Since I work at home by myself, I am quite deprived in the office gossip department. So naturally, I've been following The Tale of the Plagiarized Chick Lit with interest and more than a little schadenfreude. (To sum up: 17-year-old Harvard Student gets half-million dollar advance for two novels and copies wording, characters, and situations from a previously published work. Plagiarized novel is then published! Oops!)
My problem, though, is that I hardly know how to make fun of this story--it practically makes fun of itself. First, there's the fabulous quote here, in which the publisher of How Opel Plagiarized Her First Novel or whatever it's called says her writing "has a seeming effortlessness to it." Hee hee! Apparently it actually was effortless!
I love her excuse, too: "I had finals."
I was going to offer my services as a writer to anybody hot, young, and ethnic who wants to be the next literary it girl: I'll write the book and take half the money, you take the glory. But apparently that's kind of what happened, since today
we find that she actually took her novel to some "book packaging firm," whatever the hell that is, and is actually sharing copyright with them on the novel, which is tantamount to acknowledging them as co-authors, rather than just the editors they're claiming to be.
And then the fact that she used this packaging firm makes me wonder: Did the publisher really give her a half million dollar advance without a book in hand? Apparently that's exactly what they did. Wow! How do I get in on this scam? (No, really. And don't just tell me I have to be young and hot. There's gotta be another way!)
In the end, of course, all I care about is what it all means to me. Well, I guess I should point out to future would-be plagiarists that I also wrote a kind-of coming of age story about a teenaged girl. If you'd like to change her ethnicity and copy some of my paragraphs, it looks like there'd be front-page publicity in it for both of us! (And hopefully a tasty bite of your ill-gotten advance and movie deal for me too!) Think it over!
