Hello!

When I read the rules of The Ink Well before posting my short stories there, I didn't find anything that would have prevented me from posting (or cross-posting) my own posts that I had personally written, and that were purely a figment of my own imagination, as in reflections of my dreams.

Still, I got this response to my short story "Vertigo" from @jayna:

And it got me puzzled.

If dreams are not "original work", or "fiction", what are they?

You could of course argue, that personal experiences are not fiction, but I'd wager that'd go in the face of many fiction writers who use their own experiences of the world in their books.

Also you could make the claim that since a dream is not something I can fully control, it isn't an "original work", but you'd anger those who painstakingly went through each memory or figment of the dream and cultivated it into a working, readable story.

In the case of plagiarism, there is always the possibility that someone has written something similar, and that's frankly the risk you are willing to take when you 'put the pen on paper'. You just can not be sure. And I for one am not going to read through everything ever written just to check if someone has written something similar. I don't have time for that.

Now that someone took it up, I got worried, and run the text through a plagiarism checker.

Turns out it wasn't plagiarized. I am quite relieved now.

Update: Since we apparently weren't in the clear yet...

I got a reply from @Jayna, where she apologized for the confusion, and told me that I broke the rule #4 for crossposting previously posted content.

I wanted to be sure so I re-re-read the rules, again:

I still don't see my old post as a rule-breaker. There is clearly an exception to the rule #4, and my post falls perfectly in line of that particular exception.

I wonder what the problem actually is. This is a bit silly if you ask me.