sDon’t call it plagiarism, call it repurposing
Night of the Living Plagiarists
Writers’ Week
Tim Dimm (pen name Dakk Starz, sci-fi writer) stumbled from his bedroom into the kitchen in nothing but his skivvies and a single pass with his fingers through his hair. He stared at his girlfriend Myra with puppy eyes, his longing clear. She slammed her cup on the counter. “You want me to pour your coffee?”
His jowls sagged into unformed Play Doh, his eyes sank beneath his lids, the corners of his mouth dripped past his chin. “I was up all night writing the first three chapters of my masterpiece. This one’s going to sell a million copies. So forgive me if I’m a little out of sorts.”
Myra grumbled as she searched the cabinet for a clean mug, since he’d filled the sink with dirty ones overnight. “Let’s see if you can sell me first.”
He spread his fingers and waved his hands in front of the table, as though parting theater curtains. “Cosmic Combat. An intergalactic space opera about a handsome rogue, a rebel princess, a naïve farmhand and their two faithful robots who steal a spaceship to fight an evil empire and destroy a WMD the size of the moon.”
Myra spit her coffee into her cup. “You mean ‘Star Wars?’”
Tim wrote an intergalactic space opera about a handsome rogue, a rebel princess, a naïve farmhand and their two faithful robots who steal a spaceship to fight an evil empire and destroy a WMD the size of the moon.
Tim cradled his chin between his knuckles. “That’s a stupid name. Cosmic Combat has class. And could I have some coffee, please?”
Myra massaged her forehead. “No, Mister Purist, who doesn’t watch popular films because it might corrupt his prose. Star Wars is one of the most famous movies of all time, a movie that my sister and I watched the other night while you were napping on the couch after another 24-hour writing session that produced one paragraph.”
“Bullshit.”
She poured her coffee down the sink. “You idiot. You probably heard the entire film in your sleep. And Disney owns the franchise now, so they’d sue your ass all the way to Tatooine.”
Tim buried his face in his palms. “Tatoo what?”
Later, at his laptop, after he’d washed the coffee left in the pot from his hair, all his anger burst from his chest. He should devour Myra for sabotaging his novel like that. Seconds later, however, he opened Scrivener and started an even better novel about a space explorer attacked by an embryonic scorpion. Later, it bursts from his chest after morphing into a monster with acid for blood. It devours the crew, leading to a face-to-face showdown with a scrappy female engineer.
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Wry noir author Phillip T. Stephens wrote Cigerets, Guns & Beer, Raising Hell, the Indie Book Award winning Seeing Jesus, and the children’s book parody Furious George. Follow him at Phillip T Stephens.
