I'm going to throw a spanner into the works... and try to spin this
into a discussion about something that has always interested me. It's
relevant at the time because my next installment in the booklet series
is going to be on the topic of turning life events into fiction.....

How do people here feel about plagiarizing from life? I've asked this
before ... if something happens to me, I own the interpretation of
what happened, right? Let's make it more complicated: if two writers A
and B both know some person C, and both fictionalize the life of C
based upon what they knew of that person during the hippie era -- and
both novels come out sounding much the same, because both A and B were
there for many of the same events ... who owns the character D -- the
composite of the interpretations of C as seen by A and B?

Make any sense? If I throw Fred Candelaria, the Canadian poet, into a
novel (I have done this, with his express permission, in Succubus
Sea), who owns the fictional version of Fred if someone else decides
to do the same thing?

If Mary and I had an affair when I was 18, and she was 28 -- am I
allowed to fictionalize it and almost tell it word for word -- or can
she sue me? What amounts to reasonable care in hiding her identity, if
only she and I knew of it and the only way anyone could know is if one
of us revealed her true identity? What if she married the man she was
unfaithful to, and he read about it one day in a short story? Could I
be sued by ... ?

Who holds the rights on interpreting the people I've known?

--
Quinn Tyler Jackson

--- Rachel's Little NET2FIDO Gate v 0.9.9.8 Alpha