Giving credit where's it due

So, that little AU post- The Gift ficlety thing I posted here inspired by brutti_ma_buoni's lovely "Goodbye To All of This (And Hello to Oblivion)"  ?  My story has two mommies, except that I'd forgotten one of them.  (Really.)   snowpuppies's "Lillies" is a post The Gift AU fic in which Dawn dies instead of Buffy, and the Buffy is the only one in the world who remembers her.  The tone is different than BMB's; Buffy tries to go about living her life as normal around uncomprehending friends, and there are lovely callbacks to the series (Mr Gordo!).  There's a sense of the story here being strangely in-canon however, in terms of Buffy's depression in S6; snowpuppies gets that tone beautifully, as she usually does.  (Have you read "Fractured"? A non-shippy Angel and Buffy story that goes AU at the beginning of S6 - what if Willow's spell went wrong? - and OMG. Dark, dark dark stuff.  Poor Buffy.)

So I feel like an idiot because while my f'list was being very nice about my first attempt at BtVS fanfic, my brain had grabbed the concept from one story, then conveniently forgot about it, and popped it back into my head reading someone's story. What embarrasses me is not the "theft" so much, as the fact that I forgot to give proper credit. This is a huge issue for me; women artists in particular have, for centuries, had their work misattributed to male artists, or simply called "Anonymous".  And because our history books have so few women artists (writers, painters, etc), the assumption is to default to the standard of Male identity in terms of the person's identity.  There's other issues at play, of course, such as the fact that artists of all genders are having their work stolen to make a profit for someone else without proper attribution, something I became much more aware of when my partner went back to art school. I'm probably being melodramatic; no theft was intended, no profit was made, and all's right with the world. But nonetheless...here's me giving credit, and apologies, and cookies.

Oh, and snowpuppies also wrote a "commentary" for "Lillies" which is worth reading as well.  Actually everything that snowpuppies and brutti_ma_buoni write is pretty phenomenal, so at least I've got damnably talented Muses, which makes me very lucky.