I suppose – if I didn’t notice this situation in over a year, it’s probably not going to blow up in my face. Still. I’ve dropped a note to the Organization for Transformative Works, to see if this kind of thing has ever come up before and if they have any advice for how I should handle the situation.

Meanwhile, if I ever find out who “Cole Price” or “C. P. Price” is, we are going to have words.