wow, first message!
I haven't visited this site in ages, but I'm really glad that this board has been created. I mean, nitpicking isn't exclusively an activity limited to discerning sf fans. I mean, a couple of years ago I hung around a site for jane austen freaks -- pemberley.com -- and man those English professors were real venomous nitpickers when it came to all the Austen movies. Especially when it came to the old version of "Pride and Prejudice."
anyway I was wondering why there isn't a board for nitpicking fanfiction yet... but I'm digressing.
Annelies, by now you've hopefully had a chance to check out the renovations, and I hope you'll feel free to join in anytime. I agree that literary nitpickers can be just as fanatic as any others!
As for fanfic...for the moment I'd rather restrict this particular board to published works and see how far we get. Traffic here at the moment is a bit too slow to justify heading off in a whole new direction.
Meanwhile - assuming you haven't dicovered them yet - there are a couple threads in the NextGen Sink where you'll find a spirited discussion of that very subject; look under 'Stephen Ratcliff's Marisa Stories' and 'Marisa Stories 2'.
A while back I was spending a weekend away from home and grabbed a couple of anthologies off my shelf I hadn't had a chance to go through yet for some reading material. In one I read a story called "The Most Maddening Story in the World" by Ralph Straus. A little while later, in the other anthology, I came across a tale called "The Mysterious Card" by one Cleveland Moffett. I was stunned to find that this story had the exact identical plot to the earlier tale I had just read! I wonder if one author flat out stole from the other, or whether both based their stories on a popular anecdote or piece of folklore. In eihter case, it was a very bizarre coincidence for me to just happen upon these two stories within a short time of each other, from two completely different anthologies.
It appears that you are not the first to notice the extreme similarity between the two stories. Consider this, quoted from Violet Books's website:
Stern, Philip van Doren, ed. THE MOONLIGHT TRAVELER, Great Tales of Fantasy & Imagination. NY: Garden City Publishing, 1945. Near Fine in edge-torn pictorial dw. Issued two years earlier by Doubleday Doran. Lengthy Introduction on the weird tale, & a superior selection including both well known writers from Poe onward, alongside stories that would not be well known except for this anthology, i.e., Stella Benson's "The Man Who Missed the Bus," Jan Struther's "Cobbler, Cobbler, Mend My Shoe" & Ralph Straus's "The Most Maddening Story in the World" which plagiarises Cleveland Moffett's "The Mysterious Card." Laid in: A New York Times clipping, Stern's obituary. This very copy is pictured in the article Philip van Doren Stern, A Traveler by Moonlight $25.00
Yeah, that's the anthology I have, all right. Except my copy is paperback and retitled Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination. I still think it's incredibly funny that I should just happen upon both stories, in two different randomly-selected anthologies, in the same evening.