And the asshat for today is. . .

Paul McGuinness, manager of U2. Ok, we get it, music piracy = bad.

But, do we think that either a) Making ISPs responsible for policing net traffic for copyrighted data or b) Taxing ISPs to compensate artists (read: compensate the monolith corporations that profit from said artists) are in fact good ideas?

Quoth asshat:

If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door. That's no different to an ISP.

So a manager for a major rock group can't tell the difference between a content provider and a distribution channel. So if some *cough*Negitiveland*cough* artist decided to sample too much of U2s songs, he'd figure it was reasonable to expect the record stores selling the offending CD to be liable? Or maybe he just wants the stores to check their product for oversampling.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. . .

Many moons ago I posted about a spam query letter I got. (Not to be confused with the spam book promotion I received recently.) Just to reprise, the query was about "A Best Seller waiting to be published - Discover the Revolutionary New Way to Heal Yourself!..."

Needless to say, the first mistake was confusing a writer with a publisher. But our spammer was not one to make such fine distinctions. Anyway, I posted, I vented, and the tale thus ended.

Or did it?

I was just checking traffic to my site and discovered a new referring link from the Doubtful Muse blog. It seems that our spammer has finally gotten around to spamming editors. Yep. She's still at it. And, yep, by the pronoun I have a gender. You see, the recent post at Doubtful Muse gave me two tidbits of information I didn't have before (or I just wasn't up to Googling for at the time.)

Tidbit one is a post or two at the The Rejecter blog. Apparently this poor employee at a literary agency got the same spam around the same time I did. The response reached a snark level that equaled if not exceeded my own:

Fortunately you have magic cards to heal yourself from the emotional trauma when you don't get published because you pissed off potential agents and publishers by randomly spamming their emailboxes instead of submitting your idea in the proper format, which can be found on the very page from which you got my email address.

But wait, there's more! The second tidbit was the fact that the proprietor of the Doubtful Muse was able to Google the mysterious website only alluded to in the spam email. This was a dangerous thing to let me know. Apparently, our spammer is a woman named Christina, who operates out of the UK. Saying she doesn't "get" the publishing industry is an understatement. Here's some quotes from the site:

The ideas for these manuscipts [sic] are born out of many situations, if you have an idea worthy of development, please contact me for an informal but confidential discussion.
[...]
Therefore, the role of the editor is to save the writer from the embarrassment of presenting poor quality workmanship. Once an editor has proofed and streamlined a manuscript by strengthening any weak areas, the manuscript will then be ready for market.
[...]
I hope to fulfil certain criteria:

- to produce excellent, professional novels worthy of publishing
- an original plot idea
- to appeal to the a broad market place - with enough potential for the book to be commercially viable
- to continue to produce novels and I as an author stand the test of time

I won't link to the site, but feel free to Google it yourself. The woman has invested a lot in web design, but could have done a lot better by actually submitting proposals. I really don't know what makes her think some publisher is going to surf her site and solicit her for a book proposal. Not only that, but Christina is paranoid about "revealing" her "secrets." She has synopses up on her site, but they're password-protected MS Word documents. She has the spammed proposal up on its own domain that's unlinked to from her author site, and insists you e-mail her for chapters. She has sample articles up, but no publishing credits listed. None.

However, we know she's a certified published writer. How, you ask? Because she has this:



How can you argue with that?

Plot vs Character: aka The Emotional Zombie

I finally got around to seeing 28 Weeks Later on DVD, and it's a great zombie flick and one of those rarities; a sequel that is a considerable improvement on the original. Not that 28 Days Later was a bad film, it was just sort of typical for the genre; "You're in the midst of the Zombie Apocalypse, you have to survive. Go!" And, while 28 Weeks starts out in the same place, it goes in a way different direction.

When people talk of fiction, there's often much made of the distinction between plot and character, or "plot vs. character," as if the two were somehow in opposition. The fact is, a story needs both to survive. If either is missing it becomes hard for a reader to care. Without character there's no reason to care about what's happening. Without plot there's nothing happening to care about.

Now the connection between the two is not always very strong. There are literary character studies where the protagonist is caught up in events beyond their control and the object is to watch how this person's character changes, and there are genre stories where interesting sympathetic characters are caught up in some grand adventure that doesn't do much other than threaten their safety and give them something to do.

But, in the best stories, the plot is a direct result of character and vice-versa. It is a feedback loop that, in a tale like 28 Weeks, sets up a resonant vibration that shakes the whole universe of the story apart. (Before you go on, warning: Here Be Spoilers.)

In 28 Weeks we start with the typical post apocalyptic holdouts, a bunch of people including a man and wife whose children are safely on a school trip out of the country. The movie begins much as Night of the Living Dead ends, with the zombies storming the house, and one lone man (the husband) escaping. This is the point where we enter new territory. Not only do we jump to the post-apocalypse reconstruction effort, we get to see Dad— wracked with survivor's guilt that's painful to watch— reunited with his kids. When he breaks down explaining what happened to Mom, we care about this guy and his kids more than any ten characters in a dozen other action/horror films.

This is also key to the series of events that pushes the rest of the movie into motion. The kids slip out of the safe zone, not because they're kids and kids do stupid shit, but because the son's grief-stricken and his big sister wants to go back to their house and get some pictures for him. When Mom's at the house, apparently uninfected, the first thought isn't "What? How'd she survive?" it's more "Mom's alive!"

Of course when the army brings Mom and the kids back and put them in isolation, Dad's reaction is even more intense. Up to now he believed he had left her to die. Of course he's going to go see her. . .

The most powerful moment of the whole film is when he's facing his wife, apologizing for leaving her in the farmhouse to die, and she forgives him! You've agonized with this guy since the opening of the movie, and you can see the weight lift off his shoulders. He walks to her side, and even though you're screaming at him not to, he kisses her.

And unlike so many "too stupid to live" characters in dozens of other movies, you're not screaming at him because it's an idiotic thing to do. You're screaming at him because you know, given what he knows (the plague has burned itself out, the military said so), and what he's been through (this his his wife) there was precious little else you'd expect him to do. Even though we see it coming, because we see it coming, we're as horrified as his wife when we see the infection grip him, and when he kills her it's as close to classic tragedy as I've seen a genre film get.

28 Weeks is made of this stuff. Human beings bring about the end of the world, not through malice or stupidity, but because they're human.

In case you weren't sure what plagiarism isn't.

The whole Cassie Edwards flap continues to ripple outward, leaving blog posts and long comment threads in its wake. One of the things it has unearthed is a widespread misunderstanding of what plagiarism actually is, leading to some rather eloquent posts on the subtle difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

But there is another widespread confusion that also needs to be addressed. It seems that for every person who believes "she did noting wrong", or "she was just lifting non-fictional facts", or "it's romance so it don't really matter. . ." there's someone else who's just as willing to dive overboard and say "hey that (description of a) book looks like (a description of) some other book," and point screaming "PLAGIARIST" like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Such people don't get the fact that, in fiction at least, there's no ethical problem with taking ideas/plots from prior work and adapting them to your own.

In fact, there'd be a bit of a problem if there was such a restraint as is pointed out rather amusingly on the Smart Bitches' blog:

There seems to be some confusion regarding the status of ideas in copyright law. You can’t copyright a plot or an idea. You can only copyright the specific expression of that plot or idea as recorded in some sort of tangible form. Think about the nightmare of attempting to nail down and legislate a plot or idea for a story. How specific would you have to be before you could declare something unique enough to copyright?

“An angst-ridden story about a vampire falling in love with a human.” Dude, if you can copyright that and collect a small fee every time somebody published that story, you could have your own giant pool of gold coins to swim in, Scrooge McDuck-stylee. (Side note: doesn’t that sound like a painful idea to you? Because it always has to me.)

Or, as Justine Larbalestier pointed out in a follow-up on her blog:

I am so sick of people thinking that retelling a story is plagiarism. If that were so then we would have, at most, ten novels. All books about vampires, zombies, middle-aged English professors are not the same (well, okay, some of them are). It’s not about the story you tell so much as HOW YOU TELL IT. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Georgette Heyer did not plagiarise Jane Austen. David Eddings didn’t plagiarise J. R. R. Tolkien. Walter Mosley didn’t plagiarise Raymond Chandler. I did not plagiarise C. S. Lewis.

The next person who says to me, “Oh my God! Did you see that Certain Writer’s next book is set in a future world where you have to have your skin removed and replaced with carbon when you turn sixteen? That is just like Scott’s Uglies books! He should sue!” That person will get smacked. HARD.

For some reason, a lot of people are tied up with this misunderstanding, to the point that I've seen multiple someones opine that Author A should sue Author B because of some similarity in plot mechanics. ("OMG they both feature red-haired were-weasels in a New-England high school!!!1!) In their view the similarity (usually between two Amazon-style plot synopses) is a BAD THING.

To this I say, "No, it isn't, you twit."

Fiction endlessly recycles plots, characters, tropes and the other structural elements of a story. Fiction is in a constant dialog with itself, and many stories are written in reaction to prior work. My own Emperors of the Twilight is a response of Heinlein's Friday, Dragons of the Cuyahoga was directly inspired by the "Future Boston" portrayed in In the Cube by David Alexander Smith, Raven has Edgar Allan Poe smeared all over it, the situation in Broken Crescent bears a (in this case accidental) significant resemblance to the plot set up in Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook, and a large part of Wolfbreed #1 owes its genesis to an anime series I'm rather fond of.

Those of you who've not gotten the point are going to start getting all Sutherland on me, somehow thinking my history of literary borrowing makes me a hypocrite for jumping all over poor Ms. Edwards. Let me clarify something for you. In fiction. . .

PLAGIARISM IS THE COPYING OF SOMEONE ELSE'S TEXT. T-E-X-T. NOT PLOT, NOT IDEA, NOT SOME CHARACTER'S ÜBER-COOL SUPERPOWER. TEXT! AS IN, THE PLAGIARIST OPENS THE SOURCE AND COPIES THE WORDS THERE! GET IT?

Thanks.

And he gets +4 vs. Furries

I saw a post on Lynn Viehl's blog and I just had to follow suit and use the online Trading Card Maker for one of my most popular characters. . .

(Pic is from the Japanese Ed.)

It made sense before the LSD wore off. . .

Ok, maybe I can buy the cobra. . . But what the hell is up with the Santa hat?

When a would-be writer is in denial

One of the most important elements in being a pro writer (or artist of any stripe) is the ability to accept criticism. Not only will you receive it from editors and, if you get published, fans and reviewers, but if you wish to improve your craft you need to accept that others will read your writing and find fault. Maybe a lot of fault. If you're a beginner, it will be a painful amount of fault. Not everyone is thick-skinned and mature enough to accept this. Some are so in love with what they think is on the page that they cannot conceive of something wrong with their golden words, the mean person disrespecting their story is either jealous, or reading it wrong. . .

I bring this up because I have a significant follow-up to my last spam deconstruction. When last we talked about this "compelling and absolutely authentic SF novel" I was reflecting that spamming a bunch of professional SF writers and hawking your self-published manuscript was not the best way to sell your book. However, curiosity did get the best of me and I did eventually visit the spammer's website. Here's a sample.

Journey with our main characters SeiWan Li and Lazarus as they go from young adults to maturity while they begin their mind altering excursions into the familiar settings of our solar system and beyond. Quest with the feating duo in their magnificent vessel The Star Voyager.
[...]
Immerse yourself in the informative epilogue providing detailed diagrams and alpha numeric data of ship profiles, speed scales, alien life, and locations throughout Star City.
[...]
We want to maintain a comprehensive narrative. Informal facts are available for the appetent scientific crowd to devour. This is not a work of strictly science yet herein surfaces fantasy.

I was so aghast at all this I had to tell someone, but instead of blogging about it (I'd already done the spam, and that seemed enough) I posted my discovery on my favorite bad movie site, the Agony Booth. I started a thread on the forums there letting the patrons know that this curiosity existed. (If you're curious about the site, the link to it is in the first post there.)

I created a monster. Nearly two months later, and the thread is six pages long. And, believe it or not, the author showed up, posting in the same broken spamtastic grammar. With the Mary Sueish touch of using his protagonist's name as a handle. Here're a few choice quotes:

You'll get 87.000 words of structure and adventure of exeedingly accurate and classic scince fiction action, thrill, and even a little romance for all you lovers out there.
[...]
I would like to assure you though I am in aggreeacne that we are not an official dissenminator of science fiction
[...]
I am reasonbly certain you will find it thoroughly efficient. Our team consists of writers, philosophers, and physicist to bring you the most accuract perspective on true space exploration.
[...]
The armature work "Star City" is available and ready to be acquired. Though you may find random spelling anomalies even in the face of our diligent editing of the conglomerate host of narrative and astronomical data, we believe that the random grammatical anomalies could be overlooked for the sake of ease.

This stuff parodies itself. If you've been on the internet any longer than the last 24 hours you can only imagine the level of snark that erupted in the thread in response to these pronouncements. It would be awe-inspiring if this was all there was.

But it isn't.

One of the fellow forum members, Premier Blah, actually had the balls (or the masochistic streak) to order a copy of the book. The author actually had the balls (or the masochistic streak) to send him a copy. Now, since the Agony Booth is dedicated to sarcastic, snarky, scene-by-scene deconstruction of crappy movies, you can guess what happens next.

Premier Blah starts his own forum thread where he does his own recap of the novel in question. And it is as awful as you think it is. And the author himself weighs in, which I'd feel kind of sad about if it wasn't for the fact that this train could be seen coming for two months and the guy still stood on the tracks pimping his self-published masterwork. It is a sight to behold. . .

At least this way, there's only one payment

Part of an ongoing series on stupid internet ad copy:



All I got to say is that's one hell of a monthly payment.

Laughing with you/Laughing at you

Well, I have again returned from the CWRU Film Society's SF Movie Marathon, which makes this about #20 for me. (I've been there enough times I've seen Zardoz twice there.) As last time, I've been left thinking about SF movies— in this case "SF/horror" movies since there was a zombie/undead theme going on. In particular, I've been left thinking about the differences between parody and homage.












If you look to the left here, we see four films I saw during the marathon. (Shaun of the Dead was one of the three "surprise" flicks, for the commenter who asked; the other two were Ice Pirates and The Day the Earth Stood Still.) The four share a common thread in that they are rather loving reworkings of earlier genre material done with tongue firmly in (through?) cheek.

I probably won't hear much of an argument if I say Young Frankenstein is the best of this lot. (And IMO the best film Mel Brooks ever did.) I may hear more of a complaint if I say that Planet Terror, is the least of the four. Yes, I rank it below Black Sheep. Why? It comes down between the difference between parody and homage.

The dictionary definition of the two mostly take the tack that parody is imitation with ridicule, whereas homage is imitation with respect. Which, when we talk about films, is close but not really exact. Parody can be done with great affection for the source material. In this case, parody is making fun of structural elements or genre tropes, taking them further than they normally go for the sake of highlighting them. This can be done with ridicule or, as in Planet Terror, with great affection. In Planet Terror the attempt is give an extra postmodern level by inserting splices, scratches, film burns, trailers, and missing reels to mimic the experience of cheap urban 70's filmgoing. Only Young Frankenstein can match it for authentically reproducing the feeling of its source material.

So why do I think it the lesser work?

To explain, let me define "homage" in this context. A film, IMO, counts as a homage when it imitates the source material faithfully enough to actually become an example of the genre. It may be self-aware, but it isn't (when well done) self-conscious. Most important, the humor is self contained. A proper homage stands alone as a film and will work for a viewer who has no prior experience in the genre being paid tribute to.

In contrast, a "parody" relies a great deal on the viewer's prior experience.

A good part of Planet Terror, especially the missing reel gag, requires the viewer to understand the source to get the gag. For someone unversed in 70's schlock, the self-conscious reproduction of all the form's flaws will, at best, come across as slipshod screenwriting.

However, while a diet of zombie apocalypse cinema makes Shaun of the Dead a richer experience, anyone can enjoy the film, even if you think George Romero is the host of an Italian cooking show (and today... brains!).

Young Frankenstein is hilarious even for people who've never seen the Universal original that it gives tribute to so faithfully. Even Black Sheep, a gory New Zealand effort that owes a lot to early Peter Jackson, while it has the DNA of a 1970 wildlife-gone-amok film, has smartly decided not to rely on the viewer's knowledge of that particular micro-genre.

Planet Terror is redeemed by the "cool shit" factor, and is loved by many for that alone. But it unfortunately so in love with its subject and in such a self-conscious and self-referential manner that as the movie proceeds, the less accessible it becomes, until it largely falls apart as a film and devolves into a sort of uber-sketch; a bloated version of the fake trailers that preceded it.

We have a novel

Or a third of a trilogy. Final verbiage until editorial revisions kick in: 95,859. Since rewrites for me always go long, Prophets will probably be 100K words when it hits the shelves. I've retired the counter, and adjusted the word count for the trilogy as a whole so that Prophets is actually 1/3 of the total.

Yea me!

I now have a long weekend ahead filled with a buttload of SF movies and office furniture assembly.

I guess I overshot

By about 5000 words so far, but another 1000 to 2000 words and Prophets will be done. I was going to try and wrap it up tonight, but ended up dealing with insurance people (will people stop it with the rear ending of me and my wife, please!) and buying a new office set for my wife, who definitely needs her life organized (guess what I'll be doing with my day off Monday?) and I just now finished dinner, and I'm dog tired. So, what's another day? Sigh.

Good thing is, cliffhanger ending or not, I think I did find a nice natural break to end book #1. Sure I killed a major character, left another one floating stranded in space, and everything's sort of going to hell, but it feels like a good place to stop.

And the asshat for today is. . .

Steve Jobs, for the following quote RE the Amazon kindle: (via Gallycat)

The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.

Yeah. The internet would really take off if people get over this whole reading thing. All those blogs filled with words and stuff. Man, you make nice hardware, but sometimes you ought to just shut the pie hole.

Wherein some Smart Bitches give me romantic advice

You may have noticed, even before the whole Cassie Edwards flap, that I follow the blog, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books. It is, as advertised, smart, bitchy, and chock full of the kind of humor I tend to appreciate. Well, on said blog they have a feature called GS vs. STA (aka Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid) where their readership asks the massed genius that is the Smart Bitches for genre recommendations in a particular subset of romance. Today, they posted my query, since, as an accidental romance author, I need to brush up on the genre I find myself writing in. The comment thread so far may interest SF/F fans, since there's a heavy overlap. I even got one recommendation for Poul Anderson.

My Mind is Melded

Over at the SF Signal blog they have a cool feature called "Mind Meld" where they ask a bunch different SF-type people a question and post the answer. This week's post is the second half of a two-parter on the definition of SF. I've made the following contribution, which expands a little on my prior post on the topic:

Defining SF has always been problematic, since there's no definitive plot element (as in Romance, or Mystery) or mood (as in Horror, Comedy, and Suspense) or setting (all Historical Novels) that helps us in defining most other genres. To this is added SF's Siamese-twin, Fantasy, a separate genre that carries the same lack of definitive plot elements, mood, or setting.

In most popular discourse the definition of SF and Fantasy ends up being definition via trope. (It has a starship, it goes here. A dragon, over there. What? Pern? Head'splode.) The other popular method of separating the twins is by splitting things up along a possible/impossible axis. This has its own consequences, such as slotting time travel and FTL into the fantasy realm. It also excludes from the SF fold stories whose point is to logically extrapolate from some fiddling with natural law-- I mean a novel about a box that adjusts the gravitational constant should be shelved in fantasy?

My own definition of SF comes in two distinct parts. First, while the story's world is not the same as the author's, there is some explicit or implicit congruency between the story's universe and the author's. There is a map from here to there, even if it's to go back to 1908 Siberia and take a hard right at Tunguska.

Second, and more important, the story is written from the perspective that the universe runs by predictable and knowable laws, and those laws are the same as those in the author's universe. If they differ at all, the difference must be explained in such a way that the story doesn't loose its connection to the author's universe.

Irony, thy name is Cassie Edwards

I thought I had posted all I was going to on this. But, then, my wife was waiting at Walgreens to get a prescription filled and was walking past the book isle, and came across this. I draw your attention to the lower right corner.

How bad is it?

Cassie Edwards' plagiarism that is?

Well I tried an experiment. I decided to spend part of my evening hunting down some CE sample text, look through it, and see if I can Google a lifted passage. I decided this at roughly 7:30.

It is now 7:47. The seventeen intervening minutes was spent as follows: Fifteen minutes launching Amazon in my browser, searching for Edwards' work, finding a random book of hers that allowed the "search inside" feature, and scanning the pages for likely candidates. Two minutes punching a few phrases into Google.

I got a hit.

From Savage Intrigue by Cassie Edwards, Leisure Books 2007 p4-5

Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all. Great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed by either.
The Dakota could look at nothing without seeing Wakan Tanka; they could never evade his presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all spaces.

From Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear, Bison Books 1978 p179

Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all, and great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed. The Lakota could look at nothing without at the same time looking at Wakan Tanka, and he could not, if he wished, evade His presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all space.

So in less than half an hour I was able to hunt down a random piece of Edwards' text, find its correct attribution, transcribe it, and write a blog post about it.

That's how bad it is.

In her own(?) words

What follows may be as close to a complete statement from Cassie Edwards as we’ve had since the whole plagiarism issue raised its ugly head. It is allegedly an e-mail response to a fan expressing support, and is documentary evidence of why lawyers generally tell you to shut the f**k up when the feces hits the fan. The text via the Smart Bitches blog: (My comments in green)

[UPDATE: Dear Author contacted a representative of Cassie Edwards to confirm the authenticity of this e-mail. The response was "no comment." An evil, hateful person would assume that this means Cassie finally talked to her lawyer.]

I just got on My Space and I found your wonderful encouraging letter. Thank you for believing in me, for I have done nothing wrong.
[SWANN: exsqueeze me? Even when this was restricted to non-fiction you were saying to the AP that you just “didn’t know” you were supposed to cite references. Hint- if the behavior isn’t wrong, you don’t have to make excuses for it.]
My publisher is standing behind me 100%, for they know my work better than anyone,
[SWANN: Quoth Signet: “… we will be examining all of Ms. Edwards’ books that we publish, and based on the outcome of that review we will take action to handle the matter accordingly. We want to make it known that Signet takes any and all allegations of plagiarism very seriously.” Apparently, they don’t know your work that well.]
and they know that all romance authors who use research for historicals have to use reference books to do this.
[SWANN: Cassie, here is a hint. Use <> Copy. I’ve written historical novels, read a whole lot of reference materials, and the only passage I ever felt the need to copy verbatim was from a news article in the Cleveland Press about the Torso Murders, and that was because a character was reading that edition of the paper. I don’t think your 19th century characters have the same excuse lifting passages from a 2005 nature article about ferrets.]
My readers love this accurate material about the Indians.
[SWANN: And, apparently, ferrets.]
And if I couldn’t use this material my books would not be worth anything to my readers who depend on me.
[SWANN: Depend on her? Ok, I feel a little responsibility to my readers (sort of the reason I don’t lift passages wholesale in my books) but she makes herself out to be like a paramedic, a cop, or at the least the Roto-Rooter guy who came and kept my basement from flooding. It’s a novel, get over yourself.]
The sad thing is that I am writing these books now in a way to honor our Native Americans, past, present and in the future.
[SWANN: Why do I get the feeling that her primary demographic is not down on the Res?]
And I am honoring my great grandmother who was a full blood Cheyenne. She would be so proud of me if she could read what I am writing about the Indians who have been so maligned for so long.
[SWANN: The white man steals our land. We shall steal the white man’s words.]
And do you know? I feel picked on now as our Native American Indians have always been picked on throughout history.
[SWANN: How juvenile can you get? Chicky, you were outed on a blog for near-verbatim copying of your sources. You were not stripped of your property and made to march barefoot a few hundred miles to a reservation, forced to abandon your language and religion, and given a pox-infected blanket for your trouble.]
I am trying to spread the word about them and what do I get? Spiteful women who have found a way to bring attention to themselves, by getting in the media in this horrible way.
[SWANN: You note, at this point, there is not a single denial of what she’s been accused of doing? All she can do is malign the women who brought attention to the fact she’s been stealing passages wholesale.]
Right now I am getting hit from all sides....CNN, The New York Times, AP, everyone who those women could think of to contact.
[SWANN: Um… they posted it on a blog. That’s telling everyone. Also, I think the press caught wind of this themselves. It’s sort of like, their job.]
And what is also sad is that a fellow author, has spoken up and condemned me.
[SWANN: Hi there, I’m a fellow author. Pleased to meet you. Guess what? I’m condemning you too. And, frankly, I haven’t seen an author write about this who is not pretty pissed at your antics.]
Thanks again for your support. When I am feeling stronger I plan to write a bulletin on My Space, but right now I am totally drained of energy from what has been done to me.
[SWANN: You know, Cassie, if someone posted a picture of you shoplifting, I do not think an adequate defense is to decry how horrible it was someone posted the picture.]
I hope that you will tell your friends, who are so much also mine, the wrong that has been done to me, and tell them that I will get through this. I will be found innocent and vindicated [sic] of any wrong.
[SWANN: This is classic, and still not a denial. She never says “I did not do those horrible things I’m accused of.” Probably because it’s all in print and can’t really be denied. The best she can do is, “The horrible things I’m being accused of aren’t wrong. No, really, it’s ok. My publishers would have said something, wouldn’t they? Please, it’s not like I’m killing puppies. They’re all jealous anyway. They never liked me. Please feel sorry for me.”]
For now, it’s all too raw and horrible, but I will be alright.

I actually do feel sorry for her. Not because she was outed as a plagiarist, but because she, and her readers, were very ill-served by a series of editors who either never had enough respect for Cassie and her readers to discover this pattern twenty years ago and straighten her out, or worse, knew about it and did nothing. Instead of being bitch-slapped some sense in the eighties, at which point she might have been able to recover her career and have by now, perhaps, 80-some untainted novels to her credit, she was given permission, either implicit or explicit, to do what she was doing. Now, because no editor ever corrected her behavior, she has 100 novels out there every one of which is questionable, and it’s possible she will never be able to recover from it. That’s an appalling situation on any level. She might bear full brunt of the blame for doing what she did, but the people in the publishing industry that enabled her and encouraged her are equally complicit.

Projects and Counters and Stuff

It's a new year and I've revised my project counters. I have ditched the counter for The Unicorns of Hunting Valley because it seems very unlikely I'll be able to justify getting back to it any time in the near future. (As in, any time in 2008.)

I've added a counter for book 2 in the Apotheosis Trilogy, which, barring catastrophe, should be done some time this upcoming year.

I've also added a counter for the book two in the Wolfbreed series.

Note, some title changes here. I've talked with Anne Groell at Bantam and it looks as if "Wolfbreed" will be the title for the series-- which makes sense given how I intend to follow the book up going forward.

So the first book, which up to now I've been calling "Wolfbreed" will actually be printed under the title "Wolfbreed:[something else I need to think up]." I'll post here when I have a clue what the final title will be.

And, if you're curious, book two is set in 14th century Poland.

Butt Glut

In a manifestation of what I noted in an earlier post; that if your romantic paranormal fantasy is filed on the romance shelf you get a hunk on the cover, on the fantasy shelf you get a babe on the cover in short:

Fantasy:



Romance:



Now there's a blog post on the Juno Books blog that's warning of yet another subclassing of paranormal cover art-- The Butt Cover. Apparently, if you have an ass-kicking heroine in a paranormal urban fantasy, we need to see some ass. Consider yourself warned.

In case you weren't sure what plagiarism is

Well, Cassie Edwards' research methodology has caused quite an internet dust-up. Inevitable, I guess, when a set of controversial bloggers uncover this kind of skeleton in the literary closet of a popular NY-Times bestselling author. What I find interesting is that there are a few bloggers out there that have what I find to be a rather odd take on the whole thing. Here are a few examples:

From the The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Now, I haven't read every last bit of the supposedly plagiarized pieces, but they all seem to be factual descriptions of actual Indian rituals, behaviors, beliefs, and so on. And changing the wording substantially, when describing actual real-world things, would tend to make one's description diverge from that thing. The technical term for this is "getting it wrong."

From Lila Schow's Blog o' Fun

This one strikes me as a bit different because, while the issue is still plagiarism, it is plagiarism of non-fiction. Of information.

There are things plagiarism is, and things it isn't. Plagiarism is the appropriation of another author's words and presenting them as your own. You can't plagiarize "information," "ideas," or "plot," unless you directly copy the words conveying said "information," "ideas," or "plot." Many on the internet have accused Christopher Paolini of plagiarizing Star Wars in his novel Eragon, and despite all the parallels they draw between the two, the accusation is wrong both on a legal and a artistic level. Not because Eragon is a different genre, but because, as far as I know, no one has claimed that the words Paolini wrote were anything other than his own. If you research a fact, there is no ethical problem with conveying that fact in the text. It's when you cut and paste the "facts" with minimal editing, you have a problem.

Here I show the whole "stealing another's words" bit. The "borrowed" verbiage is highlighted in green to help illustrate the problem. (examples courtesy Smart Bitches.)

Here is a problematic passage from Cassie Edwards' Shadow Bear:

"In their own way, they are a peaceful enough animal," Shadow Bear said... "They are so named because of their dark legs." "They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail," Shiona said. "While alone in my father's study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father's books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."

And the source quote from Paul Tolme. "Toughing it Out in the Badlands," Defenders Magazine, Summer 2005:

Black-footed ferrets, so-named because of their dark legs, weigh about two pounds and measure two feet from tip to tail. Related to mink and otters, they are North America's only native ferret (and a different species than the ferrets kept as pets). Their closest relatives are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska to establish the New World population.

Now, this is only a few sentences and is unlikely to be legally problematic, but it is ethically troublesome. Not because the passage copies "facts" as such. But because it uses a near-exact copy of another author's language. And, with all due respect to the blog posters above, writing these facts "in your own words," as my 6th grade teacher used to say, does not change the "facts." Is it so hard to write something like this?

"In their own way, they are a peaceful enough animal," Shadow Bear said... "Their name comes from the dark color of their legs." "They are so small, barely two feet long nose to tail, surely they can't weigh much more than a couple of pounds," Shiona said. "While alone in my father's study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father's books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. They're in the same family as minks and otters, and are closely related to European ferrets and Siberian polecats. I read the theory that those polecats crossed into the New World via the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska."

It isn't great, but it's only a few minutes work.

File this one under, "and you were thinking what?"

If you follow this blog you might remember NE Ohio's resident plagercop Jack L. Herman who swiped plays wholesale from Canada, produced them under his own name, and I guess just assumed that the language barrier would prevent him from getting caught. I said in that post:

It goes to prove that direct word-for-word plagiarism is rare because it is an incredibly stupid practice to engage in. Especially for serial plagiarists like Det. Herman. The fact that your crime will remain on public display until someone figures out you stole it means that potential for eventual discovery is about as close to 100% as you can get.

This is certainly true for the wholesale plagiarist like Mr. Herman. But in our Googleized Wiki Wide Web World, this is also true for the less grandiose plagiarist. Someone who doesn't cop the whole shebang, but just a bit here and there. The writer who's like a lazy college student, copying chunks of research materials directly into their paper. . .

Maybe exactly like that lazy college student, copying chunks of research materials directly into their paper. Now, more than ever, one should ever hear the Grundyesque voice of their sixth-grade teacher muttering, "In your own words, now, boys and girls."

You see, when a writer drops in a chunk of text from an external source into their novel it's sort of noticeable. It will read like someone else wrote it, because someone else did. Eventually, an enterprising reader is going to pump those borrowed words into a search engine. . .

When they do, you end up with something like this series of posts appearing on the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog. In the Bitches' own words:

Shadow Bear [by Cassie Edwards] introduced poor Kate to all-new levels of pain--she’d never encountered a book in which ellipses and exclamation marks were abused with quite that much abandon, or in which the characters spoke in Glossary with such distressing consistency. What especially caught her eye, however, were the didactic passages in the book. They were written in a distinctly different voice, and out of idle curiosity, she decided to Google certain phrases and sentences.

The results were...interesting. Kate was able to find large chunks of text from a few sources that seemed to have been inserted into Shadow Bear with little to no modification, mostly from Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear and, I shit you not, an article about black-footed ferrets from the Defenders of Wildlife.

Yes. Ferrets.

Thus launched a rather extensive research effort that reveals a distinct odor around Cassie Edwards' work that has little to do with ellipses and exclamation marks. Even if the passages used by Edwards and itemized in these blog posts aren't actionable, they certainly are embarrassing.

Bummed

Well it looks like I'm going to fall short of my self-imposed deadline for Prophets. I went and caught the flu. When I get to feeling this kind of blah, I find it hard to read, much less write. So down to around 500 words a day for the time being. On a more pleasant note the contracts from Bantam showed up today.

Now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside

John Ottinger has had some nice things to say about Fellowship Fantastic, the latest anthology by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes. He also had some very nice things to say about this humble author's contribution:

The best stories in this anthology were [Donald J. Bingle’s] "The Quest" and "The Enigma of the Serbian Scientist", which is odd, considering that neither is truly fantasy in the strictest sense. [...] "The Enigma of the Serbian Scientist" by S. Andrew Swann reintroduces the historical figures of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, in a murder mystery that can only be solved by an alternate Sherlock Holmes. The stories connection to fellowship is tenuous, as it builds on the readers’ prior knowledge of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, renamed Helms and Wilson in this story, but it is still interesting to read and is an unusual choice for this collection. Therefore, if nothing else, it stands out for its distinctiveness as well as its craft.

Well I'm all asquee.

What are you waiting for? Buy the book already.

The weird things you discover when finishing a manuscript

I didn't write a chapter 12 for Prophets.
No, I didn't leave anything out, I just went straight from 11 to 13.
No, I don't know how it happened.
Yes, this is a sort of pointless comment.

Don't drink the product when writing your ad copy

Or else your Robutussin ad might read like this:



Two things:

1. Love Mucus^TM
2. That woman looks way too excited that she gets MORE than just Mucus^TM

Oh, by the way

Happy New Year!

(Remember to write "08" on your checks now.)

Not Quite

But I still managed about 2500 words a day, which is pretty respectable output when I'm not under the whip of my muse. When you subtract the two days where I had an output of approximately nil (one celebrating X-mas with my Mom, the other X-mas with the in-laws), I actually made my 3500 word/day goal. The counter stands at 91%, and I think that my initial word count estimate may in fact be pretty damn close for once. I didn't finish the draft, but we're clearly at the point where when I get to the right point I can turn it in.

Notice though, I didn't say "end." unlike Hostile Takeover, Apotheosis doesn't quite lend itself to three independent chunks the way that trilogy did. This one is going to be a bit of a cliffhanger.