Caitlín R. Kiernan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greygirlbeast) wrote2006-04-28 12:26 am
greygirlbeast) wrote2006-04-28 12:26 am
Entry tags:
Between yesterday and tomorrow.
Tired. Tired. Tired. But...
A reformulation of an old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, plagiarize and sometimes make much more money than most of those who can. To wit, 19-year-old chick-lit Harvard wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan. Little, Brown and Company signed her to a six-figure book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Dreamworks even bought the film rights. And now Viswanathan has been accused of stealing much of the novel from Megan McCafferty, her publisher is pulling the book from stores for a "revision" to remove the offending portions, and Viswanathan is apologizing. It's all very queer to me. Queer as in strange. Queer as in gay Republican queer. Odd. All the books in question sound dull as dirt. I have trouble getting past that part, but when I try, the whole mess just seems...well...queer. Mostly, though, I'm sort of vaguely horrified at a 19-year-old Harvard student getting a six-figure book deal, plus movie deal, for writing what I strongly suspect (but cannot conclusively state) is vapid crap. It matters not to me whether she stitched it together from someone else's wildly successful vapid crap, though I do wonder at an apparently smart young woman's inability to write her own vapid crap.
Er...there was something else. Wait. It'll come to me. Oh yeah.
I was going to write something about the difficulties of being a solitary practitioner of Wicca in an oppressively social & Xtian world. But it's long, and it's complex, and I'm only two-thirds awake. So maybe I'll come back to that some other time. It's depressing, anyway.
As far as I know, I wrote the preceeding. All by myself. Well, except that I read the Yahoo article first. Maybe Miss Viswanathan is merely guilty of "over researching"....
Postscript: Sophie now claims that Lopez the chihuahua has a law degree he acquired via e-mail. I think she's lying. You decide.
A reformulation of an old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, plagiarize and sometimes make much more money than most of those who can. To wit, 19-year-old chick-lit Harvard wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan. Little, Brown and Company signed her to a six-figure book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Dreamworks even bought the film rights. And now Viswanathan has been accused of stealing much of the novel from Megan McCafferty, her publisher is pulling the book from stores for a "revision" to remove the offending portions, and Viswanathan is apologizing. It's all very queer to me. Queer as in strange. Queer as in gay Republican queer. Odd. All the books in question sound dull as dirt. I have trouble getting past that part, but when I try, the whole mess just seems...well...queer. Mostly, though, I'm sort of vaguely horrified at a 19-year-old Harvard student getting a six-figure book deal, plus movie deal, for writing what I strongly suspect (but cannot conclusively state) is vapid crap. It matters not to me whether she stitched it together from someone else's wildly successful vapid crap, though I do wonder at an apparently smart young woman's inability to write her own vapid crap.
Er...there was something else. Wait. It'll come to me. Oh yeah.
I was going to write something about the difficulties of being a solitary practitioner of Wicca in an oppressively social & Xtian world. But it's long, and it's complex, and I'm only two-thirds awake. So maybe I'll come back to that some other time. It's depressing, anyway.
As far as I know, I wrote the preceeding. All by myself. Well, except that I read the Yahoo article first. Maybe Miss Viswanathan is merely guilty of "over researching"....
Postscript: Sophie now claims that Lopez the chihuahua has a law degree he acquired via e-mail. I think she's lying. You decide.
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Queer as in publicity stunt, if you ask me.
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Lopez probably got his degree from a diploma mill. Which is sad, because if he applied himself I bet he could get it legitimately...
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Unintentional plagirism...I can see doing that a bit, subconsciously. It's one of those thoughts that gives me cold sweats. But that's what first readers are for, and editors, especially editors who should darn well be familiar with other works in the genre. Whoops, indeed.
But Viswanthan is certainly getting her five minutes of fame out of the whole deal.
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There was an article about this yesterday somewhere-- didn't save the URL, unfortunately-- about the corporation behind the novel. Seems it was actually the brainchild of a "book packager" (the same company behind the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants phenomenon), who comes up with the plot, story, and characters, and then assigns it to an author. (One wonders if the same book packager was also responsible for the novels she supposedly plagiarized.)
I'm not sure how much this means-- after all, a bad writer can take the world's best story/plot/characters and turn them into unreadable dreck-- but it does seem unethical in some portion of my lizard-brain.
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The concept of "book packaging" horrifies me. Real writers, the ones who give themselves bad posture, lives of questionable ability to eat regularly, and who draw from their own experiences and twist them around - or just make up their *own* stuff - deserve the half-mil book deals. Ms. Vis-wannabe just sounds well-connected. Maybe she really can write (hey, even the Monkees, pre-packaged as they were, eventually rebelled and did their own stuff) but after this, how will we ever know for sure?
The name "Alloy" Entertainment is certainly spot-on:
(from dictionary.com)
2. A mixture; an amalgam:
3.The relative degree of mixture with a base metal; fineness.
4. Something added that lowers value or purity.
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