Fact is I do not know who william Shears is. He will have to speak for himself. What I do know is that he is not me and that Jane is wrong if she says that he is.

As for the irony you speak of… there is in fact no irony there – I am on record as having said that i do not mind other people using my characters or ideas in their own stories. However, in the context of Greyling Bay it was stipulated that if you wanted to do something with your character on Greyling Bay then you should say so and so prevent anyone leading your character astray from the path you had mapped out; I had done this and trusted that the editor would see to it that the rule would be honoured. The hi-jacking of my character within Greyling Bay was against the rules. I am now posting many of my pieces on my blog, not at all concerned that someone might find inspiration in something I am writing. So there is no irony, Jonathan.

And is my andrex puppy thing even on the scale of what Nik Perring has done/is doing to me. I e-mailed him nearly two months ago to point out an untruth he had said about me (I have never ever been asked to leave a writing group. When I had outgrown a writing group, I left. People there tried to persuade me to stay. Nik again last week said that I had been asked to leave.) Is it ok for him to damage me, and not alright for me to question his intellectual grasp of the issues here?

My problem here is that so many people had time and energy enough to call me vile back on anti-plagiarism day in July, but now they do not have the energy to read what i have to say and to get to a better understanding of the subject and of my particular case.

I am not a plagiarist. I expect people with intelligence to draw that conclusion only after a full examination of the facts… I agree some of the facts of this case are difficult to arrive at… but the real facts are beyond dispute… they are the stories themselves and they have been posted for all to see.

First of all, Mr Shears (assuming for the moment that Jane is wrong and you are indeed a separate person from Mr Bruton), can you please tell me what your particular interest in all this is? Are you a friend of Mr Bruton or just a general crusader for justice? If the latter, it seems odd that you pick on this particular small dispute in a field that you are not familiar with (you do say you are not a writer, which would mean that you are probably not familiar with the case’s particular nuances).

Secondly, Mr Bruton, you say that it all came about because of what happened over Greyling Bay. The fact is that I for one had worked out a lot of what happened long before Jane’s “Anti-Plagiarism Day” post, by simply reading between the lines on other blogs. I’m guessing that Jane’s specific interest arose because you had been such a prolific member of the Greyling Bay community. Moreover it must have struck her (as it struck me) as more than a little odd that someone who had got so worked up about other contributors to GB taking a different view of one of “their” characters could find themselves being accused of stealing other people’s work. Ironic is probably not a strong enough term to describe it.

You might be interested to know, by the way, that one of the most popular search terms to be used by people finding their way to this place is “douglas bruton plagiarism”. You might also find it interesting to look up “Streisand Effect” on Wikipedia. Just saying.

As for the IP address thing, I have no reason to doubt what Jane is saying and it does look mighty fishy to me. I did note that the only poster to previously speak for you here (the mysterious “R Donald” above – who also posted as “Anon” on another post of Jane’s, BTW, and has the e-mail address flowersinbloom@hotmail.com) has an IP address starting with 81.156.144, which – spookily – is also how the IP address used by you on January 10th starts. Could be a complete coincidence, of course.

I guess the problem, Douglas, is that we ARE all drawing our own conclusions, and that they’re not necessarily the ones that you’d like us to draw. And personal attacks on people like Jane and Nik Perring (really, the Andrex puppy thing was LOW) ain’t gonna help you. Believe me, given your awesome track record as a writer, I desperately want to respect you, but you’re not making it easy.

She is once again miles wrong, or further fabricating. I am not in Edinburgh. I live miles from edinburgh in the scottish borders. I teach near edinburgh. So how can my IP address be based in Edinburgh? This is yet another error, or dare I say it lie.

If what I have said is libellous, then let Jane seek legal representation… she says she has lawyer friends.

She will not want to rehash this very old unsavoury story precisely because she is one of the architects of the story. And now that she has been shown to lie and now that the ‘offending’ stories are there fro the public to measure my ‘crime’ (and no one has yet come out to say that Jane’s analysis of the offending stories is correct) Jane will want to be very quiet on the subject. I think we can all understand that.

Sorry if I am being tedious and obsessive here, but I am defending my nam, which has been muddied by Jane Smith for one.

I have once omitted to allow Jane to comment on my blog precisely because she has been unsavoury in her use of my private e-mails to her… something that she addresses on her blog in a discussion of copyright… but seems ok about breaching copyright when plundering my e-mails to her. Funny thing, Doug Cheadle does exactly the same in posting my stories on the net without my permission!

YOU draw your own conclusions!

After I pointed this out on my blog Shears commented, insisting he was not the same person as Bruton. This comment also came from a BTCentralPlus account, but this time one based in Brentwood, Essex, with a different IP address: 217.44.136. At first I thought that I’d made a mistake and was just about to apologise when Bruton commented on my blog again–this time from the same IP address in Brentwood, Essex, which Shears had commented from.

I live in Sheffield, and when I visit my own blog from my own desktop computer, Sitemeter reflects that. But when I’m out and about and use my laptop and mobile connection, the IP address is naturally different–and my given location changes depending on which wireless connection I’m using. According to Sitemeter I’ve posted from Manchester, London, and Glasgow when I know I’ve just been down the road.

You can draw your own conclusions.

As for the rest of Bruton’s increasingly libellous comments: I’m not even going to address them. He won’t allow me to comment on his blog, he twists my words, and he misrepresents me at every turn. He’s a talented writer and I wish him the very best: but I don’t see the point in rehashing this very old, and very unsavoury story any more.

But what I think is key here is that Jane Smith has now been caught out in the lie. She said William and myself were one and the same computer address. She had proof, she said. She had matched up our Ip addresses with her technical gadgetry. I am a computer illiterate and if I hadn’t been me I would have believed what she said. But I am me and this William is as much a stranger to me as he is to you. Jane did this to discredit William Shears’ comment on my work and to further blacken my character and to defend her increasingly suspect position in this whole sorry mess. This is the length she goes to in order to get at me. This is not honest and begs the question how much more of what she has said to back up her charges against me is a lie.

I have written extensively on my blog about the prosess of borrowing and how artists are fine with this but small writing communities seem not to be. I have never stolen another’s words and passed them as my own. No law has been broken here. I HAVE used structures I have seen others use to tell my stories. I have never hidden that. I am completely open about what I do.

Vanessa Gebbie does the same; I like her writing and think her work is worthy of respect; but she finds more than inspitration in the work of some other writers. I have covered this in revealing the similarities between her story ‘The Collector’ and Carver’s story ‘Collectors’. BUT, and this is an enormous ‘but’, I do not think what she has done with Carver’s story is theft or plagiarism; it is what artists do. They build on traditions, they emulate others, they add their own spice to the mix. VG has done something the same as I have, the difference is I admit it and I am being charged with plagiarism.

I have written more than 100 stories in the past three years; I wrote more than 300 flash fiction pieces last year; and I am being held to account for two pieces of work and people like Jane Smith and VG and the mysterious Mrs Jones have all raised their voices to cry me villain.

Now my ‘plagiarist’ works are visible and more than 300 views of the site and only one comment aside from my own – and that comment in support of me. At the very least this tells you that it is not obvious – not as obvious as Jane and Vg and Mrs Jones would have you believe. I still maintain that I have done no wrong. I don’t expect everyone to agree…