Theft by the customer
Last week I experienced the one thing that every writer hates more than rejection: theft by a customer. A customer’s account on an agency site had expired without buying my article. That’s not unusual. I recycled the piece, following approved procedures, and submitted it with a few changes to another customer through the same agency. It immediately bounced back to me as plagiarized!!
This made no sense to me, and I immediately got suspicious. I did a Web search on the first sentence of the article. There was a match — on the site of the customer that had lapsed without buying my article! They had published it without bothering to pay.
In this case, the story had a more or less happy ending. The agency made good on the article, paying me for it even though they must have absorbed the loss. I say “more or less happy” only because a truly happy ending would have given the customer a bath in boiling oil.
(more…)
What if the Reconquista hadn’t happened and the Iberian peninsula remained primarily in Muslim hands? What if Al-Andalus, rather than Christian Spain, had sent explorers and colonists into the New World? What if its people had colonized what we call Manhattan, mixing heavily with people from other cultures? This alternate history forms the basis of a series of mystery novels by Roberta Rogow. I’ve read the six that have come out so far and enjoyed them. The island is called “Manatas” in this version of history. Each book is presents one or more murders whose investigation falls to Halvar, a North European employed by the Sultan. The books so far are: