OmegaMom

Many years ago, when OmegaMom was a young lass in school, she loved both her creative writing and history classes.  In both, she discovered, she could happily produce chapters of romance novels, fresh from her imagination, and actually get good grades for it!  Hot damn!

In fact, OmegaMom decided, upon leaving high school and entering college, that she would major in history, learn German, take lots of writing and English classes, and forge herself a career writing historical romances.  Bodice rippers, in other words.

Well, she went from being a big fish in a small pond (smart in high school) to being a little fish in a big pond (sat next to a National Merit Scholarship winner at the new student introductory symposium at Big Name Midwestern College) and promptly went into a depressive tailspin, flunking German, spending her spring semester taking horseback riding and ice skating, and dropping out of college at the end of her first year.  *Poof* went my prospective career, lost in the mists with my need to, say, pay the rent and buy food.

Many, many years later, here is OmegaMom, working with computers, eyeing the downhill slope of her life, and long long past the daydream of bestselling romance writer-hood.

But pity the poor romance writer!

You have to do research, y’know.  (This was why I was going to learn German:  it seems that many history research books were written in German, and so, to get the background of various small European principalities, I thought I would need to learn the language.)

And you have to find a way to get it into your book, as background, y’know.  (Most of us have ways of reading stuff, digesting it, and then regurgitating it in our own words.  It’s a skill.  It helped immensely during all my humanities courses.)

So there I was, reading John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, when I came across this post about plagiarism.  It seems that a best-selling romance writer was found by the ladies at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books to have plagiarized backstory research in her romance novels–one of their friends had gotten intrigued by the clunky dialogue in one spot in a book, and googled it–and the story has been making the rounds of romance fan boards, writers’ blogs, and more…A trainwreck, to be sure.

Then today, I run into a headline on MSNBC:  "Newsweek:  Plagiarizing Hot Ferret Love"…and I just had to find out what it was about.

Lo and behold, it was one of the writers who was plagiarized, writing about the entire affair.  And let me just say, it’s hilarious.

All of which reminds me of some amazing instances of blog plagiarization I have encountered (blog newbies just copying famous bloggers’ posts in toto and changing a few details to make it seem that the posts were their own), and the recent issue photographers on Flickr have had with big media companies actually using their photos without attribution.

The internet, it seems, is both a useful tool for plagiarizing, and for catching plagiarists.  O Brave New World…

Anyway, I highly recommend following the trail above.