with Sephrena.

There is nothing new under the sun. Shoot, you'll find most of the stuff you see today in old folklore. Sex? Romance? Transformations? Furry? Zeus turning into a swan and bonking someone? It's pretty much all been done.

And on this site... well, in almost all of the stories, someone is going to turn into a girl, or wish he could turn into a girl, or wish she could change back, or whatever. The interest is in the details.

The idea is to put these well-used story elements together with some interesting and/or likable characters and maybe some unique settings, stir well, and give the reader a few minutes or hours of happy reading.

I freely admit to being an SF geek, and rarely read stories that don't have a science fiction or fantasy element. Still, I am an avid reader of Edeyn's Scenes of Hope and Dear Diary series. I have some of her other stuff (Sk8r Grrls) in my to do folder.

What I'm saying is that Edeyn's stuff is fresh and fun. So what if someone else at some other time has had similar ideas?

I read stories about 'new life and new civilizations' long before Star Trek came out. (To be more precise, I read the stuff that was written long before ST was conceived.) Asimov wrote The Fun They Had long before the personal computer was a gleam in Wozniak's eye -- yet the central device in that story was a 'teaching machine' that was a whole lot like a modern PC.

By the way, you can't copyright a story line. Roddenberry doesn't have a copyright on the idea of a faster than light quasi-military ship full of adventurers any more than Clarke has a copyright (or patent) on the idea of a geostationary communications satellite (even though it was originally his idea.)

You want superhero fiction? You don't have to buy from Marvel to get it. In fact, you don't have to buy anything.

OK... rant over.

Edeyn, please try to ignore the nay-sayers. You write good stuff.

Ray Drouillard

I'm glad you're not removing your stories or leaving the site- I kinda like having you around :)

As far as the original idea thing, I don't see why that would be an issue on a site like this. Personally, if I like a story, it's not gonna matter how similar it is to someone else's story, especially in a genre as incredibly limited as TG fiction. Doubtless everything I've written could be said to be derivative of someone else's work as well, if you looked hard enough online (please, don't. I feel proud of coming up with the ideas for my stories and don't want to see them eclipsed by better stories that were written before them :P)

Look at the stories here on this site. How many ways can you write a story where a boy becomes a female cheerleader without crossing the same ground as every other author who's wrote a story along the same lines? How many ways can an older sister convince her little brother to try on one of her old dresses? Even if the science changes, isn't one body swap basically the same as any other? The devil's in the details. Author writing style, word choice, even what events are chosen to focus in on and which ones are skimmed over. If two authors here were to take the exact same story and write it, corresponding with each other constantly to make sure they had the same events, the same characters, and even the same general dialogue, you would still see two very different stories that would appeal to different audiences. Where one person might focus on the clothes, shopping, and makeup aspects of the change, things that affect social standing and how others perceive the character, the other author may take the more introspective route, concentrating on the main character's emotions as they interact with others and how the emotional and psychological affects of the events change the character. Two authors, one story, two extremely different reads. I like to toss out references to my favorite authors and stories in my works that anyone who has read them will easily catch, but that doesn't mean I copy their stories.

Honestly, I think the biggest tell is that you received those comments and the PM HERE. Not at a site for writing anything that comes out of your head, not at a site designed to showcase progressive writing styles, not at a site that covers everything under the sun. It's a TG fiction web site. Every story is going to have a plot that boils down to being the exact same thing as every other story here, and you can probably take a random sample of any fifty stories and find at least three that could be clones of each other. It's gonna happen, there's no way to stop it, IT DOESN'T MATTER. 'Original idea' is all in the eye of the beholder.

Melanie E.