INTENTIONALLY WRITING A RIP-OFF

​The Mystic Rampage series has been going on a while and every now and then I’ve taken a break. Usually it happens during NaNoWriMo and it’s helpful to spend a month focusing on a different project. The problem with that month is that it comes with its own stresses due to the deadline and even if I’m not planning on getting the story published I still desire it to have a certain level of quality. The past few weeks, I’ve taken a lesson from my office ergonomics team and have been taking what I feel is the writing equivalent of a “micro-break.” Instead of taking a single month once a year I’ve been taking a day or two every week to work on a different story; a fan fiction. I’ve always been nervous about that genre since plagiarism can be a serious issue. That being said, it’s been fun. The stories come more easily when you don’t have to create a new character from scratch. It’s been a struggle lately to reach my usual one thousand word limit for the current novel in my series, but with the fan fiction I’ve been able to reach it without too much trouble. I never considered fan fictions to be “real” writing since they inherently take someone else’s work, but now I feel like I owe writers on those forums an apology.