Scribe World

[Teresa]

She did research for three years, posed as a fiction writer on a social writing network. 

 

She wrote flash fiction and dark humor, made friends with an impressive number of members.  She chose the most interesting people on the site, entertaining eccentrics, outrageously talented, and she won their trust through weekly personal emails. 

 

She'd promised her boss at Mind Magazine that she would have one hell of a story, but she never expected this -- the drama, the fights, the love interests, the mutinies and banishments from Scribe World.

 

When her research was complete she wrote the article, five thousand words on internet relationships and the secret sordid lives of mostly unknown writers, an article which would outgrow itself and later become an international bestseller:  The Secret Lives of Scribes, Random House - Harmony Division. 

 

A week before the original article published, her writing friends noticed "George" was no longer a member.

[Cita]

Love this.  But then, I love all that you write, George.

[Simon Halliday]

I like this.

Part of the guilty pleasure of 6S is the sense of exclusivity and selection (the writer's illusion), illusory since the exclusivity is imaginary and the selection is self-selection. Nevertheless, if one feels it, it's objectively true—so the betrayal described in your story has an equally real cutting edge.

This also reminded me, I'm not exactly sure why, of the drama student played by Dennis Quaid, in Playing by Heart, who practices his improv skills in a bar  as  'the drunk driver who ran over his own wife'. Weird association. Strange.

[Judy Thompson]

Whatever it is, I didn't do it, and it won't happen again.

[Teresa]

No worries, guys.  "George" was struck by a car this morning at Lexington and Sweetwater Avenue.  Hit and run.  Scribe World had a lot of dirt on George and they're writing their own books.  It's a cut-throat world...muahahahahaha!!!! 

[Bill Floyd]

My lawyers will be in touch.  

[Amanda]

I like this! Great job!

[Angela]

Highly plausible. 

[Gita]

Oh, to think of the emails I've exchanged with her, the books we traded, that time in New Orleans when I bought her a drink. *sob* The hot tub at the cabin in the Smokies... She OWES me. I gave her some of her best material!

[Judy Thompson]

(be afraid. be very afraid).   What IS scary,  this very thing happened on a message board far far away, years ago;  the man even faked his own death (and wrote a marvelous account of his last days) as a kind of way of easing away from the board,  all for an article on,  you guessed it,  internet relationships.    Nicely done, Teresa, most believable. 

[Ron. Lavalette]

Uh-oh.