Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

I've never seen a fandom implode like this.

There's so much rage at the amazon.com forums, so much froth across the internet, so many (possibly NWS) macros and lists and sparkly text blocks and lulz at ohnotheydidnt, mmmcradle, and however many other places. Hell, professional reviewers like Publishers Weekly are even taking giant bites out of it. There's also a movement starting for people to return their copy of Breaking Dawn if they hated it.


Seriously, yes, it is that bad. (I have links for downloading if you wanna see. It's terribly edited & terribly paced & terribly worded & terribly plotted in such a way that it almost makes the earlier works look good.)



But y'know, for the trash-talking SMeyer did on Rowling for taking so long with her books . . . Epic. Pwnt.

Picked up Danielle Steel's Rogue and cracked it open on a whim, just to see how bad it was. It was phenomenally bad. Sweet Jesus, her narrative is about as exciting and emotionally charged as a comma-heavy encyclopedia article written by a depressed octogenarian. It's poop, I tell you, utter poop--as if you didn't know already. :P

Started Steve Perry's The Musashi Flex and ended up putting it down. Perry's actually trained in Filipino knife systems and it shows with his fight scenes, which work pretty well (as opposed to the half-assed & barely described "knife dancing" in Karen Miller's Empress). He makes me wanna dig out my karambit and play with it. Unfortunately, his sentence structure clunks along sans semicolons and the big typo on the first page didn't really endear me to the work. I may go back for it later--just not now.

Gave up on Elizabeth George's Careless in Red around a sentence that rolled something like "running up and down his arms like the chilly fingers of a dead baby." You guys know me--it triggered a few dozen dead baby jokes and that was pretty much the end of that. Oh, Elizabeth . . . And I had such hope.

Started reading The Feminine Mistake. I think it needs more citations & a little less bias, but I'm still wading on through because I'm interested in a possible explanation for the sort of culture that'll make a runaway bestseller of Stephenie Meyer's wildly misogynistic & blatantly anti-feminist trainwreck. We'll see how this one goes.


(C. S. Lewis wrote the Christian fantasy epic. Pullman wrote the atheist fantasy epic. Meyer wrote the anti-feminist Mormon epic. Rowling wrote the boy wizard, and Paolini wrote the shameless Star Wars ripoff. I wonder what mine'd count as. Neo-pagan? Hmm.)

(I should really, really work on that first draft of BF&B more. But between that and the NYAF stuff and the wedding mess and random ficcage and the lolSue story clamoring for headspace, I really have no idea what the fuck I'm trying to create from one moment to the next.)

Next victim: Gideon Defoe, and his uber-cracky Pirates! novels.




Gregory Maguire's third book in the Wicked series, Lion Among Men, is due out later this year. I want to have a release party. I'd paint myself green and wander about with the uber-cute Ty lion. I think my store's higher-ups would be amused at the green-ness . . . but not enough to warrant a midnight release. Bah.

Oh well. If they won't give me a midnight release, I shall crack into the boxes myself and read it early, out of spite. :D

I think I found the worst sentence in the entire world.

Mysterious, this object drew Erika just as the lustrous eyes of Dracula drew Mina Harker toward her potential doom in a novel that was not likely to be a source for literary allusions suitable to the average formal dinner party in the Garden District but that was in her downloaded repertoire nonetheless.
Dean Koontz--Frankenstein, City of Night

Granted, this was on the first page I opened to, so the book may contain a whopper or six yet. But I showed it to one coworker, who went into shrieking gales of laughter and then demanded I find something worse to show her come Monday.
Likely? Not really. Bah.

~~

Current objective: get more stuff on etsy, get invitations printed, get red ribbon, and get t00bs addressed.

I'm about a third of the way into The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and am not quite sure what I think of it. The gist of the book is this: Freud and Jung arrive in New York City (yes, it's NYC again) as one young heiress is murdered and another rendered speechless by an unknown assailant. Psychobabble follows, along with a ton of extraneous detail & offshoot stories as padding. With Elizabeth George I know that all the little side stories will come into play. Here, I'm getting every impression that we don't need to know the exact amount of money Ms. Hoity-toity spent on X ball where she invited Y number of guests to a hall that was Z feet long and decorated with this, that, and the other (in these shades).

(It's like the Tolkien of period writing, in a way.)

The characters are what's getting me the most, though. Jung is thus far absolutely batshit insane. Now, I know Jung was crazy--though maybe newageamazon & I just ran into the wrong professor and Jung wasn't as crazy as we may think--but there's talking about collective unconsciousnesses playing into dream interpretation and there's being a frothing out-of-control neurotic lying racist. And on the other hand, Freud is idolized by the author main character author's self-insert, and behaves like an absolute saint. Sort of.

See, I think real!Jung was crazy but I think real!Freud was worse. I read Freud's case history of Dora once and decided that for all his analytic writings he really knew jack shit about women. So when book!Freud conversationally drops a recognizable (later cited if not footnoted) block paragraph from the Dora file of how the character "Nora" reacted with disgust to being accosted/molested & propositioned by a friend of her father's because she was really just sexually frustrated and wanted to do him? And the author's insert character (who still hasn't had a physical description--besides visually appealing, of course) is only defending her because he himself is attracted to the girl? Fuck no. Freud didn't seem to believe that a young girl could be skeeved by being assaulted by someone. No, Freud apparently believed that young girls respond sexually to everyone, no matter the guy's age or approach--thus putting them on a lower level than animals, who can and do choose whether or not to mate with one male or another. And his later claim (in the book--I don't remember if this was in the file) that the girl told her father about the assault just to get back at the guy for not pressuring her into bed? Yeah, no. But it's okay, of course, because book!Freud knows everything.

So yeah, between the quotes, the pacing, what looks like an authorial insert (The author did a thesis on Freud and loves Shakespeare. The main character loves Shakespeare and idolizes Freud, and is thus far described only as strikingly handsome and especially well-moving.), Freud being both Stu!Freud and jackass!Freud, and what looks like a wholesale vilification of Jung, I'm not sure that I'm gonna make it through this thing--which is sad, because the premise was definitely an interesting one. :(

I read Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain a few days ago and appreciated it much more than the first time I tried it out--which was on my break during an overnight shift somewhere towards the end of a seventy-hour week. Before the minimalism was a little too much--this time I meandered on through, noted the basic brutality of the human condition, picked out the turns of poetic phrase that are basically like crack to me, and liked it better.


I also got into Anne Bishop's Tangled Webs, another book set in the Black Jewels Trilogy 'verse, and liked it way, waaay better than Dreams Made Flesh. Basically, one of the side characters from the BJT (Surreal) gets tricked & locked into a death trap of a house, & has to find a way out without getting herself, her friend, or any of the accompanying kids killed.

The story plunks along pretty slowly in the beginning and somewhat predictably towards the ending, but premise-wise it's a thing of shrieking hilarity. A raging Stuthor gets pissed off that people don't like his book and decides to take it out on the people he hears making fun of it (Surreal, Surreal's male friend), the person who "snubbed" him by not sending a thank-you note or dinner invitation after being given a book (Daemon), indirectly at the person he claims stole his idea for a haunted house (Jaenelle)(when it's mentioned that he snagged his "human with talking animal companion" story from another author after seeing her popularity), and . . . Lucivar. Apparently Lucivar's just guilty by association.

Does this sound like anyone we know?

No, seriously: I know Bishop is a snarky someone, but is she snarky enough to be pointing the finger at a particular author or authors? Her characters in the BJT have names that tend to indicate something about them. Landry Langston (the Stu's name) might just be a play off of Landen, the term for non-magical humans. Maybe. And Jarvis Jenkell (the Stuthor's name) . . .

Meh. Could be anything--though it would probably be good form of her to bury the reference so far in that only a few people would get it.

Otherwise: Bishop's characterization is much better here. Saetan gets fleshed out a lot more; ironically, he's more human a character after he's left the human world to become an especially heckled & cranky librarian. Lucivar becomes more sympathetic; Marian becomes a little less the stereotypical romance novel heroine (but only a little). Daemon . . . is Daemon, but shows some insecurities, gets rumpled by his new duties, and is run over by Jaenelle a few times. And Jaenelle is no longer all-powerful and has to deal with that. There's some logical/plot/wording things left to question--No one knew where the house was but Marian and Jaenelle? Why were so many demon-dead aiding the person who'd killed them? Dear God, do you really think people speak like that? Don't tell me you snarked the infamous weeping cock but left "milking" in a supposedly serious sex scene! And plz, plz stop using the phrase "chained sexual heat"--but by the time Lucivar went into action I was too busy cackling to care. Much.

Overall: Don't go in expecting literature--this is pure, unrepentant fluff. It's better fluff than the previous fluff but it's still nothing spectacular or really serious. If you go in with low expectations, looking for just a few hours of fun read, you'll be set.

ETA: The short story at the end was a different flavor than the rest of the book and would probably be worth reading even if the rest of the novel doesn't appeal to you.

So I ran into the damndest thing in the world yesterday: A YA book that didn't blow. I also kinda crushed the entire thing in a few hours before realizing (at about 3am) that I needed to sleep.

( Say it ain't so! )

I tried reading Karen Miller's book Empress and ended up having to stop due to how much I hated the main character. ( Cut for rant and potential spoilers. )

This thing stands only as an extremely long-winded questioning of what it means when a person commits all kinds of atrocities in the name of god—and with that god’s approval. I’ve got an answer. It means that world would be a shit place to live. It also doesn’t make for a good story—at least not with that person as the supposed protagonist. This book is definitely one to pass by.

I have lost a book, and in doing so I've turned into one of our customers.

I know it's in the literature section, I know it's a QP, and I know the author's last name started with a later letter of the alphabet. I know it was released within the past three weeks. I know it had a brownish or grayish cover with a woman in 18th century clothes being held up by a non-Cassie-Edwardsed Native American man.

I know that when I opened it to a random page it damned near melted my brain.


The bit started with some beautiful youngish beautiful beautiful girl on a boat with her two pet baby moose. She was fairly lightly dressed for the season (winter) and was so wildly blindingly beautiful that half the bunch of guys on the boat took one look at her, grabbed the nearest female, and went flying behind some handy curtains for a screaming bout of fornication. The rest were standing there leering but unsure of how to go for her beautiful beautifulness (and certain virginity) . . . So a random blind fiddler (who can't see her to be overcome by her looks) starts playing, and they decide to have a dance-off for the right to nail her.

No. Srsly. Dance-off.

So half of 'em are dancing, and the people nailing each other are shrieking, and a blind pianist turns up from somewhere to play more music, (and the girl's just kinda standing there with her two moose), and the shrieking and stomping and dancing and music keeps going until . . . all their activity sinks the boat.

The guys are wearing winter clothes and all drown. The girl wasn't, and holds onto her moose, and makes it to shore and lives.



See, now I have to find it again to figure out if it's supposed to be parody or not.

ETA: The book was The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer, and he was supposedly going for beyond parody--and succeeded. :)

I just found freezer818's rundown of the second and third books of Janine Cross's Venom Cock series. (If you've somehow erased the first book from your memory, please tell me how here's crevette's sporking of Touched by Venom for a refresher.)

That being said . . . D: D: D: DO NOT WANT.



But on a happy note, Neil Gaiman's gonna put up his novel American Gods for free download. The ending of it still managed to turn somersaults while tying random bits of itself into happy little bows (read: convolution!), but I'd still recommend it. :P

I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death however long ago and found it to be one of those books that makes me happy while simultaneously making me really really fucking angry. (The main female character, Adelia, drops all pretense of being an independent woman when she decides to stick around in decidedly hostile territory for an obviously doomed relationship, as the mistress of a man she knows doesn't respect her.) So when Franklin wrote a sequel, The Serpent's Tale, I was a little iffy about trying it out; but then again, I really wanted to see if she'd done better the second time around.

She did better. Significantly better. The book pretty much starts off with Adelia's guy parading about the country while she stands off to the side with a baby tucked in her folded arms, muttering about how she hates him. I cheered. Then I slammed through the book in one night.

But sometime during my “Yay book!” writeup, I realized that she’d really just written the first book again.

The villains are still in the same sexual deviant vein: In this book, an assassin with a penchant for cross-dressing serves a religious figure whose murderous streak ties in to his inability to become physically aroused. In the first, the bad guys were a sadomasochistic predator nun who serves a pedophilic sadistic sexual predator (who can’t get a hardon while a woman’s being mean to him). Adelia gets kidnapped again and assaulted a few more times—once with more of a hostile approach, once by the bad guy with a kink in mind. She gets accused of being a witch again, though the accusations are once again cleared up by the royalty-on-premises and in this book the demented out-and-out Satanist is mostly ignored. And while we're at it, characters bludgeon the reader with once again demonstrate that it’s shitty to be a woman in the medieval ages. (Seriously, it’s like all the male characters turned into Slytherins this time, what with their overarching ignoble mentality. They all somehow manage to collectively not care when a minor character gets kidnapped and raped—instead, they think it’s funny. Page 277, hardcover: “A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.”)

Anyway. There's another case of regis ex machina at the end, and the normally chunky Rowley undergoes yet another drop in weight before it's time for another (single paragraph) sex scene. Hell, there's still problems with first-person narrated thoughts being sporadically italicized.


But damn it, the plot still charged convolutedly along, the historical detail has backing that's cited in the endnotes, and Franklin didn't fuck up the 'ship this time. Adelia and Rowley understand that they both care for each other and both seem to get that where they are is not a good place to be, and they're gonna work with things from there. I can definitely appreciate that.



From a reader’s perspective, this book was much better than its predecessor. From a ficcer’s perspective, I wanna see a lot of the aspects of this book played with. For example: A minor character is raised in a convent, falls in love with a poetry-writing minor nobleman, and plans to elope with him. But when he’s murdered she’s kidnapped, forced into marriage, and raped by a particularly brutish asshole who’s about twice her age. When the asshole’s executed for treason a few days later, she’s left with a title and a small fortune and the king-given right to never marry again.

She’s fifteen.

I want her story.



So yeah. It's a decent read if you like historical fiction and don't mind the author getting a little stuck on the trials of being a woman when the guys around you are a bunch of cocks. I've been to clubs. I know what that's like.


Started Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart. I like her characterization--she's very, very deeply rooted in the human condition and works the emotional pull hard--even if the story itself is thus far drawing distinct parallels to Stephen King's The Green Mile. I'll see how it goes.

Still reading Lovecraft. Still liking Lovecraft. Thinking of claiming Miskatonic University as my alma mater. I wonder how well that'd go over on a resume. :P

So I've picked up, cracked open, and put down the Twilight series a couple times now. What I've seen has done nothing but piss me off. WTFPlot? WTFUrple writing style? WTF, hundred year old anybody wants to be in high school again? WTF, he touches her and she turns into orgasmic goo? WTF, he calls her an idiot and it's okay? WTF, is this girl intent on proving him right? WTFSPARKLY VAMPIRES?!

newageamazon has made it through more of the books than I have. Mentioning Stephanie Meyer will invariably set her off on a high-volume rant. Thusly.

Note that with this rant, she's questioning what it is in today's society that's made a runaway bestseller series out of the romanticizing of a decidedly abusive relationship, where the guy treats the girl like shit and constantly tries to control her (Telling her where she can and can't go, or who she can and can't be friends with, WTF? Disabling her car or locking her in her house or emotionally crushing her "for her own good," WTF? Telepathic stalking, WTF?!) and the girl's entire existence revolves solely around him.


And people come trolling in to prove that our collective worst fears are true.

for NINETY percent of the time, Edward DOESN'T treat Bella like property. I think when girls say they want a boyfriend like Edward, they mean they want a boyfriend who is a gentleman, which Edward mostly is. Like I said earlier, Edward definitely has his issues with being overprotective, but the thing is he DOES love Bella - he doesn't just say it, he shows it in the books.

Because it's okay if the guy treats the girl like property as long as it's not the majority of the time? Because it's okay because he's supposed to love her--because the author tells us he loves her and he says it a few times?

the attraction to Edward is that he's a gentleman...not so much him. Some of the traits that can be considered as abuse like the ones listed above (while bigoted) aren't necessarily abuse. That's over the top protection.

. . . Words failing.

IT IS A BOOK,
i think that if half of you guys just got laid
your lives would be filled with more than bashing Edward Cullen,=.

And that one just speaks for itself.

Edward is dead, see, and he's not controlling! When did he once control bella?

. . .

Now using his "charm" to get her to do what he wants, wouldn't most people do that? I mean seriously, think about it: if you had the ability to make someone do ANYTHING you wanted them to, just by looking at them, wouldnt you use that? and if you say no to that, there is just no reasoning with you. And as for the controlling her, he is doing what he thinks is best. Now we may know that what is actually doing is not the best choice, but he doesnt know that!

So it's okay because he can. Or because he thinks he's justified.

I wanna see a fight to the death between Edward Cullen and Richard Rahl. May the most self-justified asshole win!

And yes, Edward has his moments of being opinionated and controlling, but I sware to you, he does care for Bella. Until he found Bella, he had spent many years alone. Would you want to lose something so great after having waited for so long to finally get it?

In the fact of him leaving her, he was trying to be selfless. He was giving her an opportunity to live her life, without him being involved in it. As for him dragging her along to prom, it was another case of wanting her to live as a human. He didn't want her to miss such a great experience. Edward has given Bella countless chances for her to to leave him, especially for Jacob. She is one who chooses to stay.

It's okay because he's been alone! It's okay because he felt she needed to have experiences, no matter what she wanted for herself! It's okay because she chose to stay with him!



Miseryxchord sums it all up pretty well towards the bottom:

miseryxchord: 01/25/2008 5:03 AM
Wow. Reading the comments here has been very educational... apparently:

1) It's okay to totally trash someone's opinion, accuse them of overreacting, and belittle their concerns, as long as you tack "but I respect your opinion" onto it.

2) If someone has an opinion that disagrees with yours, you should repeatedly lecture them on your right to disagree with them, while acting like they have no right to disagree with you.

3) The number of people who are excusing an abusive character's actions because 'He really loves her' or 'he's a gentleman the rest of the time' or 'he's only controlling because (insert excuse here)' totally justifiy Ashly's concerns for young women living in a society where they apparently believe an abusive person is a great catch, fiction or not. THEY (the people commenting here) are in the real world, and THEY are making excuses for his behavior in terms of a real person... he loves her, so it's okay.

So today we've learned that it's okay to squeal over a fictional character, but it's wrong wrong wrong to point out that character's faults or that they're built to be an exceptionally shitty person. We've also learned that excuses for the emotional abuse of a fictional character look almost exactly like the excuses given by someone in an abusive relationship. And that society is fucked.






And that spaghetti-o's plus the flu = nothing good. From an unrelated IM:

slinkeepie087 (2:01:24 PM): you know what is nasty to throw up?
slinkeepie087 (2:01:35 PM): Spaghetti-Os that are in the shape of letters
slinkeepie087 (2:01:46 PM): at one point i was like... oooh maybe i can throw up words!
slinkeepie087 (2:04:51 PM): i thought... in that sick way you are when you're vomiting.. for a quick second it was like... man if i threw up "Bbbblllllaaarrrrrghhhhh" id take a picture.

I picked up Gaiman's Stardust, got about halfway through, realized I couldn't give two shits about any of the characters and that there was far too much extra padding word-wise, and put it down.

I picked up Charles de Lint's Widdershins, realized that it was cut from the same cloth as Gaiman's American Gods, and got maybe four chapters in before my overused concepts sensor started shrieking about NO MORE FAIRIES NO MORE FAIRIES AND ESPECIALLY NO MORE EUROPEAN FAIRIES TRANSPLANTING TO AMERICA. Then I put it down. Too bad--I liked his straight-up native oddities stuff.


I picked up Kiernan's novelization of Gaiman's screenplay Beowulf, mostly out of a morbid sort of curiosity--how would modern-day storytellers take on the work that'd been one of the (many) banes of my Major British Writers class?


Well, I didn't put that particular header on this post for no reason.

( They did WHAT to my classic?! )

I'm afraid to see if the movie's any better, so I picked up a Best of Lovecraft collection and am still working on Laurie’s The Gunseller, which is still good. Mm, brain cleaner. :P

I'd make that Cassie Edwards post but it seems this wank is far from over. Smart Bitches Trashy Books readers offered to take on Cassie Edwards novels to see if there was anything else to find--and they found (among pages and pages and pages of other things) that the woman'd taken chunks out of a Pulitzer-winning novel from 1930.

Big, clunky, recognizable chunks.

Fandom_wank is linking left and right here and here.



Okay, whatever. I'm going for it.

Thankfully, Signet has finally decided to start taking this shit seriously (going back on their initial statement that Edwards had "done nothing wrong") and thus I am spared the moral conundrum of how to bite back at their publishing house without aversely affecting their innocent n00b or mid-list authors. Too bad I can't figure out a way to boot some of these Edwards defenders' brain cells through the computer, though. These people are trolling SBTB and Dear Author, and have shown a dazzling (if somewhat predictable) array of logical failure.

If you have time to check things like that then you need to get a life!
Say (general)you see a crime being committed. If you report it or try to stop the criminal, does that mean you need to get a life?

You've done the outing, now you should just let it go!
Signet tried to brush this under the rug when it came out. We (as bloggers, readers, buyers, and anti-plagiarist individuals) have every reason to believe it’s because of our massive outcry that they’ve taken back their initial statement. Why should we believe that they’ll continue to do the right thing if we ease up on the pressure?

Besides--people keep catching other things she’s stolen, and (to lift a phrase) I'm curious as to how deep this rabbit hole goes.

It’s fair use!
Fair use requires citations. This was her passing off a number of other people’s work, both fiction and non-fiction, frequently word for word, as her own. That’s plagiarism. Big difference.

You’re just attacking her! You just wanna ruin her career!
I’ll mock her for being a shitty writer while I get the flamethrower for the plagiarism, sure. But shitty writing is just shitty for the people who have to read or edit it. Plagiarism is another full fly-infested pit of feces entirely. And no, I firmly believe that plagiarists should not get publishing contracts—especially those like Edwards, who refuse to understand or acknowledge that they’ve done wrong. Come on, now. Publishing a known plagiarist is like having some guy who's promised you a nice date taking you to a barnyard and nailing a sheep in front of you, then calling you back the next day to ask for another date. Are you gonna say to yourself, "Well, he was such a nice person--Maybe his sheep-fucking days are over and I should give him another try!"

Of course you wouldn't!

Readers are pulling stolen chunks out of books Edwards published from 1983 to 2007. This woman has made a career out of stealing other people’s work. Why the hell should it continue? And why should we try to protect Edwards from the consequences of her own actions?

It has to be proven in a court of law!
I don’t know where the fuck people get off with this. It’s right there, in writing and in almost mirrored text. It’s not cited. That’s plagiarism. John M. Barrie, the guy who helped create anti-plagiarism software for colleges, has called it plagiarism. That really means it’s plagiarism. You’re telling me that you don't believe your eyes or an expert in the field, that you need a judge to spell out to you that these texts are the same? Are you fucking serious?

Add in how plagiarism in and of itself isn’t illegal (though hideously unethical), but copyright infringement is, and your demand for a criminal trial becomes a little ludicrous I guess I’ll have to start pulling the still-in-copyright stuff she’s been caught stealing. Like the encyclopedia bits and research books and Pulitzer winners and wildlife magazine articles, and the fully lifted author's note, and . . . Jeez, I need a beer. But for the still-being-compiled list of what's been hit, check here.

Why does it matter, she isn’t selling nearly as much now anyway!
So it’s okay because she’s already made money off pretending someone else’s work is her own?

But she’s an old woman and you’re just being mean to her!
Please tell me what age I must be to no longer be held responsible for my actions.

(The ubiquitous) You’re just jealous! *invocation of Godwin's law, Snacky's law, so forth*
Because outing someone for stealing and hating the fact that they stole has something to do with jealousy. And speaking out against that is an act of treachery, treason, unnecessary aggression, and just plain meanness. Really now.



May add more later. Still being angry. But this is certainly a wank of legend.


But for the happiness to this massive wankstorm: Nora Roberts! I think I love Nora Roberts now. I still haven't read her stuff but after reading her posts during the Lanaia Lee wank and seeing her have the balls to stand up and decry Edwards's actions to the AP (when so many authors are quiet in an attempt to not rock the metaphorical boat and when that moron Jennifer Crusie jumped into the fray to decry SBTB's outing as bullying when the posts themselves were remarkably objective) . . . I want to send her shiny things.

The author of The Sneaky Chef has sued the Seinfelds for plagiarism and defamation of character. Good for her. I hope she wins.


I should customize my community, but I'm so not good with that sort of thing. :(


ETA: Apparently this is the time of year for authorly trouble . . . God-awful romance novelist Cassie Edwards has been caught plagiarizing by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. This is some heavy-duty ugly and I can't wait to get to take these books off the shelves. Signet is defending Edwards's plagiarism, saying in an official statement that Edwards has done nothing wrong. No, seriously. There's some healthy explosions at SBTB and Dear Author, and the AP has even picked up the tale.

1 2 3 4 5

Here's the first pages of two separate novels. The segments have the same general theme, same limb in danger, same type of bad guy . . . But there's wildly varying degrees of written success.

(Sorry to the RSS feed people, and for the scans' iffy spots.)

( A few scans of first pages: )

Next up on Random's Batshit Author Watch: Patricia Cornwell shows Anne Rice how crazy is done this day & age. It's not that her book is bad, it's that the government is out to get her. That's why she's getting those bad reviews at Amazon & B&N.com.


As found on the front page of patriciacornwell.com, reprinted on crimefictionblog.com, and screencapped by fandom_wank:

We have reason to suspect that someone (or a group of someones) might be mobilizing people to attack me through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, etc., to hurt my sales and reputation.

So here is what I’m asking. Would you please encourage your friends and those you have contact with that if they like Book of the Dead, to please spread the word, and if so inclined, to please post their reviews on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

It’s easy to do. For Amazon.com, if you already have an account, you can post a review. Otherwise, open an account by buying a book. You can also check the boxes of other reviews to say you disagree or did not find their review helpful, if this is so. Barnes and Noble does not appear to require any account for posting reviews.

Over the past week there were about fifty bad reviews posted for a book that has gotten the highest reviews for any book I have ever written. If you see what I am saying. Interstingly [sic], this all started right after a Pentagon high official tried to get me to make a pro Bush, pro war appearance on an aircraft carrier and I refused, politely, a photo opportunity to contradict what is in my novel! Not to mention my battle over Ruth Graham’s burial. Suddenly, I am getting a barage [sic] of reviews discouraging people from buying my book, though there are some good ones as of today because my supporters are chiming in.

Right now I need my supporters. I am not asking you to write anything you do not mean. But why should hateful people be the only ones heard?

You and your friends can help by reading the book, encouraging others to read it, and posting their feelings about it - honest feelings.

With appreciation, Patricia.

Guys, please. If I EVER start doing some shit like this when I grow up, I need you to hunt me down and beat sense into me with whatever well-written hardcovers are available.

Iorek Byrnison? BEST. BEAR. EVER.

Oh, yeah. Book.

So I got most of the way through it before realizing that despite the near-narcoleptic main character(She's afraid? She sleeps. She's going somewhere? She sleeps. She's cold? She sleeps. She's stressed? She sleeps.) and some confusing bits that later came clear with the world-building, Pullman isn't a bad writer. And when it comes to how the writing builds up momentum in dramatic moments, how Lyra's character growth is subtle but still definitely visible, and how Pullman rolls the language . . . Yeah, I'm happy I picked up all three books at one go.

Still not sure how the movie's gonna handle Iorek ripping another bear to bits before eating his heart, though. Or if I really want to see the movie, even . . . From what I understand, the CGI is great but they worked to tone down the bit where the Roman Catholic Church had sanctioned torturing/murdering children in their quest for spiritual purity. Which . . . Well, that's a big part of the book. I'm kinda afraid of how it'd be cut to placate the people who can't handle having fingers pointed at the history of an organization, even in a fictitious allusion.



7k to go for Nano. That's two days' grind--or one long shot, if I'm really determined and don't have to work at 9am tomorrow. Which I do. (I haven't forgotten the drabbles, either.)

Bah.


ETA: For wingedrivers--Iorek the bear rockin' it hardcore:

That was when Iorek moved. Like a wave that has been building its strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which when it reaches the shallows rears itself up high into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down onto the land with irresistible power--so Iorek Byrnison rose up against Iofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of Iofur Raknison.

It was a horrifying blow. It tore the lower part of his jaw clean off, so that it flew through the air scattering blood drops in the snow many yards away.

Iofur's red tongue lolled down, dripping over his open throat. The bear-king was suddenly voiceless, biteless, helpless. Iorek needed nothing more, He lunged, and then his teeth were in Iofur's throat, and he shook and shook this way, that way, lifting the huge body off the ground and battering it down as if Iofur were no more than a seal at the water's edge.

Then he ripped upward, and Iofur Raknison's life came away in his teeth.

(p. 260, His Dark Materials omni)

As if fandom hasn't seen enough hell this year in the forms of Fanlib & Strikethrough . . .

So there's this massive Harry Potter Lexicon wank going down now. One Steve Vander Ark, the maintainer of the Harry Potter Lexicon, once wanted to be a part of Rowling's planned HP encyclopedia if not write one of his own. JKR turned him down. SVA got his panties in a twist and decided to publish his own encyclopedia anyway, made up of material from the Lexicon's website--which is composed mainly of quotes & lists from the HP books (that he has no legal right to publish for profit) and critical essays that are not his (which he has no legal right to publish for profit). JKR turned that down too. SVA and his moronic publisher RDR Books decided to try to publish anyway. Cue massive wank to crush all other wanks, complete with RDR's refusal to hand over a copy of the book to Rowling/WB, RDR's uncooperative stance towards the entire proceedings (including but not limited to them telling the WB that if they wanted to see the book, go look at the website--which backfired just a little bit), the hiring-on of RDR Books's owner's cousin as an intellectual property lawyer even though he had no background in intellectual property law (NO. SERIOUSLY.), and such heavy-duty self-righteous flailings that it makes my brain hurt.

Fandom_wank brings it in extremely long-winded chronological order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7


Overall? As a fandom member, I'm scared. This is the push that might force everyday authors to crack down on fanworks. How do they know that some jackass with an entitlement complex isn't gonna turn around, create a website, and decide this makes them a partial owner of the author's work? Yeah, Rowling won't lose a meal or miss a rent payment if this book goes to print. Another author might. Another author might not have the time and ample legal funds to fight a case like this. And some might not have the patience or mettle to deal with the kind of flak Rowling's getting from this; from the idiots who try to say her work is in the public domain to the people who call her greedy and a bitch and a lesbian for defending her intellectual property. It'd be far easier to just shut things down before a problematic person or group could start getting ideas.

This means fansites. This means fanfics. This means everything.

Which brings me to the next point--as an aspiring professional author, I'm even more scared. Am I gonna have to worry about cracking down on fan sites for fear that some jackass is gonna think that a list of quotes, a plot summary or two, and some essays he didn't even write warrants enough work that he should get a payout? Or that the same jackass will get up in front of a crowd and tell them that since they've contributed so much to the series (by being fans and all) that it no longer belongs to me? ("Jo has quit. She is done. We're taking over now." [@ 3:12]) I like fandom. I like fandom a lot. I think it's a great place to grow as a writer. But I don't want to have to worry.

The boy and I watched The Host yesterday. I get the feeling that there was some hardcore socio-political commentary going on in there, but that I couldn't quite catch it. Otherwise it was interesting: black humor with some scares that didn't hinge on a gigantic gory mess. It was kinda refreshing to see a horror movie that didn't have to rely on entrails.

American Psycho, though . . . We got to the end and the first words out of my mouth (other than "What?") were "Fucking literature." The passage of time was indeterminate, most of the supporting characters were barely fleshed out and ended up interchangeable (Whose name was what? Who cares!), and by the end . . . Yeah, we get it, he's at an indeterminate level of crazy. No matter Christian Bale's full nudity more lighthearted antics, I couldn't bring myself to like his character.

On the other hand, I picked up Darkly Dreaming Dexter and found myself liking that homicidal maniac's character just fine. shikomekidomi, I'm fairly certain you'd enjoy this book. The narrator's humorous and still sympathetic even though both he and the reader are trying to figure out if he's sleepmurdering his way through Miami, the characters are quirky and have faceting/depth I haven't seen in mystery/thriller detective books in a while, and the sex scene didn't have a chance to be badly written, as it's glossed over with a variant of "How the hell did that happen?" All-around, rather fun. I think I'm gonna pick up the next one after I'm done with this . . . though amazon.com says I should avoid the third.


Today is the start of my first vacation in forever. I'm almost not sure what to do with myself--though I've gotten my first dreadfall commission and have a ton of Nano to write, so I've got a good idea of what I'll be doing. :P

A coworker introduced me to the work of mystery writer Ted Bell today. This did not go well. We spent a good fifteen minutes flipping through the book Spy and boggling at the sheer WTFery of the back ad copy, the prose, the premise, and the dialog. An explosion is searching for a lost river in the Amazon (No, seriously, that's what the back ad copy read), and some guy runs into cannibals who are really Islamic terrorists who are gonna do something awful to the USA as Mexico brings an army across its northern border to take over chunks of the USA, while every person talks like a fucking robot and spends pages telling each other things they should already know, all while the metaphors and similes roll about gnawing on themselves . . .

A single emoticon sums it up: D: Are you fuckin' kidding me?

There are so many things wrong with this book it's unreal. You can even tell by the first chapter up on amazon.com:

He saw painted faces atop long brown legs sprinting madly through the tangled undergrowth along the banks.

This just in: The Amazon basin's hiding a sekrit tribe of daddy longlegs-men!

And for writing something set in the Amazon, Bell's done no research.

A young member of his expedition had been standing in the river, the water just above his knees, urinating. A week later, he died in feverish agony. A candiru had swum up the boy's urine stream and become lodged in his penis. There, feeding on the host's blood, the tiny creature had grown to enormous size. The resulting infection led to the amputation of the organ and the boy's painful death.

So this little fish made a dramatic flying leap up a broken stream of urine, and with its incredible fishy aim managed to go straight up into some kid? Add in the other problems (Brazilians speaking Spanish instead of Portuguese? The guy can't see the sunlight through the jungle canopy but keeps track of the time by the phases of the moon? Nine days to a week?!) and this research junkie cranky editor feels that her intelligence has been insulted--though I'm still somewhat amused by the overly-dramatic outright posturing as Bell himself trolls his review boards. What a fucking loser.


Anyone feeling down about their writing abilities anymore?