Working Weird

I didn’t know for so long. The weather outside was worse than the storm that shut everything down a few days earlier. Wild outside these cabin walls. Always seemed so. I looked at my watch. 10PM my time, different in Sedona. Chelsea and I talked.

‘Will the speaker feel justice by the end?’

‘I’m not sure. Somehow, yes. If it’s possible. If I decide.’

Chelsea said this was an opportunity to flip the genre expectation. I nodded and grinned, thinking about what Chelsea said then and earlier, then remembering something Laura said, something Connor said, something, many things, the plagiarist said.

We talked a little bit about Sam, Wendy, a couple of other people. Lili’s Bennington podcast came up. Theo. Also Jordan, I believe.

‘What do you want this essay to really be about?’

I hadn’t known for so long.

12AM my time, was starting to know.

It was an essay, it was war, it was whatever I wanted.

Wild weather outside for the rest of the night.

***

At the time, something very specific in mind. Feeling like this was the move, I asked people to keep the plagiarism to themselves. Laura was open. Kit favoured confrontation. Sister Neave spoke for silence. I agreed with Neave, albeit somewhat differently motivated. Connor listened and commented. Leigh said be careful. Time passed. Laura waited.

I did not live with the plagiarism well.

Some days, all day.

Other days, at the worst times, a split-second and I was back in the horror hours. The energy vampire controlling me. I didn’t need the company. Distant, difficult. Maybe just me, their father. How could they know why? Ups and downs. Many downs. I always apologised later though. That was something at least.

Gradually I wrote the situation in a Word doc.

What scared me initially was the possibility the plagiarist would win. That his book could do something. It wasn’t out of the question. New editions, translations, adaptations. This was how it usually went when you heard of such things. I felt sick.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen thousand words, maybe fourteen at longest. Never read correctly. Corny. Bitter and unwieldly, just like these pieces often seem. Not how I’d want to settle the matter. Worse, I came over every bit as insane and humourless as the plagiarist would have gamed out and banked on.

And then my life changed.

I barely spoke of the plagiarism.

Rarely thought.

Yet always there. Waiting. Lurking.

I couldn’t look at the plagiarist’s Goodreads page. What was I so scared of?

Winning awards, selling thousands, translations, I still found myself periodically returning to the doc. The words didn’t feel good to read. Little desire to remember, commit to trawling my memory for juicy new details or, by now entirely obvious, retrospective signs that the plagiarism had embedded itself in my psyche, spectre-form, for so long.

My life, as it had become, had been hard won. Walk away. Take the win.

And yet, in the end, I knew then and know now that I have to speak. Still. The stealthmare won’t stop until I say it. 

I revised the doc again.

Gian said send it. I waited to send, and then he was gone.

Witnessed Sam do his thing, experience freedom flow. Some similarities, some differences. It was off his chest, or that’s how it seemed from my remove. I shouldn’t have left my situation to fester so long. Playing a game with a sneakweasel who would never back down. Levels. Skill sets. I was a novelist, the plagiarist something else altogether.

Time had passed. The feeling wasn’t the same, but I worked on the essay some more.

Twelve thousand words down to eight. Then seven. Not editing so much to find the precision, merely removing brutal dunks on a man who by this point was a stranger longer than we’d been friends.

What was the point?

I’d won. A war fought with self. A different person. Big Tig said that I was sounding a lot more conservative. True, I kept talking about discipline, freedom and hard work in interviews. I understood where Tig was coming from. Really, I’d never felt less political. Maybe. Some things changed, some still the same. Pride demanding a violent revenge. Stubborn. Still afraid. Addicted to the affront, the hurt.  

Why not deal with it privately. Why write-

The plagiarist, a neighbour, once a friend, sold his house and left the city the month before his book was published. Incredible to know. One of many incredible to knows. Accumulative, and in context, equally a threat to my sanity and too funny to believe. Details too rich to leave and do nothing with.

The plagiarist was gone. Still, difficult to imagine I’d never see his face again.

Better for us all if this is done.

I’d worked with Chelsea previously, so we said let’s go.

***

The dawn of a dynamic fresh and tasty hell. I decided to read the plagiarist’s book in the days after the launch out of politeness and respect to our friendship.

A friendship that had seen better days, yes. But still.

 I knew if I didn’t read the novel in the first week or so, motivation would be a struggle. From the plagiarist’s mouth, from one of two others as well, the book had been passed on by all the usual places. Not that this had to mean anything. But it probably meant something.

When I first realized what the plagiarist had done, and the extent to which he’d done it, my initial reaction was amusement. Rather, I desired amusement. Aloof. At this point, a defence mechanism. Thirty-year vintage.

Prior to the launch, the plagiarist had told me that his next book after this one would be much better. Incredible honesty. Such candour. The plagiarist, always striving, forever grafting. He told me to remember his words, not to judge this one too much. Maybe don’t even bother to read. Strangest flex. But sure, okay.

 The plagiarist spoke this at Coffee1. Jumpy, tripping over words. Then for the first time, having been friends for two or three years, mere weeks before his launch, he offered me freelance copywriting work. Incredible friendship flex. I owe you, man!

I read the novel on Sunday, or perhaps Monday. Laura told me to not stay up too late. I was working the next morning at 5, which meant leaving the house at 4:30. Early nights and early rises. 

The day of the launch had been something.

Connor was staying at my house for two nights. The plagiarist, taken aback, questioned this as he began messaging Connor. Connor, commenting on a photo of me drinking water from a large NutriBullet cup, turned his attention back to his phone.

He is typing, stopped typing, is typing, stopped typing, is typing, and has stopped typing again, Connor said as the plagiarist finally messaged, inviting me, via Connor, to join them at Lo Selso before the launch.

The plagiarist, plagiarist’s wife, a couple of Christians, Connor and me.

The plagiarist, jittery again, delivered a rambling anecdote both Connor and I had heard before. Separate occasions but the plagiarist coming off book on both, waffle words about his mean father. This latest version seemed less impressive, lacking conviction. A deranged, mawkish play for sympathy. The Story of He: Flexes of a Sneakthief.

Later, at the launch, the plagiarist had mystifyingly, or so it felt to me, read, as he himself referred to it, an edited version of the novel’s opening chapter. Also strange was his continued skittishness as the launch plodded on into the live bands, or as was emphasized by him, several times, ‘the interesting bit of the evening.’ Sure.

 Back at home, reading, touching page, I felt sick. I knew what I was reading, I didn’t need anyone else to tell me – not that they didn’t anyway; offered to me, unsolicited, by various people over the following days, there was a clear aping of the style from my short fiction collection, All The Places We Lived, published a couple of years earlier.

Not plagiarism, I understand that.

But not nothing either.

Continuing further into the novel, the mimicry of my style dissolved. Irritated and unsettled, I felt relief still. Continuing on, strange things again. Plot points, direct lifts, miniscule adjustments to character names or settings and descriptions. I wrote them down, dozens of examples; an arbitrary seeming spread across the novel - almost as if they had been dropped in during a panicky draft edit. I felt nothing. Something. Numb bewilderment. Is that what it was?

Ripped the style. Gave up. Plagiarized. Gave up. A total shitshow of a novel.

I felt like I was going crazy.

But, two weeks of sobriety in the bank, I at least had time to think. How lucky for me.

Time passed. No contact from the plagiarist since the launch. I’d heard about him though. Three or four weeks later, the plagiarist purchased a piece from a close friend of mine’s recent collection. The plagiarist wasn’t friends with Jackson, and not once up to that point expressed any interest in his work. Quite the sudden and well-timed turn around. Four thousand, five thousand, six thousand. How much is silence? How much will it cost. Incredible to know.

Enough suddenly felt like enough.

The last thing I wanted was to speak openly and risk killing my friend’s sale. There had to be a release, something I could do. I tweeted that my book had been plagiarised, that I had a cross referenced file, that I forgave the plagiarist - whoever that might be.

The intention wasn’t to expose the plagiarist. No clues given to who the thief was. Fine, whatever. But the tweet existed in a kind of safe middle space, no follow up. I didn’t want a conflict. No reckoning. Only a record that needed marking.  

In a quote unquote shocking turn of events, later that evening the plagiarist messaged me. A weak, wallpaper-words football message. Totally out of character and contextless.

The plagiarist messaged Connor, now de facto man in the middle, minutes later. See above. Incredible to know, necessary to document.

I saw the move from the jump. There would be no reply from me to the plagiarist’s message. No replies to any of his messages again. Unreal to think. Unreal to do.

But the plagiarist saw the play and responded with his own move. Steady streams. Banal, generic, everyday manoeuvres. Never mentioning the plagiarism tweet now pinned to the top of my profile. Never mentioning his book. Always checking in with Connor afterwards, mentioning me in passing, time after time after time after time after time after time.

The plagiarist knew how to manoeuvre. Working weird, sliming his way through life.

If I cared - and despite not wanting to, I evidently, deeply, painfully did - I was stuck.

***

I hadn’t owned a phone for months. Sitting on the toilet at work, I downloaded WhatsApp to my new phone and logged on for the first time in several months. The plagiarist messaged within twenty minutes.

Something something selvedge denim, something something something what’s new?

I had to hand it to the plagiarist, his commitment to the bit was relentless. A most formidable persistency flex. Probably why he had a career outside of writing and I was cutting corners, shredding awkward work, and hiding in toilets at ten AM.

At some point, before that morning, it could have been days, weeks or months, I realized something. The plagiarism had been a clear decision. The plagiarist saw the opportunity to take my work, pain, life, whatever. Recycle it into something he perceived as more commercial. Risk versus reward. Knowing what he was doing was wrong but doing it anyway - and still refusing to take responsibility, even now.

Even now that his novel had sunk without a trace.

No sales. No exposure. No clout.

Still, I was another client to be steamrolled, gaslit into forgetting whatever I might have been angry about. A guileless war of attrition that was on some levels bizarrely admirable and amusing to me.

Until, reliably, it wasn’t.

After re-reading the first line of his message over and over, I resisted the urge to drop my phone into the toilet and instead walked downstairs to the office Starbucks. No response to the WhatsApp. Or the Messenger. Any. None. No.

The first final contact came. The plagiarist knew I didn’t want to talk to him, had ignored him for months, so liking a photo of my daughter on Instagram felt bogus and sinister to me, unmistakably a provocation. Recognising the change in tactics, I had to hand it to him. But I wasn’t amused. Finding myself at what, to me, felt like dangerously close to the edge, I had to work hard to stay in control. Prison wasn’t a joke in my family.

I was suffering. I wasn’t successful, nothing in my life had changed yet. There’s always context. The suffering, to me, in my life, at that moment was something else, something real. My context is me.

Back there again, all the pain.

I was thinking about the plagiarism, the plagiarist, all the time. How the plagiarist had tried to steal my life, my graft, for his gain - and all for his own flimsy ambitions.

A nightly walk, around nine, on the pavement outside the Robin Hood. The front door was open, a direct line to the garden at the rear. I felt dizzy. Inexplicable sensations of hearing the taste of lager, tasting the smell of cocaine. Momentarily, standing upright was difficult.

Sobriety was sticking, no problems.

But I didn’t need this.

***

The first time I met the plagiarist, the false first time.

The first time I met Connor, a real one.

A reading event at Dylan Thomas’ childhood home. Connor, grinning, said that the plagiarist was a terrible person and I’d regret meeting him. Thank you, Connor. Memories to cherish!

After Dylan’s house, Connor drove the three of us back to town. The plagiarist and I went out, Connor had a flight to catch early the next morning. The plagiarist appeared very popular and known. He asked a lot of questions, seemed keen to learn about me. I cringed at some of his opinions, but it felt comforting talking with someone else who’d eaten microwave pizza as a child.

We, the plagiarist and I, organized a couple of reading nights of our own. Soon weary of being treated like his employee, and to his obvious irritation, I said enough. The plagiarist didn’t like losing momentum. He’d worked hard to get where he was professionally. Perhaps understandable then that he cared about things like this, but I found it bizarre that the end of our, or really - his, reading nights was so embarrassing for him.

Theatre Bar, a couple of months later.

Feeling like too many readings and not enough reading.

I showed up with Felix and we walked to our seats with Blue Moons, a payday drink. I can’t recall if I got his or he got mine. Either way, one of us had the money that night. The launch was for Jack and Carrie, a surf noir novel and short story collection. The plagiarist was late for his reading, a short story that was, apparently, going to form the basis of his new novel. He arrived, started reading and-

Bro-

I know-

Felix and I left and walked up through town. The plagiarist had read with a cadence and style that was, to all who watched and listened, not his own; I wasn’t doing the heavy lifting on our nights anymore, but evidently that wasn’t to say he couldn’t use me in other ways.

Laura said it was weird and I should be careful around the plagiarist in future. I said it was fine, agreed I would be careful in future. This didn’t need to be anything. Part of the problem of overreacting, and being out of control at times, was that I didn’t react enough when other situations merited a stronger response. A kind of wrongheaded, guiltily inverse compensation. Something or other. Still doing the work, walking the miles on it.

Truth. I should have said something then.

The plagiarist would have flipped. Known.

I’d witnessed him at work. Been complicit in my silence, even curious or amused on occasion. That’s on me. I didn’t want to lose him as a friend at that point - I wasn’t even sure you could do that. No overreaction. No reaction at all. I soon forgot. The sneakrat would not forget such weakness.

***

The first time I met the plagiarist. The real first time. Standing on the wet, dirty Borders laminate, nodding and grinning as two men stood before a small crowd, the bedraggled man unpacking a box of new books while the other man downed red wine from a plastic glass. Felix was next to me, and we listened as the author began a preamble to his reading, something something Borges, talking and talking and talking.

During the interval, Felix and I discussed an award he had been shortlisted for. I hadn’t entered, or even been aware of the award, but still felt competitive. Felix worked hard, I knew I’d need to work as hard and then harder still. A few people at the reading knew of Felix, his name was being spoken a lot in that moment.

A man appeared and stood in between us, his attention on Felix, my presence not acknowledged. The man fixed his gaze on Felix, fake-laughed, fake-questioned. I knew who. Not that I felt any less small, but some friends and I had been lampooning a recently published short story of his regularly over the previous few days. A derivative grab at a style. Early consistency flex. Incredible to remember.

A shot of adrenalin as he who would become the plagiarist continued to ignore me, the price tag hanging off his All Saints jacket making me blush for some reason. Wild Borders moments.  

The plagiarist continued to apply laser focus onto Felix. I stood and grinned in his shadow. Barely concealing his indifference as Felix opened up the moment to introduce me, the plagiarist didn’t know who I was and didn’t care much to know either. Fine. No love. No problem. It just wasn’t my time yet!

The real first time we met. Finally recalled.

A year of sobriety and all I got was this lousy recollection.

***

Six months before the plagiarism.

Connor and Celyn, now living in northern England, were staying nearby for a private Burial gig later in the week. Celyn was at dinner with a friend, Tess, Lane’s stepsister. Connor had arranged to meet him, the future-plagiarist, at St. Cannas. I initially turned down Connor’s invitation to join, knowing that we were meeting the next morning to discuss his plans for ULTRA:, the documentary he was making; I didn’t want to discuss the doc in the plagiarist’s company - it felt grimly possible that the plagiarist might try and bludgeon his way to involvement - but figured this was probably Connor’s feeling too; it was. No problem.

I approached Connor and the plagiarist in the pub, the pair of them sitting either side of an upcycled barrel. Their conversation ended abruptly. A strained two hours followed.

The next morning, over espresso at Brød, Connor confirmed it. They had been discussing the plagiarist’s impending new book. Having finally secured a publisher the previous week, the plagiarist told Connor that he was viewing writing differently now. Time to reconsider. His business was growing, where the focus needed to be. Maybe another book later. Maybe not. Writing for fun. He wanted that excitement back. Nothing serious. Writing wasn’t serious. Not for the plagiarist. In his opinion, his punchily honest boy made good take, realistically no one should be too serious about their writing. Groundwork flex. Respect it!

A sidebar. On the street outside St Cannas the previous evening, the plagiarist revealed for the first time that he was putting his house on the market.

Soon, we’d no longer be neighbours.

***

Time had passed, we hadn’t spoken. After failing in his provocation of liking a phot of my daughter, I thought it might be over. But there was more. I was about to be treated to the exemplar of the plagiarist’s relentless grind.

What’s up, hope you’re good, I’ve got a spare tick–

The plagiarist - who it would seem still hadn’t seen the pinned plagiarism tweet, let alone felt the urge to ask me about it - wanted to reconnect. Month after month after month of refusing to respond to him. There was no quit in him.

Had I just been too busy to reply? Who could say? Certainly not the plagiarist.

Maybe I was crazy. Perhaps it had all been in my head. The plagiarist’s book was nothing like mine. His synchronized messages to me and Connor coincidental, maybe even a figment. That time he told Connor he was ripping off a Thom Lien story was… actually what was that? A rare moment of honesty, or perhaps a catastrophic admission. It matters little. A professional life built on following trends, taking and rearranging words, selling a narrative. No shame, no guile, no mercy. The plagiarist had worked hard and done well for himself.

As I was to discover further down the line, I was probably best suited to being the heel in Literary Wales. Smarter schools, higher ideas, success. Villain territory.

And wasn’t it refreshing to see it happen this way around? The plagiarist was simply doing what anyone should. Take from the rich. Rob them blind. I had made the situation easier for him by telling friends and acquaintances to not say anything, either publicly or privately. To never confirm the problem if the plagiarist asked – which, of course, he didn’t. Not directly. By never asking anyone, he would never have to face it. I got that. 

But from my perspective, attempting to deny the plagiarist a right to reply, and frustrate him into admitting to me what he had done, simply allowed him to press ahead as if nothing had happened. Some strategy.

Christian, professionally and personally connected to the plagiarist, spoke it in a tweet a week after the launch: All The Places We Lived should be considered part of a contemporary canon for ‘most influential Welsh cultural output’. Thank you, Christian – means a lot!

I bumped into Christian several times over the months that followed, the tension unbearable and hilarious, forever unaddressed. Rather than appreciating his tweet, I resented him for not speaking to me about the obvious problem. Maybe fair, maybe not. I would have been a man and said it myself, but I figured I couldn’t bring it up in case Christian took it back to the plagiarist and polluted my silence. I don’t know if he would have. Still, we chose. Christian went one way, in more ways than one, while I went another.

If it was hard for me to comprehend how the plagiarist thought he could be so flagrant without repercussion, it shouldn’t have been. I thought back to earlier in our friendship. The plagiarist told me how before university exams he would sit at the front of the bus and hustle, work anyone he could find, for crib notes like he was a latter day Zack Morris.

Joe Rogan Huh sound.

I flinched when he said it.

Right.

Didn’t know self.

Huh, okay.

Couldn’t face the conflict.

Okay.

Remembered much later, eventually grasped it.

That’s right, man, you got it. You understood that shit.

The plagiarist wasn’t used to hearing no. He knew how to work, keep going, get things done. Belligerence flex. Determination flex. No need to get away undetected, only unconfronted.

No matter that I’d dropped off his radar for months. The plagiarist could forgive, forget, all in the name of keeping himself moving forwards. Keep messaging. All mediums. Only a matter of time before I’d cave.

I knew the plagiarist’s entire routine by now. Engagement was an invitation to let him work his grift. All I could do, as far as I could see in that moment, was keep on ignoring him and hope he’d eventually stop.

Whatever it was I thought I was doing, it wasn’t working. He would stop. Start again. Arbitrary times. Wild times. Somehow I was under his control, seemingly at his mercy.

Hindsight, ridiculous.

The moment, nightmarish.

Maybe seven months before I read the plagiarist’s book, I found myself under nuclear lights in the waiting room at Heath A&E, a jagged split on my forehead; tasting blood, staring at a lunatic lie prostrate, wailing, berating his mother. This wasn’t a life for me. A different time for a different time. Post-Heath felt like a reset. Cleansed, I gave myself up and got to work. Walked the miles. Touched the keys again. Rejuvenation didn’t happen overnight - what truly can be achieved swiftly.

I was sliding back. Another night, another call from the plagiarist.

Sweating, humid, crouching in the garden. Eleven, close to twelve, listening for the frogs. A flat, jagged rock the size of my hand cooled my forehead.

What to do.

My silence, infuriating and unsettling as it must have been for the plagiarist, was responsible for the toxicity I carried around. Constantly on edge. Waiting for the missive. Knowingly putting myself through something so ridiculous and painful, at the expense of mine and, worse, my family’s happiness.

I realised this wasn’t the first time I’d done this to myself, not even close.

Had to be the last. Time to walk the miles again.

***

Time passed, feeling good. I took delivery of my new novel, a midday glare in my eyes as I spoke with my publisher, watching as he unpacked my author copies from an old cardboard box, the same box he always seemed to have. Release day. No launch event due to Covid. I was fine with that. Worked out well enough down the road.

There had been no contact from the plagiarist.

Good days, good weeks, good months.

I was lean and back working for myself. It still didn’t pay to spend a moment thinking about what had happened with the plagiarism. No thoughts. A fierce routine established. Like Shelia said, control your mind. I knew what to do. Ways of being only.

No contact.

Release day. No contact. Nothing but a sunny evening and-

Hello Dom I Missed You!

To message me now, on this day, at this time of this day, the arrival of my novel, a moment where he might reason I would feel happy, open-minded, susceptible to feelings of generosity, forgiveness, and, for all he knew, already under the influence of alcohol, ready to let my guard down. I knew it made total sense that he would try this, even after all the time that had passed.

Time I had lost forever.

Time I had gradually – eventually – used to reconfigure myself.

I left the phone in the bathroom as I hurried my eldest daughter out of the shower, not mentioning anything to Laura as we went through the usual bedtime routine. The girls were exhausted that evening and flopped into bed and blackout silence without any hustle for extra time.

We had a quiet evening.

By that, I mean I was quiet.

Lost an evening. I messaged Connor and, yes, of course, the plagiarist had messaged Connor immediately after messaging me. The vaguest questions. Dom’s Banalities.

Lost the next morning.

Except I lost it on a run out of the city, thirty-five kilometres, hills, dirt, animals. Listened to headphones for some, nature for some. No self. Thoughts about Laura, the girls, childhood dreams, Masvidal vs Askren, Jordan was right, Joe was right, Dicky was right, Xavier was right. Hot day. Glad for the heat. No sweat.

Everything came from self.

Everything for self, everything for the work.

No time. Too busy for this. A corny bluffer ripped my first book. Wild mimetic desires. Was it worth it, bro-

Nope. None of my business.

Levels and layers to this game. Whatever happened, happened. I blocked the plagiarist at every turn. Quietly, finally done. Dom would always be Dom. The eternal plagiarist flex. He was welcome.  

***

Too much other work, an investment to complete. Watched Jeen-Yuhs, Red Rocket, The Nest. Calmer weather. Return to edits. Laura said to beam back down to earth from the spaceship. Controlled my mind. Nearly. Almost there. Rewrite. Edits. Back to the ethic. Warmer weather. Finished him: Fatality! No need to speak on it again. Might be mad I ever gave it my attention. Funny how that goes.

The time that passed, passed.

My life that changed, changed.

Here’s the one reply you’ll ever get from me, Dom.

Thank you for helping me make this.