LOVE AND THEFT

Did a best-selling romantasy novelist steal another writer's story?

- KATY WALDMAN

In the autumn of 2010, Lynne Freeman, a family-law attorney and an unpublished author, put the final touches on her first novel, “Blue Moon Rising.” The story revolved around a teen-age girl named Anna who falls in love with a werewolf and learns that she has magical powers. It was a fantasy, but it drew on Freeman’s own experiences growing up in Alaska. For years, Freeman had been fiddling with the material, imagining and reimagining characters, revisiting childhood memories. She even dreamed about the idea, and kept notes on it in a shoebox in her bedroom. In 2002, after becoming pregnant with twins, Freeman lost one of the babies and gave birth prematurely. Long nights lay ahead. She spent them caring for her son and working on her book.

A few months after she’d finished, in December, 2010, Freeman signed with an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, the founder of Prospect Agency, a small firm based out of Kim’s home, in New Jersey. Kim, a slight woman with a youthful aura and a bright, clenched smile, struck Freeman as a kindred spirit—she’d launched her own business, just as Freeman had, and she’d even brief ly attended law school. For the next three years, Freeman and Kim worked together to expand and refine the manuscript.

Kim sent pitches of “Blue Moon Rising” to more than a dozen publishers. The results were discouraging. “I thought the writing, the storytelling, in this manuscript was simply wonderful,” one e-mail read, but “we are . . . looking for things that fall into a newer territory.”