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Aug. 15th, 2006 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiThis has definitely been the worst month of my life. Not a day has gone by that I haven't sobbed with my family and friends.
I got back to Miami on the sixth, and three days later, my parents arrived with my sister and her 14 month old baby. We spent all of Wednesday and Thursday in mourning, a sort of semi-shiva at my parents', and the funeral was Friday. More shiva and a memorial service on Sunday, and some day I'll be able to get my memories under control and write about how it feels to hold your sister as they remove her husband's breathing tube, or see him in his bed ten minutes later and know that there's nothing of him left there at all, or watch as his casket is raised into a crypt right under a skylight, right under the sky that he'll never lift his daughter into.
It's insane, when you think about it. In 42 hours, I went from having the time of my life at Lumos to my brother in law, who I've known since he was 19, lying in a hospital bed with his brain waves flatlined.
Hug the people you love - spend time with them even if you've only met them online - because you never know when you're going to lose them. Brian was an amazing, active, dynamic, energetic and sweet guy, and we'll never have him back again.
And, of course, amid all that, I had YMs and emails calling me a plagiarist because I didn't do MLA citations for a fic that I wrote over five years ago, or because I stupidly forgot to cite a Prefab Sprout song, or a Shel Silverstein poem, or three lines from Cicero. Yes, I was stupid to forget to cite them, and I am sorry that I did, and that in the ensuing years, I didn't go back and reread the fic and realise it at some point along the way. I went onto FA yesterday and fixed them there, and I think I've caught everything, and I don't think it's up anywhere else but on the Paradise list - I've emailed Yael about editing those in the files section. If I didn't, please feel free to follow FA's copyright infringement policy from the Terms of Use - if you do, the usual procedure will kick in as it did this past weekend, and I'll have to correct it or have the fic pulled down. I don't know, at this point, if I'm going to opt to leave everything up there going forward, but I also don't feel capable of making that kind of decision at this time. It's been a very long month and a very long week.
There's a discussion I tried to have five years ago about plagiarism - what is it, where are the lines drawn, how do we cite, how should we cite - but it often disolved and devolves into extremism. I hope it stops because there are some terrific people - and some people who are complaining about me in this past week - who have used lines from other sources in the fics they've written and haven't done MLA style citations, so maybe we do need to again revisit the issue of disclaimers and what should and should not go into them. The discussion didn't go anywhere five years ago, and when I've brought it up since then, it's never gotten much attention. Maybe now, it will.
I got back to Miami on the sixth, and three days later, my parents arrived with my sister and her 14 month old baby. We spent all of Wednesday and Thursday in mourning, a sort of semi-shiva at my parents', and the funeral was Friday. More shiva and a memorial service on Sunday, and some day I'll be able to get my memories under control and write about how it feels to hold your sister as they remove her husband's breathing tube, or see him in his bed ten minutes later and know that there's nothing of him left there at all, or watch as his casket is raised into a crypt right under a skylight, right under the sky that he'll never lift his daughter into.
It's insane, when you think about it. In 42 hours, I went from having the time of my life at Lumos to my brother in law, who I've known since he was 19, lying in a hospital bed with his brain waves flatlined.
Hug the people you love - spend time with them even if you've only met them online - because you never know when you're going to lose them. Brian was an amazing, active, dynamic, energetic and sweet guy, and we'll never have him back again.
And, of course, amid all that, I had YMs and emails calling me a plagiarist because I didn't do MLA citations for a fic that I wrote over five years ago, or because I stupidly forgot to cite a Prefab Sprout song, or a Shel Silverstein poem, or three lines from Cicero. Yes, I was stupid to forget to cite them, and I am sorry that I did, and that in the ensuing years, I didn't go back and reread the fic and realise it at some point along the way. I went onto FA yesterday and fixed them there, and I think I've caught everything, and I don't think it's up anywhere else but on the Paradise list - I've emailed Yael about editing those in the files section. If I didn't, please feel free to follow FA's copyright infringement policy from the Terms of Use - if you do, the usual procedure will kick in as it did this past weekend, and I'll have to correct it or have the fic pulled down. I don't know, at this point, if I'm going to opt to leave everything up there going forward, but I also don't feel capable of making that kind of decision at this time. It's been a very long month and a very long week.
There's a discussion I tried to have five years ago about plagiarism - what is it, where are the lines drawn, how do we cite, how should we cite - but it often disolved and devolves into extremism. I hope it stops because there are some terrific people - and some people who are complaining about me in this past week - who have used lines from other sources in the fics they've written and haven't done MLA style citations, so maybe we do need to again revisit the issue of disclaimers and what should and should not go into them. The discussion didn't go anywhere five years ago, and when I've brought it up since then, it's never gotten much attention. Maybe now, it will.
