What a relief.

I’ve been in copyright infringement hell this week. A guy in Samoa with a funky domain was stripping all the content off of Gothic.net and using it for his “gothic” news and arts site. Asshat didn’t dare link Gothic.net in his “Dark Links” section, for fear that everyone would realize from what site he was illegally scraping his content.

I don’t know exactly what finally worked. Certainly a critical mass of writers had been reached who were involved in sending DMCA notices. And Dave Schow was alerted, who’d had a story stolen, as well. Goddess only knows if he threw his weight in on the collective body slam. I sent the legal department a third email this morning (the wee sleepy hours for pretty much all of youse) saying I had contacted an attorney, as well as all of the other fiction writers and that a certain someone was WGA and that it’ll probably start raining WGA lawyers any minute now…

Whatever worked, I’m glad for it.

Somehow I managed to write another 1000+ words today — even after some Joe vs. The Volcano action I had with Amazon that took a good chomp out of my day.

I managed to get Faust live on the phone in the aftermath of the copyright debacle. I told her that it’s very strange now focusing only on my own work for the first time since I was disabled. I don’t have my day job with Uncle Walt to draw off my frustrations and anxiety. Copy for DisneyWorld, its booking engine or Disney Cruise excursions no longer gets my energy, good or bad. Everything is focused on the fiction. It feels like these ten months are the book end to eight years of having two jobs. The other book end was sixteen months of disability, where I wrote with the voice program from 1997 to 1998.

Rilke talks a lot about embracing solitude and letting its pain work through you until you create. He also explains to Kappus that you cannot look to the outside for anything as a writer. The latter is far more difficult for me and is a constant source of challenge these days. I don’t know how Rilke managed, but I do know in a later letter he said this:

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

Hard to imagine. Maybe it’s better to be Kappus.