#it writing

[liv45no]

“I know your secret, your dirty little secret,” It sang, repeating that line before landing on the ground. It tilted its head, piercing Richie with its yellow eyes. “Should I tell them, Richie?”

Richie felt his inner storm intensifying, coming to its final, worst point - in where Richie would break down. Richie Tozier, the goof, the joker, the trashmouth, the smart ass, the one who never shuts up would break down.

‘It knows,’ Richie then thought, panic spreading in his chest, ‘It knows about me. It knows all about me.’

The one and only hope left that Richie had clamped to; Pennywise not finding out about him because he knew It could and would use that knowledge against him whenever It liked. For a long time Richie had only feared the people around him would find out - then he had run into that monster and now he was praying to god It would never know.

Something in Richie’s mind shattered into a million pieces, the window got opened - a memory. He saw small Eddie Kaspbrak before him, crying, sweating, holding his weirdly twisted arm. He saw him and at the same time he didn’t. He felt that need to squat down and protect Eddie, to make sure he wouldn’t get hurt again. And not like his crazy mother, like that psychotic Mrs K, no. Richie wouldn’t suffocate Eddie with his love, he would replace his inhaler. He would give him space, he would stay as close to him as possible, hell, he’d do anything Eddie needed.

Richie felt his fingers, those small bony pale fingers that he no longer owned (they were now marked by color and hardness and roughness), but stopped right above Eddie’s fragile arm.

Don’t touch the other boys, Richie. Don’t, or they’ll know your secret.

It hit him like a wave, throwing him back into the moment, into his adult body, into the ugly reality, to the spot he didn’t want to be. He blinked - and as if time had done him a favor, the world began to breathe again. The seconds went on, the hours passed, and Pennywise was still there. Richie squeezed his eyes shut.

[lesbinewren]

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email

[tenderwatches]

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[write-on-world]

[alivingtypo]

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[pierog]

i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.

[derrypubliclibrary]

the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish you guys could see this

[liv45no]

Frank stepped into the kitchen through the garage door, careful not to make a sound. He had already taken off his shoes for that task; they were in his other hand, the one that wasn’t carrying his keys.

But he didn’t even make it past the doorway to know he had screwed up. The kitchen wasn’t as dark and empty as he had expected, instead, the small ugly milky lightbulb that was hanging from the ceiling above the kitchen table was bravely spreading white light. Sonia’s face looked like the white face of a ghost. A drained-out ghost.

Frank bit his bottom lip. “Why are you still up?” He asked shyly.

Sonia turned in her chair, causing Frank’s eyes to fall on the all too visibly baby bump, his wife’s floral nightgown covering it, like some sort of protection. According to the doctor the baby would arrive in between late October and beginning of November, and it would be a little boy.

“Why are you still up?” Sonia replied to Frank’s question. She had cried; her lips were pressed upon each other to a thin line. Her breath was shaky as she spoke again, “it’s three am in the goddamn morning. Where were you?”

“At work,” Frank blurting out, the thought are you serious?! crashing over him right after. Stupid answer, unbelievable answer.

Sonia scoffed loudly. “My goodness, how stupid do you think I am? No chef keeps their employees until after midnight in the operation if they’re not on a Night Shift. Where were you?”

Frank fell silent, staring at his grey socks on the black and white patterned kitchen floor. He needed to think of what to say next.

“You won’t like it,” he mumbled.

“What I dislike much more is my husband disappearing over the night and then sneaking into our bed as if nothing ever happened.”

Sonia’s voice was teary, close to break. In her fist she had captured a tissue which she now brought up to her eyes to wipe them clean. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“You know, stress isn’t healthy for the baby,” she added.

Frank looked back up, their gazes locking. He stared into Sonia’s brown eyes, those eyes that always reminded him of caramel, and he wondered whose’s eyes the baby would end up with.

“When I was done at eleven, Jim from worked asked me whether I wanted to go drink something with our friends from work. I thought about what you told me about being more social and said yes. I lost track of time and I didn’t have a charger for my phone.”

That sounded believable.

Sonia threw her hands in the air. “That’s not what I meant!!” she cried, “I told you instead of working all the time I’d much rather have you go out with some friends and be home at a humanly hour! You didn’t do either of those things!”

Frank opened his mouth, but his wife wasn’t done yet.

“I sit here all day along, sometimes I even have friends over for tea. I am carrying your child, I’m in the eighth month for gods sake, there’s not much I am allowed to do! And you work every day from eight to eleven and then go out with people I don’t even know and crash back here in the middle of the night!!!”

He felt tears entering his eyes. He felt that familiar guilt in his gut, that nasty guilt that was slowly but surely eating him up from the inside.

Everything was going downhill. What had Frank ever done so wrong to deserve all this? Was it because he hadn’t left Sonia before she got pregnant and they got married? But he stayed, he knew he had a responsibility, if he could do this to her, he couldn’t do this to his own kid.

And how the hell was he supposed to explain to her that his cancer symptoms from his childhood had reappeared?

He had to end this. He couldn’t let this escalate.

“I don’t wanna fight,” he spoke up, his bottom lip trembling strongly, “we always fight. I’m sorry I went out with the others, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I’m sorry I didn’t check the time. That was unfair from me. But I can’t change anything about my work schedule.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Sonia, taking her little hands into his. He looked her in the eyes, smiling slightly.

“I know work hard enough so our kid can live a good life. And then, when he’s here, I’ll watch him and you go to your reading club, your tea time and you can go work for your sister again so we’re safe for a while.”

He squeezed her hands. “We’re gonna make this work. It’ll all be worth it in the end, I promise.”

Sonia began to sob quietly. Frank crooked his head. “Please don’t cry, honey, if you cry, I’ll cry too.”

Now she laughed softly. Sonia wiped her teary eyes as she said, “fine. Let’s do it like that. But please, Frank, come home in your lunch breaks. Come home after work, I don’t know how to do this without you.”

Frank scooted a little closer and put their foreheads together, placing one hand over her belly.

“I swear to you, I’m gonna be here with you and our little boy whenever I can.”

[animentality]

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

I firmly believe that some stories can never be translated into a different medium and that's okay

[helpful-writing-tips]

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

[golden-letters]

bitch this is all you’re gonna get. this life, this face, this body. you better not ‘maybe in another universe’ your way out of everything. sit your ass down and face this. go make tea and have a picnic and read a goddamn book. kiss your loved ones, send that damn text, and hug your siblings. this is all you’re gonna get.