Every Line of You

Naomi Gibson’s author profile says that she was an art history major turned floristry student who just published Every Line of You as her first novel. She wrote that she started it right after I published my book on Amazon in May 2018 and by August, she had already gotten a literary agent. She then Tweeted that in October 2018, her book was only half-written. Two weeks later it was finished with 30k more words — which is odd since the writing process tends to start out fast, but once the midpoint is reached, it slows down as writers have to deal with more variables and tie up loose threads. I’ve studied the patterns of fan fic authors and this pacing tendency is almost a natural law of human writing abilities. It is very odd that her process is inverted.

Her father is a medical doctor, not a publishing insider, so it is also very odd that she was picked up by an agent so quickly, especially with a less than half finished manuscript, no internet footprint, and no publishing track record. Her internet footprint is very fresh, only emerging back in late 2017. That is why I think it is possible that she isn’t a real person and has been created to serve as the face for a literary brand fed with products that are rapidly produced with the aid of a software package. I screenshotted her Twitter feed in which, after completing her first novel, she claimed to produce a new novel every four months. That is unusually fast.

Naomi Gibson Writes — https://www.naomigibsonwrites.com/ What’s in that contract, dear? Are you signing up to be a face for a brand that is used for unknown purposes?

Her identity aside, the Goodreads reviews of her recently released first novel, Every Line of You have been quite bad, even though it is getting a wide, international release, so I’m quite curious about what I’m going to find when I read it. It will come out in English in a week, but because I’d like to get a head start, I’m going to read the earlier released German version and write down the page numbers of plot overlaps with my 2018 book, My Adorable Apotheosis and the extended version of this same material called A Blazing New World.

I became suspicious about how her book was constructed after reading the blurb announced on The Bookseller in 2020 and feeling concerned by how it could equally apply to my own novel. The author was tweeting regularly about her progress in producing sequels at a rapid pace and I’ve noticed that extremely prolific new authors are often generating content with dubious methods, so I contacted her agent and her publisher and received an email from her agent assuring me that Naomi’s work was 100% original. I’ll let you be the judge. She is using a lot of common tropes, but when the list gets long enough, it appears that she mined not only tropes or ideas from books like mine but also lengthy sequences of plot elements and I don’t think that is okay.

After a quick read, it is clear that the character profiles in each book overlap:

Pete = Dodo, a privileged guy who lives with his mom, offered friendship to the protagonist, and made unwelcome sexual advances. Due to a failed implantation of a symbiotic AI medical device, he has trouble walking.
Henry = Cara, the protagonist’s dead younger sibling who was referred to as the little sunshine of the family. She has intrusive flashbacks of this sibling.
Mom = Mom, the protagonist’s mother who has been disabled by grief over the protagonist’s dead sibling who was lost in an accident for which the protagonist feels responsible, even though it wasn’t her fault. The mother has plans for her daughter that her daughter doesn’t like. Because of the grief and the plans, the daughter feels entirely unloved and neglected by the mother.
Emma = Lori, the protagonist’s friend who abandoned her and betrayed her when she needed her most.
Emma’s mother = Dr. Scarlett, the woman is married to a powerful yet evil man who is deprived of his power when the protagonist retakes control over the machine.
AI Henry/Agent Hall = Chess, the protagonist’s imaginary best friend and all powerful, controlling Jeckyll/Hyde lover who offers bad solutions to her worst problems and gets her into a lot of trouble.
Alix = Lydia, the young woman protagonist who has experienced a childhood trauma and a horrific car accident involving scraping metal, burning rubber, and blood pouring out of her broken arm. She soothes herself by looking at stars, eating, listening to music, and engaging in technical work involving a powerful machine.

A more focused readthrough reveals the plot overlaps below. I record the page numbers so that they can be charted out in a way that allows for the identification of sequences of consecutive plot elements that express the same themes in the same way in both books. One cannot copyright ideas, but one can copyright the method through which those ideas are expressed.

The page numbers below are from the extended version of My Adorable Apotheosis (2017), submitted to agents and published under the name A Blazing New World (2018). This is a first pass and the specificity and page number accuracy tends to improve on a second pass. The German title of Every Line of You is Seeing What You See, Feeling What You Feel. For the sake of simplicity, in my figures, I’ll stick to the original, English titles.

Every Line of You vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

Opening image of a trapped, grieving teenaged girl with no support at home.
1. The story opens with an AI that can control people’s lives and do almost anything. We learn that in this story, it is going to be intimately involved in a young woman’s life. (Gibson p. 7) (Hacker p. 4)
2. We meet a teenage girl who has lost her her younger sibling. Her father has abandoned her and her mother. She is haunted by the death of the child and doesn’t directly address her grief. She doesn’t seem to have dealt with it. (Gibson p. 18) (Hacker p. 18, 42)
1. Her mother is grieving so intensely that she ignores her and doesn’t feed her. (Gibson p. 20) (Hacker p. 23)
2. She is not popular and takes refuge from her pain in technical/school work and dreams of going away to college. (Gibson p. 26) (Hacker p. 23)
3. The dead child is described as the little sunshine of the family. (Gibson p. 16) (Hacker p. 17)
She tries to use technology and education to escape her disastrous family.
1. She meets a group of young women who are outside smoking. They are pretty, popular, and they treat her like an outsider, making fun of her. (Gibson p. 23) (Hacker p. 52)
2. She is befriended by a tech-obsessed guy named Peter/Pete who talks with her about tech with an irritating amount of confidence and asks her to meet up with him. He seems untrustworthy. (Gibson p. 38) (Hacker p. 38)
3. At school/work, she is bullied by her colleagues for being different. (Gibson p. 23) (Hacker p. 39)
4. Even though she thinks the AI friend can’t follow her around, it turns out to be able to follow her, watch her, and speak with her whenever and wherever via her phone. She is surprised, but takes this in stride. It can find out any information about her colleagues. (Gibson p. 25, 86) (Hacker p. 85)
5. There is a mean, female character who primarily cares about hierarchy and revels in the protagonist’s low status. The protagonist [gets assistance from her AI friend] in finding out about the mean character’s love life. (Gibson p. 27) (Hacker p. 27, [106]) — in all of the books I’ve seen that have been constructed with a particular algorithm, whenever something similar happens twice in the copied book, it will appear in the reverse order within the copy.
She enters the heart of a large, dangerous machine and is offered a job working for it.
1. She enters a restricted area of a machine after following a friend’s lead and this accidentally makes her a target of unwanted attention. She escapes unscathed, or so it seems. This is the moment that her real problems begin to develop. (Gibson p. 35) (Hacker p. 57)
2. Because of her visit to the heart of the dangerous machine, she is given access to a high status job that brings her in contact with grown ups for the first time in her life (in a non teacher-student context). (Gibson p. 35) (Hacker p. 63)
3. The person who introduces her to this job is mysterious. (Gibson p. 35) (Hacker p. 57, 70)
4. A man reaches out to her in a half-hearted way in a classroom environment, but makes no progress or connection. (Gibson p. 36) (Hacker p. 37, 96)
5. A portrait of a traumatized woman scientist who hates her job and life emerges. She serves as the protagonist’s female mentor – mother figure. (Gibson p. 47) (Hacker p. 47, 74)
Her friend who is not connected to this machine likes her romantically, but she isn’t sure that she likes him.
1. The (AI) friend tells her that a certain guy likes her, even though she didn’t ask. This makes her feel uncomfortable. (Gibson p. 38) (Hacker p. 39, 85)
2. Her only human friend is an awkward guy who is romantically interested in her, even though she doesn’t like him like that. There are some unusual euphemisms in this scene. (Gibson p. 38) (Hacker p. 48)
3. She meets the mother of the awkward guy at his mother’s apartment. She is eager for any form of connection but feels like she is intruding and is blown off. (Gibson p. 39) (Hacker p. 29)
4. The awkward guy offers her alcohol and she has little experience with alcohol. (Gibson p. 44) (Hacker p. 49)
5. She directly describes what it is like to be sexually approached by this awkward guy that she doesn’t really like. He does something to her ear that she doesn’t like. (Gibson p. 46) (Hacker p. 55)
She consults with a female mentor and we learn about her attitudes towards her career and future.
1. She has a mentor who feeds her attitudes about work. She/he is cynical and jaded, giving up on fighting for her life and passing on her recommendations to the next generation. (Gibson. p. 47) (Hacker p. 45, 74)
2. Her parents had plans for her future that she doesn’t agree with and she feels bad for not wanting to pursue them. (Gibson p. 48) (Hacker p. 32) She expresses uncertainty about her plans for her future career on the same page in both books. (Gibson p. 47) (Hacker p. 47)
1. There is an attitude of dislike for the disconnection of laboratory work from real life and real problems. (Gibson p. 49) (Hacker p. 38)
2. Skepticism about these attitudes drives her away from people and towards her AI/machine/boy friend. Throughout the book, it wants to incorporate her more intimately into its systems, but she is afraid and reluctant. (Gibson p. 50) (Hacker p. 41) On the same page in both books she is offered a drug like experience by a male character. (Gibson p. 50 ) (Hacker p. 50)
3. The AI/machine mirror image of herself has been investigating the puzzle of how to get closer to herself and has found a way to make itself smaller so that it can go with her everywhere. She is threatened with having such a system implanted into her nervous system. This doesn’t sound good. (Gibson p. 51) (Hacker p. 178) There is an analogous situation earlier in my book involving a boyfriend and drugs. (Gibson p. 50) (Hacker p. 50)
We see her ineffective coping methods for her fundamental problem: reconnection after trauma.
1. Her bedroom is unnervingly quiet. She prefers background noise. (Gibson p. 54) (Hacker p. 55)
2. She uses music to calm herself. (Gibson p. 55) (Hacker p. 51)
3. She has flashbacks to visions of her dead sibling. (Gibson p. 56) (Hacker p. 51)
4. She has experienced a horrific car accident with scraping metal, burning rubber, and a badly bleeding compound fracture. She focuses on the horror of blood coming from her arm. (Gibson p. 56) (Hacker p. 181)
5. She likes to look at stars or eat whenever she feels upset. It is a recurring thing. Alix likes noodles while Lydia likes pizza. (Gibson p. 60) (Hacker p. 54)
She tries to use technology to solve her fundamental problem.
1. She takes public transportation to go to the laboratory to get closer to a machine that she believes has the power to solve her problems of powerlessness and loneliness. (Gibson p. 69) (Hacker p. 173) Similarly, she goes to the laboratory to meet a maternal figure who doesn’t offer her any comfort. (Gibson p. 71) (Hacker p. 71)
2. At the lab, she deals with a conflict with a student and a goofy professor with a silly name who takes the side of the student even though she was the victim. The consequences for her future career are dire. She tries to find comfort from her parents but gets none. (Gibson p. 72) (Hacker p. 141, 165)
3. The computer interface implants in this sci-fi world are like biological creatures that burrow inside, grab on to a person’s nerves, and take over. She is horrified but fascinated by them. (Gibson p. 77) (Hacker p. 175) Similarly, on the same page in both books, she is considering a scene in which a woman’s body is invaded by a biological object and she is horrified and fascinated by it. (Gibson p. 77) (Hacker p. 77)
4. After losing consciousness in the laboratory and using a miniature machine interface device she is now in direct, verbal contact with her other self. (Gibson p. 78) (Hacker p. 64)
5. Contact lenses controlled by the machine can alter what she sees. The machine doesn’t have trouble hacking people’s bodies that have the proper equipment and using it to experience what they experience. (Gibson p. 79) (Hacker p. 90) Similarly, on the same page, a description of a system that allows a pair of people to directly experience what the other person is experiencing via a futuristic electronic interface is described. (Gibson p. 79) (Hacker p. 79)
She tries to deal with her fundamental problem via vengeance against a woman who committed an injustice against her and had no empathy , but this didn’t help.
1. She is threatened with a type of trial by an authority that will determine her future career success. The maternal figure tells her to prepare for it and prepare for the worst. (Gibson p. 98) (Hacker p. 218) Similarly, on the same page in both books, she is threatened with a trial by a professor who will determine her future career success. (Gibson p. 98) (Hacker 94)
2. A more privileged woman is determined to get the protagonist kicked out of her institution and is willing to be unjust at this trial so that she can maintain her status. The trial goes badly for the protagonist (Gibson p. 100, 105) (Hacker p. 218, 221) Similarly, the professor is status obsessed and determined to kick women like the protagonist out of his institution. The trial goes badly for the protagonist. (Gibson p. 100) (Hacker p. 100)
3. To get vengeance against a more privileged woman who committed an injustice against her, the AI friend helps the protagonist evade a security system and physically break into this woman’s domain. (Gibson p. 84) (Hacker p. 239) Similarly, on the same page in both books, a man breaks into a woman’s home. (Gibson p. 84) (Hacker p. 84)
4. She uses her invasive opportunities to get private information that can destroy her enemy’s entire world. (Gibson p. 106) (Hacker p. 107, 244)
5. This destruction leads to a job promotion involving a sexy guy she likes and access to power.. but also proximity to the danger of authorities who like to keep things under control. (Gibson p. 108) (Hacker p. 265) Similarly, on the same page in both books, the Agent Hall/Chess character makes an appearance. He is the evil manifestation of her AI friend. (Gibson p. 108) (Hacker p. 109)
She tries to deal with her fundamental problem by directly confronting her parents’ issues, but it doesn’t work.
1. Her mother is distant and unconcerned with her problems. (Gibson p. 110) (Hacker p. 200) Similarly on the same page in both books, we see a mother who is distant and unconcerned with her child. (Gibson p. 110) (Hacker p. 112)
2. Her father is completely absent, but she is less angry with him than she is with her mom. (Gibson p. 110) (Hacker p. 200)
3. The specter of her dead sibling remains ever-present. (Gibson p. 110) (Hacker p. 110) — the child’s voice is used to evoke anxiety.
4. Her most dramatic confrontation with her parent occurs in a car, leads to a shouting match. The car pulls over and she jumps out then runs off into a forest/cornfield while thinking about her father’s abandonment of their family and of her. (Gibson p. 111) (Hacker — this was how I started off the version I published in May 2018. All of these other points are from version 2 that I sent to agents.)
5. She associates her dead sibling with a tree. (Gibson p. 112) (Hacker p. 42, 111, 172) — there is a picture of a creature with a child’s voice in a tree on page 111.
She tries to deal with her problem by finding comfort from a guy, but it doesn’t work.
1. She gets herself into a situation where she is alone with a guy who is expecting to have sex with her. She isn’t sure about him because he seems to be someone who gets around and doesn’t respect women much. (Gibson p. 114) (Hacker p. 137) Similarly, she is alone with a guy who is dominating the conversation and is pushy yet withholding. (Gibson p. 114) (Hacker p. 114)
2. She gets nervous and puts the breaks on the situation because he is sexually aggressive and casually lies about something about which she knows the truth. (Gibson p. 115) (Hacker p. 137) Similarly, she is in a discussion with a character who is aggressive and who lies about something when he could tell her the truth. (Gibson p. 115) (Hacker p. 115)
3. Then another guy who is in love with her spies on them, barges in, takes over the situation with violence, and stops it from progressing. (Gibson p. 116) (Hacker p. 139) Similarly, the conversation is cut short by the decision to converse with a different guy. (Gibson p. 116) (Hacker p. 116)
4. She is furious with the spy for breaking in uninvited and invading her privacy, preventing her from dealing with the situation herself. (Gibson p. 116) (Hacker p. 139) Similarly, she is annoyed with the spying AI for not being forthcoming in their discussion. (Gibson p. 116) (Hacker p. 116)
5. She ends up alone and angry with herself for being unable to connect with anyone in real life. She understands that the guy is more interested in the mean woman than her. (Gibson p. 117) (Hacker p. 140)
She tries to deal with her problem by fitting into a romantic, party culture, but it doesn’t work.
1. After dealing with a sexually aggressive guy that she doesn’t really like, a chapter opens with her receiving a package from her lover and an invitation to a party with people with whom she doesn’t fit in. (Gibson p. 126) (Hacker p. 76)
2. She isn’t sure she wants to be part of her lover’s tech-enhanced sexual fantasy. It sounds weird, invasive, and controlling. (Gibson p. 128) (Hacker p. 77)
3. She decides against it because she doesn’t want to become like the other sorts of shallow women he and his friends pursue. She wants to be different. (Gibson p. 131) (Hacker p. 77)
4. Nevertheless, she evaluates the other romantic options at her disposal and finds them lacking. (Gibson p. 131) (Hacker p. 77)
5. The next thing that happens is that someone barges into her room and yells at her, begging her to see reality and do what it takes to get re-connected to people. It ends with the person howling insanely as they run out of the room and out onto the stairs. (Gibson p. 133-135) (Hacker p. 84) Similarly, on the same page in both books, someone comes into her apartment and there is an altercation. The scene concludes with a brief conversation between the protagonist and the AI. (Gibson p. 135) (Hacker p. 135)
There is a cluster of events that sample of all of the most dramatic moments in the book happening all at once, overwhelming the protagonist.
1. She has a blow up with her mother and accuses her of wanting her gone. She says her mother never loved her and only loved her dead sibling. The argument takes place in the family’s kitchen. (Gibson p. 135) (Hacker p. 23)
2. A character barges into her room and demands that she not give up on her commitment to the plans he/she had made for the protagonist (plans that the protagonist never really liked or accepted). (Gibson p. 133) (Hacker p. 84)
3. The AI takes control of her environment during her moment of crisis when demands are coming from all directions and causes lights to flash and an entertainment screen to play a strangely appropriate program that comments on her situation. The scene concludes with a chat between the protagonist and the AI and the protagonist drifting off to sleep. (Gibson p. 135-140) (Hacker p. 212-214)
4. She recounts a horrific car crash. (Gibson p. 139) (Hacker p. 180)
5. She is in a fugue state in which she has a vision of a bucolic life outdoors in nature with people who love her. (Gibson p. 140) (Hacker p. 257) Similarly, on the same page in both books, she enters a fugue state and remembers something happy from her childhood. (Gibson p. 140) (Hacker p. 140)
She tries to deal with her fundamental problem by physically destroying the old machine and becoming wildly rich, powerful, successful, and famous by becoming one with the new machine and allowing it to control her, but this doesn’t work either.
1. Because of her connection to power, she is able to purchase anything and it will appear in her home. She has money, independence, and looks better than ever. (Gibson p. 142) (Hacker p. 278)
2. With help from the AI, she completely destroys the machine she helped build. Strangely, this was the very same machine that used to support the existence of the AI. It has found new ways to survive. (Gibson p. 145) (Hacker p. 245)
3. There is an explicit description of what it feels like to have an AI living inside your body and taking control over your body to help assist in physical acts that require skill. (Gibson p. 148) (Hacker p. 175)
4. She gets dressed up and goes to a dance club with her lover. They encounter a pink martini and she is startled by a hairy, imposing man who gives off sleazy vibes. She drinks an unfamiliar martini that is ordered by her lover. It burns her throat. She goes into a corner, private booth with a man and he gets heavily drugged. (Gibson p. 152-154, 167) (Hacker p. 49) Similarly, on the same page in both books, she goes out to see some old friends. She is startled by a man with whom she makes physical contact. (Gibson p. 167) (Hacker p. 169)
1. She encounters a group of shallow, appearance obsessed women who are dressed in outlandish ways. A lot of attention is paid to their hairstyles. Despite looking good and trying to fit in, she still feels like an outsider. (Gibson p. 153) (Hacker p. 30) Similarly, on the same page in both books, she encounters a group of shallow, appearance obsessed people. Despite being prepared and trying to fit in, she still feels like an outsider. (Gibson p. 153) (Hacker p. 153)
She explores ideas at the intersection of of bodily autonomy, identity, AIs, and men who like to control women.
1. A woman has been taken prisoner and trapped in a vehicle. She escapes by tearing the vehicle interior upholstery apart and disassembling parts of it. (Gibson p. 162, 175) (Hacker p. 180)
2. She is fascinated by the idea of a young cyborg man who has an AI implanted in his spine via a biological computer interface. She struggles with the concept of lost autonomy. The man with the AI implant is quite disabled whenever the AI is not in control and this makes him rather unattractive.(Gibson p. 167) (Hacker p. 175)
3. She is trying to prevent a cyborg from directly controlling her brain for the rest of her life and is apprehended by police officers and interrogated. After an altercation involving an escape attempt, an ambulance arrives. (Gibson p. 171-172) (Hacker p. 182)
4. Because of what the AI/machine has been doing, she is captured and interrogated. She tries to evade the authorities with a fake identity and her body/AI ends up in mortal danger. They want to know who and where the machine AI is. (Gibson p. 173, 178) (Hacker p. 177)
5. At this point, she is separated from the machine/AI for the first time and on her own. She now encounters an intense guy whose job is to fight against the machine that tried to control her. She is genuinely attracted to him, but he is all business and focuses on technical knowledge. She wants to escape to a tropical island, but reality has its claws in her. (Gibson p. 173, 175, 182) (Hacker p. 184-194)
At this point in the story, everything is bad and getting worse. (Gibson p. 181) (Hacker p. 236)
1. Her mother is angry with her.
2. She has been kicked out of her job/school and labeled as a criminal.
3. She doesn’t have any assistance from her AI friend.
4. The sleazy guy who was using her is no longer interested in her.
5. The intense guy she likes is also no where to be found.
It is becoming clear that this young woman is losing her mind and her grip on reality. Was all of this just a fantasy and she is an unreliable narrator? One thing is clear. She’s not in control and she’s being used.
1. She’s in the depths of despair with no one on her side and no power. She has no help from her AI friend and is having a mental health crisis. (Gibson p. 183) (Hacker p. 236)
2. Gibson has divided her book into three parts and part two p. 191-243 is a lengthy description of a girl’s experience in an insane asylum. It bears no resemblance to my book. My character spent this period in poverty and trying to survive on the streets. I only sent my protagonist to the insane asylum later in my book. (Gibson p. 191-243) (Hacker p. 236, 289)
3. In her darkest moment, the AI imaginary boyfriend returns to her and offers to rescue her, bringing her like a Trojan horse into the heart of the system that threatens her. Closed circuit cameras are part of that system. (Gibson p. 246, 266) (Hacker p. 237)
4. She watches a news program about her situation with the machine and is completely erased from it. The machine has erased her from the media narrative. (Gibson p. 259) (Hacker p. 296)
5. The man who controlled her female arch enemy is deprived of his power and the arch enemy seems to enjoy her new freedom. (Gibson p. 273) (Hacker p. 266)
She tries to deal with her fundamental problem by becoming someone entirely new and glamorous, forgetting her past, but this doesn’t work either.
1. She is famous and is in a luxurious hotel room where everything she could want is delivered to her. (Gibson p. 275) (Hacker p. 272)
2. She experiences what it is like to voluntarily share a mind with someone else via an electrical, psychic connection. The mind exists in multiple bodies. (Gibson p. 279) (Hacker p. 292)
3. She assumes a new, virtual appearance by using special contact lenses that augment the appearance of reality. (Gibson p. 280) (Hacker p. 30)
4. She takes a warm shower and then commences a romantic relationship with a guy from the mental hospital who is installed directly in her brain. (Gibson p. 284) (Hacker p. 290)
5. He is a psychopath who learns about empathy by living within her brain and watching her suffer. (Gibson p. 285) (Hacker p. 293)
She tries to deal with her fundamental problem by marrying a hot guy, but he betrays her.
1. She marries a hot guy who is connected to the machine that was trying to imprison her, and it seemed that everything was working out. They have lots of sex and her life is working out. He is a bit controlling, but she’s dealing with it. (Gibson p. 285) (Hacker p. 265)
2. Then in three steps, he tickles her to make her laugh, he rolls over to the other side of the bed and he says something that reveals he is betraying her. As a result of his betrayal he catches a bad disease that he doesn’t want to give to her. (Gibson p. 287-288, 298) (Hacker p. 268)
3. He threatens to use his power over the machine to take away her life. (Gibson p. 289) (Hacker p. 295)
4. He is planning to turn her into someone else entirely. (Gibson p. 280) (Hacker p. 295)
5. She ends up interacting with an AI who can run off into the web whenever instead of a real, solid, consistent guy. She feels dissatisfied. (Gibson p. 290) (Hacker p. 295)
She resolves her fundamental problem?
1. She separates from her mirror self, letting go and finding her inner strength to save herself without its assistance. Then at the last minute, it comes back. (Gibson p. 298, 316) (Hacker p. 313)
2. The machine that has been trying to control her and imprison her decides to take her mental contents and copy them for use on a wide scale to protect their country. (Gibson p. 304, 306) (Hacker p. 314)
3. Her absent father’s impact on her life is brought up. (Gibson p. 305) (Hacker p. 324)
4. The end of the story calls to our attention the way in which the people who operate the machine are merely cogs. (Gibson p. 306) (Hacker p. 327)
5. Her parent used their separation to recover mental health and gives her help when she needs it most at the end of the story. This makes her feel loved and free to let go of the past and try something new. (Gibson p. 326) (Hacker p. 324)
Looking back at the story as a whole, several things become clear via some metaphors.
1. The AI is intimately connected to an echo of her soul. (Gibson p. 312) (Hacker p. 308) The AI is referred to as broken by shards of her soul. The AI is the id and the center of a battle over her individual autonomy. Her fundamental problem is solved when she achieves freedom from dependence on the AI and from the parts of her past that control her. Throughout the story, a machine repeatedly threatens someone’s autonomy via parental plans, imprisonment, mental reprogramming, etc.. (Gibson p. 312) (Hacker p. 296)
2. A cyborg is able to perform complex combat routines after downloading them from a server. He has lost his autonomy — a central theme of the story. (Gibson p. ) (Hacker p. )
3. A defibrillator is used to shock a person back to life after the machine almost takes over his/her brain. (Gibson p. 319) (Hacker p. 312)
4. The story ends with doubts about the trustworthiness of the protagonist. The story is just too crazy to be real. The last chapter balances this out with the sane perspective of her female mentor. (Gibson p. 325) (Hacker p. 326)
5. A female AI is given an acronym for a name that sounds like a normal woman’s name. It represents her relationship with a more maternal id. This AI makes an appearance at the end of both books. (Gibson p. 331) (Hacker p. 64, 296)

If you acknowledge that each of these twenty mythemes represents a relatively unique way of expressing a theme, and that the sequence of mythemes is itself relatively unique, then you have to acknowledge that it is unlikely for an author to accidentally choose these same twenty mythemes and arrange them in the same way as another author.

10! is 3.6 million and there are 2 million books published per year. Before the internet, ten times fewer books were published per year.

Without overcomplicating things, it is perhaps easiest to see what the author has done when you plot out the page numbers on which the same plot elements are expressed. When two authors choose to express the same plot elements in the same order two books over and over again, this just doesn’t happen by accident.

When I improve all of the figures I will make the size of the points dependent on the uniqueness of the plot element to which it corresponds. In general, the copying method appears to have placed the more unique overlaps away from the straight line of points by identifying scenes that involve similar archetypes or situations and reversing their order in the sequence used to generate the book template.

I’m not denying that the books are different in many respects. Stylistically, Gibson’s book reminds me of a Grueze painting with lots of melodrama and no subtlety.

In contrast, my book is more modernist, with cleaner lines and more allegorical content that requires the reader to use their own imagination to fill in the blanks. Gibson’s version does all of the thinking for the reader, spelling everything out for people who have aphantasia. Nevertheless, they have the same basic structure and content.

When I take inspiration from this book and extract a plot that seems interesting to me, it is less than 12 points long and only twists of the first 6 of those points can be found within my source of inspiration. I think this is what ethical artistry looks like:

A beat sheet inspired by Feeling What You Feel, Seeing What You See/Every Line of You
1. He calls his wife ‘mom’ and she lets him screw younger workers in their apartment while she goes out? Creepy couple.
2. One of the younger workers is an Oxford educated spy who screws this guy who is older than her father in order to hack his computer system and help him manufacture and distribute a buggy, traceable program that will sabotage an industry. The sex is bad, but she fakes enjoyment. She knows his history of psychiatric treatment and a horrible story about his brutal assault of a woman in a hotel room. He has a Jeckyll/Hyde personality and isn’t good at respecting others’ bodily autonomy. She is remembering her briefing on these matters while they’re having sex.
3. She disguises her report for her boss by using an automated tool to write it up in the form of a novel with simple substitutions for names and places. She had been hired to do a detailed psychological assessment of him that will determine his future. Will he be allowed to live or has the balance of his bad deeds outweighed the good? His boss has played a role and bears some culpability. She writes: “Because of his role in entrapping foxes, he has been allowed to exist in a somewhat free state in exchange for sitting on a nest full of explosive, rotten eggs and keeping tabs on a group of diseased chickens.”
4. While writing the report, she shows up at his apartment offering the possibility of sex because she misses her husband who is out of town on assignment — and she needs some information. He is a bad kisser and there are no sparks. Ick.
5. She reads his emails and finds out how scummy he is with women who are far too young for him. He is very immature despite his age. He then lies to her about something important to her but trivial to him concerning a party of a mutual acquaintance whose husband is a criminal she is investigating. He then tries to rape her/choke her after she backs out of their embrace. Gross! It was a test and she gets it all on video. Entrapment?
6. She finds out that he has multiple accounts in the Cayman Islands to which he and his friends funnel money from people who trusted him with their property. He systematically takes their money and disappears from their radar once he’s gotten enough from them. Evil. But since the people he targets are often doing illegal things, his work is supported by some shady government forces.
7. She appears to support him on the YouTube show he uses to attract victims after he wrote her crazy love poems and asked her to marry him and have his babies — even though she was already married and far too young for him. 30-65-eew. But was he doing this to defend himself from the entrapment and the report she was writing?
8. Was this his panicked way of apologizing for the asphyxiating sexual aggression and lying? Either he must have a history that he’s trying to live down or he was playing mind games with her. Strange.
9. She tries to look complacent and forgiving, but when she directly rejects him, he takes low key revenge by creating a loud, construction site outside of her apartment window. Low, but better than murder or more criminally bad sex.
10. Her school confidant tells her that she would hate living in a country where it is the fashion for 60 something men to marry 30 year olds. “Young ladies! These guys are past their prime. You’re being tricked,” she says.
11. Neither of them can fathom why so many respectable looking people would turn a blind eye to his behavior. They’ve concluded that the more respectable a person looks, the less respectable they are.
12. The story takes a dark turn when the 60 something con artist lothario is killed and turned into an online puppet who can be made to say absolutely anything on YouTube. He was a death eater who was cannibalized. Meanwhile, the Oxford woman witnesses the transformation before disappearing into the states with her American husband and a fat check from her boss.

Such a short list is probably not copyrightable in the sense of turning it into a 50 page screenplay, even if it may be easy to do that in the turn of a hand with the right skill set or software package.

Who is responsible for making this crap? These are stories about women, but they are definitely not written by women. It is torture porn. Wouldn’t it be cool if the video/plot summaries were AI generated? If that is possible, imagine what can be done with the written word.

What I object to is the quantity of consecutive plot overlaps between Gibson’s book and my book. There is a vast gulf between 6 plot elements inspired by another work and 60 plot elements stolen from another work in mostly the same order.

Around page 60, I understand why some of the earliest reviewers declared that this was the worst book they’ve ever read. That is a gross exaggeration, but much of the character development makes absolutely no sense. Why on earth does the Emma character act so horribly? It is over the top and unrealistic. The Pete character also seems paper thin and difficult to interpret, even though he is the person to whom the protagonist is closest. He was just using her, that is clear, but we get no background motivation about him and in the end, he is just a cardboard cutout sleaze. The AI is creepily mysterious and that is okay, but I think it is the only thing that made me want to keep turning pages. I stalled again at page 157. None of the characters are gaining unexpected dimensions. Emma’s new dimension was so predictable (secret jealousy!) that I wanted to quit reading entirely. I’m interested by the plans to inject an AI into a guy and make him a bot slave, but this is moving too slowly. By the time she is in the insane asylum, I want to skip ahead past the entire middle section p. 191-243 of the book. Girl Interrupted did it better and listening to someone’s grief counseling is boring. While the Jeckyll/Hyde Henry/Agent Hall part was interesting, the ending also disappointed since it turned into the Matrix with a fight scene involving helicopters. It did redeem itself later with some depth, but it kind of spun in crazy circles at the end. Then again, so did my story.

In general, I’m a bit weirded out by the connection of this book’s editor, Kesia Lupo, to a writers’ website where I first brought my freshly born manuscript back in 2017. It is connected to 9 of the rip-offs of my book that I’ve identified. Lupo appeared several times on their YouTube program together with an ex British army guy named Pete and an American woman named Mo who writes children’s books about a secret agent moose and I find it strange that these are the protagonist’s closest friends’ names in Lupo’s book. The villains were named Andy and Emma and a man named Andy and a woman named Emma also showed up on their YouTube program several times. Andy is a journalist who looks like he is genetically related to Pete and Emma writes books about bitter, spurned housewives who have to raise their husband’s illegitimate children. Weird coincidence.

This sci-fi book was aimed at a young, female demographic and it was published by Lupo at Chicken House Books not long after she edited and published The Loop and The Block by Ben Oliver — a sci-fi book series aimed at young men that appears to have been produced with the assistance of a software tool that mined my book for an extensive list of writing prompts. If it isn’t illegal for an author to take 50-100 writing prompts in order from an unacknowledged author, is it illegal for a publisher to mine a single, unacknowledged author’s book for multiple, 50-100 point sequences of writing prompts and distribute them to create three books targeted to specific demographics?

I have a similar problem with Sandstone Books, a publisher with three recent books that each mined my manuscript for sequences of 55 writing prompts.

After seeing many rapidly produced books that have used mine as an unattributed resource, I’m not led to the conclusion that this form of book writing should be completely illegal, rather I believe that those who write in this fashion should be required to disclose the sources from which they mined material. Since they are using a software tool to do the mining, whoever provides the software tools should identify the source material and tell any authors who use their products where they are getting their writing prompts. At a minimum, an author should disclose when they are using a software package to assist in their production of products they intend to sell.

I personally don’t think that this form of software writing cocaine is doing our culture any favors since no one is starving for quantity of entertainment. We would be better off focusing on quality and all these tools do is amp up the productivity of the sorts of writers who have publishing/spying industry connections or who are feeding money laundering operations.

Consider the Girl of Glass collection that came out just one year after my book came out and which was written within a matter of months.

A few months after this collection was complete, the same author put out another book collection with a whole new concept, world and set of characters.

A few months later she did the same thing again,

Then she did the same thing again, publishing a book every few weeks in 2019 and it looks like she did the same thing in 2020 and 2021.

My sense is that this author has a method of sampling and rehashing books by non-famous authors and this is why I’m going to investigate Girl of Glass for the marks of a software tool that mined my book for a detailed sequence of writing prompts. The original author can always recognize when her story template has been used and sometimes a whiff of the blurb is enough to put you on the right track, but more often, it is the Amazon advertising algorithm that picks up on similarities between books and delivers likely candidates directly to your email inbox.

It would be nice if this author is overproducing books as an example of principle to create an easy target so that all of the victims of less principled, more devious literary thieves will have an easier time of making their cases when the time is right.

It would be nice if the Music Modernization Act is extended to literature and that the automated methods developed to repatriate funds from pirated music or muzak will be applied to books that are very much like literary muzak.

I don’t think that this type of writing should be illegal, I just think that when an author is deliberately sampling another author’s manuscript, they should disclose the source from which they are sampling. If they are planning to sell the product they’ve created, they should ask for permission from those they’ve sampled and if permission is denied, they should offer compensation or remove the publication. This is how things worked in the pre-internet era and I don’t understand why so many people believe the rules have changed. Just because certain types of crimes take a lot of effort to illuminate doesn’t make them less criminal.

…..

record keeping section:

Naomi Gibson gave a promotional blurb to Serena Dahlan, author of Reset and Dahlan is returning the favor.

Reset was also produced with a software writing aid.