Yeah, I'm being ripped off, AGAIN

So, this guy (I'm pretty sure it's the same guy as last time, under a new name) put up a book that is a pretty blatant rip-off of Black Friday. It was brought to my attention last week and I read the whole thing.

Sadly, the part that bothers me the most is that the guy writing it has NO IMAGINATION. He'd not creative at all. He not only can't take the book in a new direction, but he copied things from me which DON'T make ANY sense in his book!

When I got to the part with the car, I started thinking, 'Hey! Maybe he's going to go off on his own now!' But now, he's immediately back to just riffing off of me. The part with the pawnshop is a perfect example. He has no idea WHY it's there, but he's afraid to change it, because he doesn't understand creativity. So he left it.

Here's why it's a tell that he's an idiot: I used the pawnshop because I needed a place where an unscrupulous black market dealer could buy and sell magical items right under the nose of the mundanes. And while he's a goblin, he's one that just looks like an ugly human, not that he ever comes out from behind his desk, and he wears clothing to make it harder to tell what he looks like (along with bad lighting).

Now, in the rip off, there is this thing called 'The Great Barrier' which keeps mundanes from seeing anything magical. THEY CAN'T SEE THE SHOP. Got that? they can NOT see the pawnshop. So they can't go into it. So the whole REASON for it being a pawnshop goes away. It could simply be 'Joe's magic shop' there's no reason to hide it! It CAN'T be seen!!! And of course making the proprietor some small green thing was just laziness coming through.

What's even sadder is that in my offer, back when I attempted to settle the whole thing, I offered to edit his books, help take out the stupid stuff and make it better. To teach him how to be a better writer, for just a 20 percent cut of those books (standard is 50). And he turned me down!

I mean it's not just that he's ripping me off, it's that he's murdering those pour stories with his inability to think for himself! Now I know why he uses all those pen names, because when everyone figures out who he's ripping off, he just moves on to someone else.

So yeah, I don't know if I'm going to do anything about this, beyond ignoring it. I know he'll make some money, but honestly, the kid is a dolt. I tried to do right by him and he just threw it in my face. No good deed goes unpunished I guess. And it had such promise, if only someone who knew how to do it, wrote it....

Oh wait I DID!

;-)

Night all!

As I haven't been approved yet, I'm guess that means I can't have subscribers yet. If any of you do see this, and know how this place works, can you tell me how i can see my own page? Patreon allows you to see what your page looks like to everyone else, but for some unknown reason, subscribestar doesn't have that feature. It makes trying to figure out how to do things difficult.

Oh, things may be a little squirrelly here for a little while, need to figure out if the tiers here are the same or different. Like if I put in a dollar tier, is that a dollar a month, or 5+1 a month? I'm sure I'll figure it all out soon enough.

I've decided to finally open an account here on subscribestar. There are two reasons for this, the first is that I have patrons who have made it clear they would rather follow me somewhere -other- than Patreon. The second is that Patreon's behavior of late has started to leave me less than satisfied. I am not a fan of witch-hunts or censorship. I will be setting this account up like my Patreon one and I will update it the same as my Patreon one for now. I'll offer (eventually) the same levels of subscriber, $1 and $5 with the same benefits. Other than that, I guess we'll all just see what the future has in store for us.