> That said, I'm also a bit absentminded and I find
>it very likely that someplace in the body of junk
>I've written casually is something that could be
>traced to someone else. Which is the crux of the
>issue: if you're going to write something for
>publication, you need to pay way the hell more
>attention than if you're just hacking away at a
>story to amuse your friends. So I sympathise with
>her totally if her work was published without her
>consent. Otherwise, she was careless at best.


I agree with your sentiment, but again I have to say I know how easy it is to fall into that trap. Can I honestly say that if TSR had come to me and said "Here's a wad of cash for that crap-ass book you wrote, we want to publish it!" I would have said "Yeah, sure, just wait for a few days while I go over it and take out all the little bits I ripped off."? No. I wouldn't have. At 17 (which was how old this girl was when she got her book deal) I would have taken the money and not thought twice about it, and gotten totally busted, just like she did. It wouldn't excuse the fact that I had ripped off someone else, but again, I had already rationalized that in my head. Until the feces hit the fan, I probably wouldn't even have thought about the dozen or so random snippets I had clearly lifted from somewhere else.

Again, I'm the last person to defend plagiarism. It's just that I remember how strangely fluid my definition of plagiarism was when I was younger, and that I know that almost every writer does what she and I both did when they're first starting out. I agree she should have been more careful. In an ideal world, she *would* have vetted her novel more carefully and expunged those bits. But again, had my novel been somehow published (or even publishable) when I was 17, I know for a fact that pretty much all the little snippets I lifted would have stayed in and I would have been busted eventually, just like she was. Not because I was a dirty no-good cheating plagiarist, but because I was a young writer still learning my chops, and I really truly did not understand the severity of such infractions. It's easy to say now, with the wisdom of more years under my belt, "Well, you should have known it was wrong! You would have gotten what you deserved!" But I remember that 17-year-old me, and I remember the wonderful experience of writing that story, and I know I would have ended up in exactly the same boat this young woman is in now had I somehow gotten the thing published.

Of course, it's entirely possible she *is* just a no-good dirty cheating plagiarist who fully understood what she was doing and did it anyway. In that case, of course I have no sympathy for her at all. There's even questions (if you read her entry at Wikipedia) that she didn't even write the book at all. Well, screw her then, if that's true. But if the situation is more like how I described *my* situation, then I do feel badly for her. Because I know that could have easily been me under different circumstances.

-- Dave