With how frustrated I am right now, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to maintain my usual more formal posting tone. This one might take a more casual, story-time, frustration tone rather than pretentious academic. I’ll still use section titles, but more for my own sake as I try to make sense of something so fucking stupid that it seems like the other person involved ist trying to cause drama. I also don’t use spell checkers, so I’ll apologize in advance if I overlook spelling or grammar here. I’m just so fucking pissed. But I need to get this out, because my name, my work, and my book are being dragged into a very false, demonstrably false accusation by a pretty large influencer, Darling Santa Maria. With her husband, Sylar, they’re known as Aicosu. If I could afford an attorney, this is a case I’d take to court. Since I’m not wealthy enough for that, I’m laying it all out here.
Roots in Fanfiction
Like many writers, I started in fanfiction way back in the day, on an old IBM with neon green text that permanently seared text into your retinas. It’s a tale as old as time, Ryu and Chun Li from Street Fighter 2 and oh god the humiliation is killing me. Or at least that’s the claim since my earlier stories were alphabet books and Full House inspired action adventure stories that I also illustrated. Moving on from the cringe. Fast forward 84 years to 2021, and the world was locked down. I had seen a video on Insta that was a TikTok repost, failed, and ended up in the ER trying to get unacquainted with exposed face-bone. I found a game to entertain myself, and ended up sucked in. A game about getting sucked into books? Yes, please! After a very short while, I connected with some Discord servers for this game, and as one does, giggled at fanfic smut and shared some myself, because why not? We all needed ways to entertain ourselves, and writing gave me that outlet. Eventually, I was encouraged to sign up for Archive of Our Own (AO3), and to post my work there.
But I had a goal: I wanted my story to be something a reader could pick up without knowing the fandom. Personally, I’ve always wished I could read more fanfics outside my own fandoms, but most assume insider knowledge. So I wanted to do the opposite and to write something that stood on its own.
That’s when I took the bare bones of the game, i.e. the real life inspirations the game used, which were Nelly Bly, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and a touch of Amelia Earhart, and then it all went completely off the rails. I crossed relationships, cut ones I didn’t want, and reworked everything to suit my own story, while trying to stay rooted in history. Even the very basic premise of the story changed. Among other things, I didn’t like that there was no option in the game to keep her love interest and her close friends. Since that was an early choice in the game, I decided fuck it, I was doing it my way. It really wasn’t long before my readers on AO3 were telling me flat out that this isn’t the same story anymore. They were right. It wasn’t. It was mine. I removed who I didn’t want, added entirely original characters, created backstories and motivation, and went over the top researching to try to keep it as historically plausible as possible. Traumatic events that happen have a lasting effect. I didn’t care to keep it cutesy and fluffy, and it sure as hell wasn’t a smut fic anymore.
Since it had gone so far off the rails, I decided to further remove it the world of Time Princess. Quite easy when almost nothing remained anyway, and so, so much more was created that was inspired by absolutely nothing in the game. Someone looking for something inspired by the game would be so disappointed now due to now little there is in common with it. It would be like wanting a book inspired my Mario Brothers, getting a Ninja Turtles story, and being to the sewer they live in means it counts for Mario Brothers.
When I reached chapter 14 (thank you to one of my friends and editors who dug up this exact, though I don’t think these were the same group), another writer in that space, cosplayer Darling Santa Maria, began working on her own fic. I could have sworn Darling started before I did, but one of my friends and editors, Jen, found the times:
I never read Darling’s. From what I heard, it stayed much closer to the source material, and it VERY quickly ballooned to 187,000 words. I never read it, not because I didn’t care, but because I was simply too busy writing my own work and starting a college degree…in creative writing, of all things (which pivoted to art due to the threat of AI, and then, thanks to AI, art pivoted to music, then…fuck…)… to commit to something that long.
Community and Distance
The Discord server where I first met Darling began as a group about sharing fanfics and improving writing, using the game and other shared fandoms, like Star Wars, as a base to give each other feedback. That’s what I signed up for. That was fun, and weekly critique groups were fairly educational. I loved that. But over a short time, it shifted. It became more of a fan space for Darling herself. Her word was taken as writing canon, and critique of her work came with the risk of her fans defending her. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted craft, not celebrity. So I drifted away, and pretty much entirely stopped when it started to become an Adam Driver fan club. I rarely leave servers outright. I just push them further down my sidebar. But I stopped posting, stopped following, stopped engaging but for the rare time I’d get a notification of something and decide to check. Often I don’t, and those red bubbles for unread messages are visual white noise to me.
When it comes to social media, I more or less engage when I must. I regularly follow no one. Not my husband, not my best friends, not my favorite bands, no one. As I see it, I’ve got other ways of keeping up with those who matter most to me, through direct messages on Facebook Messenger, or Discord, texts, phone calls, or this old-fashioned concept called “seeing each other in person.” Social media makes a lot of time and energy, tends to be a lot of drama, and that’s time and energy I can use for writing, research, or being present with my family. For the record, we even nixed cable in 2010. My daughter doesn’t know what cable is. TVs have no place in living spaces in this house. We’re like…old people or something, listening to 78’s on a handcrank Victrola since you have to be present with the music when you get three minutes per side, and talking with each other. *shudder* (For real. I actually have two hand-crank Victrolas, and they get a lot of use.)
That’s why, when I was tagged in a Discord comment, people there weren’t even sure if I was still around to see it. This is important. It shows just how little I’ve followed her work in the years since. I don’t follow her updates. I wasn’t there. I’m active in Discord, just not in the space she’s in, and I have no interaction with her elsewhere.
From Fanfic to Original Fiction to an Offshoot Original Fiction
Over some time, my now-former-cowriter and I built out the This Thing of Ours series, starting with the Shattered Glass arc telling the story of Grace Colby, who finds out through her work that she was nearly an abducted child, a premise not involved in the original game at all. Georgia Tann is the inspiration for that line. The husband of one of my characters died several years before this, and that opened up a new rabbit hole in the squishy stuff I call a brain. I quickly outlined the story that came to mind because of that death, and set it aside with the many other story ideas I have. To me, this is just part of world-building no one sees, but that I have anyway to help me when writing. It feeds into character motivations and overall stories.
Two Shattered Glass books were published in 2022 and early 2024, and there were some delays. My now-former-co-writer and I couldn’t see eye-to-eye on some issues of timing and responsibility. When it became clear that that series was heading for even more delays, before we decided to part ways so I could get that series back on track, I shared this with Jen…
At this point, we are very, very far from the original game. I spent the next month hammering out the first draft. Since then, I’ve also brushed the dust off of many other manuscripts I’ve written over the years. (To be clear this is why I will seem to have a lot of books in a short time over the next year. It’s not the result of AI, but rather the result of deciding to revisit old manuscripts that had been completed at least as far as the first rounds of revisions. I’ll discuss in another post the very specific reason I had for holding on to them rather than finishing and releasing at that time.)
The Accusation
I was greasing my beautiful cast iron typewriter tonight, wondering how to re-ink the fabric ribbon, watching something or another on YouTube, I think to do with Audra Winter. I can’t remember now. I saw I’d been tagged by Darling, which seemed unusual since I’m so rarely in that group, and didn’t see why I’d be pinged. I tapped the notification, and was stunned to find out she was accusing me of plagiarism. I thought it would be a quick matter to clear up. After all, Sincerely, Serafina involves characters from my own books, characters with absolutely no potential game-equivalents. Yet she claims that a shared trope and a similar title mean plagiarism. Let’s go through these accusations.
The Trope Issue
This blew my mind. Tropes are the backbone of fiction. If sharing one trope equals plagiarism, or even many tropes, then every author marketing their books by tropes are also plagiarizing others. Advertising tropes is how books are sold these days. Every fanfic-turned-novel that follows their inspirations would be heeeeelllllaaaaa guilty, like The Love Hypothesis or Fifty Shades.
By the logic that dating a mob boss means plagiarism because it’s a trope, then Mario Puzo plagiarized The Godfather, because Kay Adams dated Michael Corleone.
That’s not how plagiarism works! Plagiarism is lifting words, characters, and worlds, from another and presenting them as your own, not sharing a single trope, not sharing any tropes. Look at Laura J. Roberts’s Beverly compared to R.J. Lewis’s Obsessed. That is plagiarism. I admit to being somewhat surprised that Fifty Shades isn’t considered to be plagiarism despite the numerous direct correlations to Twilight. So the bar is actually quite high. Yet the accusations against my book are the trope, and the title.
I posted the outline of Sincerely, Serafina, which will be toward the end of this post.
(We’ll get back to the accusation of the cover art being AI when it is not AI.)
- I didn’t realize Lemonade was renamed until tonight, yet I can explicitly explain why mine is named the way it is, and how it is directly related to the plot. Sincerely, Serafina and Anonymously, Annabeth are similar, but technically a title can’t be copyrighted. That aside, they aren’t the time, and mine is directly relevant to my book.
- The description of dating a mob boss? I guess Darling owns that trope, in the opinion of her long-time fan, Flapper? Since those are the things being used to say I plagiarized? (After Jen found the dates we each started our own fics, I saw that Lemonade had fake dating—again, I never read it.)
- If you admit it’s different, then fucking stop trying to forge ahead with accusing me of plagiarism!
- It is original, I made it. I have it layered in Procreate, as much as it makes sense since you do need to merge layers sometimes.
- No, Darling, you don’t own the trope, so stop trying to make it sound like another book about dating a mob boss must be a copy of yours.
- What marketing have you even done on a book you’re still trying to get picked up by a trad pub?!
A trope, though. Sharing a trope…plagiarism… I just…I can’t even on this one.
The Titling Issue
Jen found this for me:
So not even nine hours ago, I found out about this.
But again…👏guess👏who👏does👏not👏live👏on👏social👏media👏 And guess what! When I’m on social media, Darling isn’t who I follow. My world doesn’t revolve around her. She exists in the world, but is not a part of my world. I got tired of a writing group turning into her fan page, and she is not important enough for me to follow. I don’t follow her on Insta either, but even if I did, as we all know, Insta shares what you interact with there. For me, that’s largely been aviation stuff until I found out Threads and Insta are instantly linked a few weeks ago. Darling literally isn’t important enough for me to follow her or to interact with her content, and that Discord group isn’t something I check unless something prompts me to. I have a life busy enough that I don’t have time to read every post in the groups I actually do pay attention to. Maybe Darling and her followers don’t have better things to do than to center her in their world, but I sure do.
So no, I didn’t know about that title change. But regardless, my title is due to some very specific reasons that have to do with the plot. This will contain spoilers, and I’m sorry for that, but a pretty large influencer has me backed into a corner.
Some of the reasons, that should show enough, are as follows:
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- Italian Roots
The name Serafina is an Italian name, and she is a character with Italian heritage. The nickname Sera is akin to Sarah, which is the name she uses for a character in her manuscript. This is important to a later plot. If I decide to remove her heritage, then the incident that put her on Francesco’s map wouldn’t have happened. - Serafina’s Reflection
Serafina is a writer. In her pitch to Mr. Kensington, she name-drops Dangerous Liaisons as an inspiration. Dangerous Liaisons is a book written almost entirely as letters. What was a common valediction? Those of us who grew up hand-writing letters, and those of us who are secretly old enough to still write with antique fountain and dip pens, will know that “Sincerely” and then a comma and your signature was the way to close a letter. That book’s storytelling method is important because... - Francesco’s Realization
Serafina’s apartment is badly ransacked, and the remaining copy of her manuscript is torn up. Distressed, she turns her back on it. Francesco, realizing this really means something to her, retrieves the pieces later to tape back together. While doing so, he realizes Sarah isn’t just a character to Serafina. Sarah is Serafina herself, and the letters on her book are her sharing her own hopes and dreams. While it is not now, I wanted Sincerely, Serafina to be the last line of the book, though I’m now considering working this back in after all.
- Personal Inspiration
I’ve used “Sincerely Noelle” in one of my email names for years, until I decided to set up a new one to help further separate my emails.
(Word to the wise: Don’t let a writing forum circa 2012 decide a writing pen name for you unless you want them to troll you with a name that is a play on some names from a book you reeeeaaaallly don’t like…like Alys B.. Cohen…Alice Cullen…and if you do, don’t let stubborn pride get in the way of saying “lulz no.” These days, I use my legal middle names.) - The Flow
Putting them together, I liked the alliteration for the title. Titles are extremely difficult, and so, since I like this one, I decided to hang on to it.
- Italian Roots
Now, I recently found out AI supposedly uses Serafina a lot, and I did consider changing it for a very short time. But nothing else fits. I couldn’t figure out any older Italian female names that resonated with me that had a nickname that passed as a common English nickname. If I could have, it would have needed to flow with Sincerely, and if it didn’t, then it just wasn’t going to work for Francesco to have that realization through her writing. So I’d need to make some fundamental changes. Given those issues, and that I’ve known her as Serafina for too long, I decided to keep it.
And that, folks is the entire basis for accusing me of plagiarism! Lest you think I’m cherry-picking, I will share the entire Discord chat below.
About the Cover
She and her friends also claimed my cover was AI. It isn’t. I built it myself, with some of the layered files to prove it though Procreate does limit how many layers, and sometimes they need to be merged. I even discarded earlier designs because they weren’t cartoony enough for market trends and because Serafina’s left hand on her chest obscured her fingers, which I knew people might misread as a sign of AI because there is no such thing as a perspective where you wouldn’t see all of someone’s fingers.
Loads of fun when trying to duplicate an image, which is labeled as “inserted image,” when trying to decide which of your variations to use, and you reach the maximum number of layers and have to decide what to merge while working, or what to delete, or what.
Nod to the Ziegfeld Follies since I’m a fan of those lovelies. (Fun-for-me fact: I own some of Alfred Cheney Johnston’s original photographs of them, so the Follies signs as my little nod to them.) I am fully aware there is no vanishing point here, that the sidewalks, streetline, and rooftops aren’t all going to share one. This is known as a deliberate design choice since I had an idea of where I wanted them to be on the background.
I’ve been working on art longer than before Darling was a twinkle in her daddy’s eye. Through the decades, I’ve worked with everything from oils to acrylics to watercolors, compressed charcoals to vine and loose charcoals, graphites, colored pencils, and oil pastels (Sennelier is glorious), on various papers and canvases. I’ve worked with sculpting, carving, and countless textiles. I’ve learned traditional book-binding. For good measure, I am an expert couturière and corsetière, which affects the depiction of the hand of fabric.
Over the past decade and a half, I’ve done some digital work, though picked it up much more heavily in 2021 when getting physical media was harder to get due to Covid. Over the past couple years, I’ve been working on more realistic digital work, which one of my editors calls uncanny valley. Here and there, I’ve found little issues transferring painting skills to digital, but have figured it out, though.
The idea that cartoon imagery would be beyond me is, frankly, preposterous.
The thing I admit I do struggle with is a desire to try to make anything stylized too perfect, there are still some things that vex me, such as perspective with hands and feet. I struggled with that issue of the less-cartooney Serafina when it came to her hand on her chest and the way fring and fabric would move between her legs when in motion. My knowledge of how fabric moves can be a bother at times. As someone who actually does this stuff for real, I will continue to work on it and to work on adapting what I can do to different styles. So take your idea that a simple cartoon image must be too hard, and shove it.
Why This Hurts
Darling has a much bigger platform. Tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, and maybe TikTok. I don’t know since I don’t yet use TikTok when keeping up with social media is already a bane. I’m a small-time writer by comparison. And instead of asking me, instead of talking privately, she went straight to her audience, straight to public accusations, giving them no context, no mention of the many, many differences, no acknowledgement that the accusation rests on one trope and a similar title that I didn’t know she changed, and getting many of her followers riled up, despite knowing the plot of Sincerely, Serafina (in images 4 and 5 below). Talk about a lack of integrity and confidence in her work if one shared trope and an unfortunately similar title have resulted in her feeling so threatened.
If Darling truly believes that actual plagiarism has taken place, then I want her to show the evidence. Show me where I supposedly copied her. Show me how one trope and a title structure equal plagiarism. Show it.
And explain this: if I plagiarized her, why does Sincerely, Serafina reference events from my already-published books, one which, incidentally, was stolen as part of LibGen to be used to train AI? Events she never wrote? If I plagiarized, then sincerely, Serafina would be a copy of her book, which would be a copy of my books….
So which is it?
Because from where I stand, the answer is clear. Sincerely, Serafina is mine. It comes from my world, my canon, and my own head.
I don’t like drama. I don’t like disliking people. But I can’t stay silent while my integrity as a writer is being attacked by someone who should know better. My writing means too much to me.
So either she doesn’t know what plagiarism is, or she does know, and has chosen to manufacture drama to throw me under the bus for attention. Since she lacks integrity to show context or evidence, I’ve got to be the adult in the room and do it.
My husband put it dryly: “What a surprise. Two people from the same fandom might both be interested in the same trope.” Exactly.
And as I put it, quite sarcastically: If you think that nothing more than a trope and an alliterative valediction for a title equal plagiarism, then all you’ve proven is that your ego is so brittle that a little nobody like me can flatten it with a book you haven’t even read. You’re a bully, and a victim of nothing more than your own insecurity. How pathetic.
Where From Here?
Sincerely, Serafina might be delayed from the original October 1st release date, simply because of the stress I’m dealing with right now. But make no mistake: It will be released. I will probably end up dealing with her sycophantic followers review-bombing me over her lies, but it will still be released. I’ve dealt with trolls and bullies before. So if anyone who has a problem with this book being released can fuck off because it will be released.
If there’s a slight delay, it’s because I’m still revising the final chapters, and I refuse to do that under this cloud of toxicity. This book means too much to me for it to be poisoned by negativity. I won’t let something I love become tainted by the tantrums of an insecure little person who, lacking confidence in her own abilities, decided the only way to feel better was to play the bully and loudly showcase her incompetence at the craft she claims to love.
If that means I take an extra week or two, so be it. I’m not insecure enough to believe that tropes and titles equal plagiarism. I’m secure enough to know that Sincerely, Serafina can stand on its own against her book any day of the century. If someone else wants to take my outline and write their own version, they’re welcome to try. I’ve read far more books than Darling Santa Maria has probably ever managed to pick up, and I know a couple things that every writer should know: different takes on the same story create different stories, and a shared trope and similar title structure don’t even come close to making the same story in the first place. Too bad she doesn’t have the security, or the talent, to grasp that.
All the Discord messages until I finally walked out. Click to read full size.
I have no idea what she was trying to prove with a screenshot of when her piece was an AO3 fanfic called Lemonade.
