Black footed ferrets, romance novels and plagerism oh my!

Recently, the romance novel world was rocked by news that one of their writers, Cassie Edwards, plagiarized heavily for several of her novels. I'm not saying allegedly, because, good gravy, when the women at Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books did their research, it's like the woman lifted passages from encyclopedias, a Defenders of Wildlife article about black footed ferrets and even Longfellow's "Hiawatha."

Now, in my mind, plagiarism is kind of like that hoary chestnut about pornography -- "I'll know it when I see it." I've never really had a problem with sampling in music as long as the original source was used to make something completely new or made the listener view the world in a different way. It's why I can forgive Danger Mouse for The Grey Album, but not P. Diddy for shitting all over the Police's "I'll be Watching You" (seriously, changing the lyric from "I'll be watching you" to "I'll be missin' you" is not a revision of the original source material).

They say that there's no original ideas anymore -- that everything is based on some other influence, and I think that's true. Writing coaches often encourage people to write verbatim text that the budding writing likes. But they don't encourage them to pass it off as their words. They use it to teach people how words work. How they read and play on the page. It's similar to doing scales on a musical instrument, in my view.

I'll admit to using structure and writing styles similar to my heroes. Hell, I'll fully admit that a lot of my high school stories I wrote were HEAVILY influenced by Tom Robbins. Right down to the insane imagery and free-wheeling style. I'll admit that I used the structure of "Like Water for Chocolate," which intermingled recipes in with the story for an article I wrote for a college class about how to play Mancala.

But there's a difference with the Mancala article and the Robbins' influences -- I wrote my own stories. I wrote about Mancala as how to play the game. I didn't take verbatim their words and pass it off as my own. And to me, that's the key. If Cassie Edwards acknowledged the fact that her research was based on these texts, that's one thing, but to clumsily copy-and-paste text into her writing and then pass it off as her own -- that's something that a junior-high school kid does. And they get busted by their teachers!

I wonder how the hell the editors at Signet didn't notice the sudden change in tone with her writing. From heavy-breathing bodice ripping to sudden shift to an academic tone must raise eyebrows somewhere. I mean, in this day and age, while people argue about intellectual property, lawsuits, etc. someone must've thought, "Wait. This doesn't sound right."

What bothers me the most is that Cassie Edwards is an established writer. And she got busted for doing something that a kid would do. One becomes a writer because they believe they have something to say to the world. However, what's said shouldn't be recycled words clumsily shoehorned into their own text.