In fact, I fear I am a jack-of-all-trades.

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So I've been writing a novel I really adore, and someone told me that it reminded them a lot of Every Heart a Doorway, which at the time I was not aware of (I still haven't read it because free time is a lie, but I read Indexing and haven't shut up about it since), and now I suppose I'm having a crisis about accidentally plagarizing someone else's concept. Do you have any advice?

You can’t copyright an idea.

A boy with messy black hair and glasses discovers that magic is real and also owls like him. Is his name Harry or Tim?

You can’t copyright an idea.

A boy climbs over a wall a girl rides away on the wind a boy plays the wrong board game is his name Elliot or Tristan, is her name September or Dorothy, is his name Barney or Alan?

You can’t copyright an idea.

You can get close enough that people will accuse you of stealing elements of your work: that can’t be helped. But Anne Rice doesn’t own vampires, Michael Crichton doesn’t own dinosaurs, J.K. Rowling doesn’t own wizards, and I don’t own portals to other worlds. I promise.

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Kageyama doesn’t see Hinata again for a few days. He spends some time exploring the city, and the beaches. Most are pretty popular, but Hinata seems only to frequent the waves Kageyama first met him in. It’s maybe fitting, then, that this is where Kageyama finds him again.

He’s walking along the pier that day, a vanilla ice cream cone in hand, enjoying the cold creamy sweetness and the hot sun on his face, when he hears an all too familiar voice from below him, in the water.

“Keep paddling, don’t get nervous! The water loves you back!”

As stealthily as he can manage with a drippy ice cream cone in hand, Kageyama peeks over the edge of the wooden pier railing. And there in the shallows to his non-surprise, because there could be no mistaking that voice, is Hinata Shouyou on his longboard.

He is currently surrounded by a handful of kids, small ones, all around the age that makes Kageyama uneasy because he can never tell what they’re thinking when they stare at him with their too-shrewd little eyes. He’s not good with children.

Of Hinata, he thinks it’s safe to say the opposite can be said. The kids all hang on his every word, some of them imitating his movements as he shows them how to maneuver a surfboard.

“You don’t want your nose to point at the sky,” he says, thumping the tip of one of the little girls’ boards, and she giggles.

He’s showing them, Kageyama realizes. Hinata is showing them how to surf.

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