Shooting stars, shape shifting and stealing intellectual property

At the end of a terrible week of indecision and self analysis, I woke up this morning with shooting star ideas. The kind that fizz in your stomach and arch through your body and burst into an explosion of ideas that you just know will shine brightly for a long time. I was so excited that I got up and started typing straight away.

Two things happened this week to make me sit up and take notice. One was a conversation with several people about what I write. It was along the lines of ‘why are you writing fiction when you are qualified to write about writing (particularly narratives) and to write non-fiction? In fact, you are an expert in identity construction.’ This conversation consisted of me and several people from a wide ranging area of my life, literary and academic and friends, all saying the same thing. You could have a career in non-fiction. The second event was a publication date for my book ‘Health, Identity and Women; a new perspective.’ As if to underline and highlight in the former in fluorescent yellow, my first book will be on the shelves worldwide. These emerging questions rankled me all week.

So, what did I decide? That I will still write fiction because I love it and if an agent takes up my latest offering then brilliant, I have lots of ideas for the next. Also, I’ll still be writing about fiction and the process in terms of narratives, fiction and real-life. But for a while I will concentrate on writing the book that needs to be written. I *thought* for a while it was one about how an imaginary someone falls in love and has problems with friends and parents and then resolves them. But it turns out that a whole new non-fiction book about identity is brewing itself and shape-shifting in my compost bin of a mind, ready to fertilise itself into existence later on today! It has taken a while to manifest itself and a lot of Internet searches to find that, incredibly, no one has written it already. During the past month there has been an eerie, malleable, play-doughy feel about this idea, which has been spinning in its own little universe into *the* book that I am exited about. I have a strange feeling that all roads led to here.

With this in mind I have changed my websites and tidied my desk. Looking at my research consultancy website made me realise that I had given away many of my ideas, and by the amount of hits and length of stay on particular pages of the site (the ones with the ‘Here’s How It Work’ explanation) it is a fair bet that a few unscrupulous people, who can’t think for themselves, have taken those ideas and used them. Thank you, Google analytics, for providing me with this invaluable and detailed information. In fact, I have a little evidence that this has happened and have taken down all my methodology. I feel sad about this as I naively thought that no one would steal my intellectual property, but hey-ho, if they can’t think for themselves than they won’t have any new ideas to follow my work up, or the ten years of research and evidence gathering I have put in. What was up there was only the bare bones of a very deep theory which, thankfully, is now protected by copyright and defendable. Ironically, it is old theory, usurped by the new, peer reviewed theory that actually refutes it in my book. And nothing whatsoever to do with my new book. To use it in any useful way and refer to it will need the knowledge and knowledge of evidence behind it. It brings to mind the concept of no short cuts in life, or quick fixes.

So, matey, yes, you who took the stuff off my website and tried to use it as your own ideas, you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when eventually someone catches you out and you can’t explain the theory behind it to a room full of people. Using it out of the context it was written in will only show what a massive gap in knowledge you have. And then, of course, you will know deep down that the original idea isn’t yours. Forever. Well done.

So, as new era starts, I say goodbye to love for a while and hello to identity construction. I’ll write the proposal and send it and keep my fingers crossed and be happy that, in the end, even though the thought of it was hyper-seductive, I didn’t sell out. I’m starting to feel a warm glow of belonging here now I’m back amongst my own meteorite storm of ideas.