The mind boggles at CC's defenders. How anyone can look at the side-by-side passages and not think it's plagiarism? Sigh.

I write slower than molasses in winter, so I've come up with a few ideas that never see the light of day because I see similar ideas in another fic, and I don't want to be seen as a plagiarist. (EX: When we found out on Angel that Xander was in Africa, I wondered how he'd get by with all the different languages. I decided that Xander and his Slayers would use International Sign Language in order to make communication easier (at least in daylight). By the time I hashed out a plot, etc., you had started posting Facing the Heart in Darkness and had Klingon as the lingua franca. So, I abandoned that idea.

Thanks for the excellent summary/discussion of this topic.