Uncopied

Why does no one ever plagiarise me?

Every time the folks at DesiPundit come up with another of their posts about a site that's ripping off other bloggers, I rush over, hoping to see these familiar words reproduced under some outlandish name. But it never happens. Everyone else gets copied blatantly, while I carry on in my pristine, unviolated isolation. Even when people do actually use stuff I've written, they're polite enough to cite me (Happy Blog Birthday, Chronicus). It's enough to make a grown man go out and buy glycerine.

What am I doing wrong, I wonder? What is it about this blog that the plagiarists don't like? How can I make myself more available to people who want to use me [1]? It's not fair, you know. Even authors of penny romances for teenage girls have got Harvard undergraduates copying them. Is it asking too much to expect that there'd be at least one stuggling writer out there whose third paragraph on page 27 would bear striking similarities to my post about death in elevators?

The night is dark. Elsewhere in the world, spyders are scuttling about in their ethernet lofts, stealing content from unsuspecting blogs and squirrelling it away in their ersatz websites. While I sit here, deserted in my involuntary inimitability, dreaming of the day that Ian McEwan will decide to write a novel about lonely, unloved bloggers and 'borrow' a few phrases from this post.

After all, it's the only way I'm ever going to get published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage.

[1] A question I often ask myself, and not only in this context.