So I was browsing the home page of AFF and this title caught my interest, not because I wanted to read it, but because the title and synopsis preview sounded awfully familiar.

 

I've mentioned it before, but before I started k-pop fanfics I was a young adult fiction blogger, I received young adult fiction books prior to their release and I reviewed them. In early 2011 I reviewed a book called 'The Vampire Stalker' by an author called Allison von Diepen, it was a pretty good book by my memory with a very engaging premise - let me show you the synopsis on Goodreads.

 

 

Sounds awesome, right?

 

But I mean, there's nothing wrong with the title being the same. 'The Weight of Souls' is a title of a book that I once read but the plot of my fic ois so different to the book I guess I 'stole' the title from, and that's okay, right?

 

So yeah, I clicked on this fic and was shocked at the synopsis.

 

 

That is practically word for word the exact synopsis that I just showed you from Goodreads.

 

But I mean, I thought 'I'll see the actual fic before I judge'. After all, you see a lot of Divergent or The Hunger Games types of fics with similar descriptions that end up varying widely from the book it was based on. So I loaded up the fic on laptop and the book on my kindle (which, after going back to 2011 I realised seriously needs a clear-out).

 

I've downloaded a copy of this book to PDF on my laptop to show you this;

 

THE FIC;

 

 

THE PUBLISHED STORY;

 

 

Ridiculous, right? Then later into the chapter the fanfic writer comes up with this gem; "(I'm really tired from typing so I'm going to summarize the next paragraphs.Hope you don't mind.If you ever get confused in a story i'll write the paragraph I meant to write in this chapter.Hope I didn't get you too much confused in this ^_^)"

 

I read further into this and compared it and it's pretty much word for word copied out, just with spelling and punctuation errors, which begs me the following question;

Why would someone spend their valuable time copying up someone elses work (not even finding a PDF to copy and paste from!!) when that amount of time could go into forming your own story or, if you're that uncreative, even writing it out in your own words (which would be totally wrong but at least better than this). I get that you soemtimes read a story and think 'I love this premise! I could use it too!'. Even I have that and I will be the first person to admit that my fics are inspired or prompted by other things I read; the idea for 'As the Dust Falls' came from a book called You Against Me by Jenny Downham, though both plots only have the crime mystery romance thing in common. The Weight of Souls is my take on the amalgamation of young adult paranormal fics, but it's very individual and not at all based on any one book, more of an overlying theme that I used to notice when I was reading 10 books a week. 

 

Sure the plot of 'book character comes to life' is engaging, but it could have been done in it's own way to be completely unique, not copied out word for word (without even changing any names except the main characters; not even an OC). It's so ridiculous.

 

So what is the right thing to do in this situation; it's none of my business. It's not my fandom or a friend of mine, however YA fiction and the authors that write it are very close to my heart and people basically stealing their work for some stupid unfathomable reason is somehing that infuriates me to no end. As well as that, as an author with some level of integrity I feel like I should do something.

 

Do I report this? Do I kindly message the fanfic author? Do I leave it be and stew on my own?

 

The key question; how can anyone think that this is okay? 

 

(AN at the end of chapter 5 

"I have every chapter planned out but It'll take a long time considering I like to write long chapter for you guys."

You mean it it'll take a long time to copy it out of the book on your lap?)