You read that right. I have been accused of plagiarism, but not as a blogger. I have plenty of juice left. In fact, I’m just getting started. I have no interest in copying others, mostly because there’s no fun in that. And, oh yeah. It’s illegal.

But since I do wonder if anyone is plagiarizing me, I use a site called Copyscape, where you submit your blog URL and it crawls the web for places where your work has been duplicated. Stolen, actually. I did find one site that took my entire The Day I Didn’t Die post and translated it into German. It’s a junk site plastered with ads. Evidently, they lift posts to drive you to their site and try to get you to buy garbage when you get there.

After discovering Copyscape, I was reminded of the one time in my life that I was officially accused of plagiarism. I was a sophomore in high school and in danger of failing music class. I don’t understand music theory, I can’t read sheet music since the symbols look cartoony to me, and of course, I can’t carry a tune to save my life. I was failing on all cylinders.

My teacher offered me an opportunity for extra credit so I could pull myself up to a passing grade. I gladly took her up on it. She gave me a few options and I chose to listen to a piece of classical music, then write a story about what I thought the music was trying to say.

I can’t remember what piece I wrote about, but I do know I listened to it over and over in the living room one weekend and knocked out not a story, but a poem, about what it meant.

The piece began with a very peaceful melody, then gradually progressed into a cacophony of what sounded like every instrument in the orchestra, later relaxing and making a soothing exit. I thought it sounded like a storm rolling into a valley, shaking things up, and then rolling out. That’s what my poem was about and I was pretty happy with what I’d written.

And then I turned it in.

While we were taking our final exam, I noticed her reading it at her desk. When the class was over, she called me up and asked me point blank "Did you write this?"

I told her "Yes, this weekend."

"It doesn’t sound like you wrote it. It sounds like you copied it," she protested.

"But I did write it. I listened to the piece all weekend and that’s what I thought it said to me."

"Did anyone see you write it?"

"Yes, my parents did. You can ask them."

"I will."

Now, you might think I should have been insulted and horrified to be accused of plagiarizing someone else’s work. But I wasn’t. It was the most flattering thing I’d ever heard since my English teacher suggested I go to a creative arts camp the summer before. It was the first time in my life that I thought I might have a talent for writing. I left the class on Cloud 9, when other students might have left in tears.

My teacher did get confirmation from my parents that I wrote the poem myself. She might have felt bad afterwards for accusing me of stealing, but she was only doing her job. The accusation left a marked impression on me. If she thought my work was so good it couldn’t have been my own, maybe — just maybe — someday I could call myself a writer.

Someday is today.

Stumble it!