^ Self-plagiarism is more accurately a form of Signature Style than any flaw.
It's not self-plagiarism so much as you being stuck in a comfort zone.
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Harsh, but potentially accurate. A few things here and there can be a signature style: Joss Whedon has a thing for Waif-Fu, for instance. But the more similarities your stories have, the more you should look into either actively avoiding your over-used tropes, if only as a self-challenge, or focus your efforts more on a single tale so you can develop said tropes more deeply and effectively.
Self-plagiarism would be more strictly defined as "Writing something and publishing it for all to see, then rewriting it and submitting the rewrite separately for some reason, instead of as a different edition so that there's no overt connection".
edited 8th Jul '11 6:09:45 PM by Leradny
So, currently I've got most of my stories hosted on the same site. *cough* This means that if I have, say, multiple stories about an Unequal Pairing suddenly getting reversed, or two different stories in which one of the characters is an Axe-Crazy blood fetishist, it's easy for people to spot that. To what degree is this a problem, and to what degree should I avoid using ideas I've already used?
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful