Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Nora Roberts Matching Donation Program for Defenders of Wildlife

Here at Smart Bitches, we’ve examined a slew of material since last Monday, from novels to anthropology texts to poems, and we’ve discussed authors, editors, publishers, writers, scientists, ethnographers, Native Americans, and of course, Bitches.

But as Paul Tolmé pointed out in his article in Newsweek, there’s one party that hasn’t gotten enough attention.

The ferrets.

Tolmé‘s article about the black footed ferret focuses on the loss of their habitat, the prairie, and the programs working to bring them back from near extinction.

The black footed ferret is officially classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as extinct in the wild, though breeding and repopulation programs have been successful. Defenders of Wildlife classifies the ferrets as an imperiled species. 

And then came this morning’s email: Nora Roberts has volunteered to match up to $5,000.00 USD any donations made by Smart Bitches readers to Defenders of Wildlife, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that works to preserve not just ferrets but endangered wildlife across the US, most particularly that species much loved by paranormal romance writers: the wolf.

Are you outside the US, but want to increase Nora’s gift? Please feel free to make a donation… read more »

The Debate Continues

The story is in the AP and therefore in USA Today, the New York Times, and various local newspapers from Oklahoma City, OK, to Morris County, NJ.

Hi there, newspaper readers. Hayadoin?

My point is, this isn’t a blog story anymore, and it’s not just a concern for the romance community, either. It’s a national story about what is and what isn’t plagiarism. Candy, myself, Jane at Dear Author, Nora Roberts and other readers say it is. Signet Publishing and Cassie Edwards say it is not.

Some of the comments I’ve seen on our site and in my inbox sent to me personally ask in irate tones how dare we, why didn’t we pursue it privately, and how can we BE so MEAN!?

Accusations as to Candy’s and my morality notwithstanding, this isn’t really about Cassie Edwards so much as it is a debate of ethics. The entries we’ve posted as to the passages that match her novels speak for themselves. This became about plagiarism and the ethical debate surrounding fair use the minute Signet said she’d “done nothing wrong.” I personally, as a reader, consumer, and writer, think there is something very wrong when sections of dialogue… read more »

A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation

I realized recently that all the information we’ve uncovered regarding the Cassie Edwards situation is scattered all over the place. Granted, Sarah and I have been pretty good about keeping that little header bar updated, but it’s still a pain in the ass to click all over when all you want is to specifically see which books have been looked into, how many passages we’ve found, how the passages compare, etc.

So I created a little Word document and converted it to PDF to track this little controversy. It’s by no means complete yet—I’m still waiting to hear from two people about a few books they’re researching, and I might’ve forgotten to include one or two titles. Also, none of the links are clickable, as I’m working from my laptop and my… read more »

Nora Roberts Quoted in AP Article regarding Cassie Edwards

Nora Roberts has been quoted in a revised AP article regarding the Cassie Edwards story:

Roberts, whose fiction has sold hundreds of millions of copies, told The Associated Press on Thursday that “it seems clear” Edwards acted improperly.

“Given the side-by-side comparisons I’ve read, it seems clear Ms. Edwards copied considerable portions of previously published work and used them in her books without attribution to the original source,” Roberts wrote in an e-mail to the AP. “By my definition, copying another’s work and passing it as your own equals plagiarism. As a writer, a reader and a victim of plagiarism, I feel very strongly on this issue. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t see it as fair use, or fair anything when one writer takes another’s work.”

Both Roberts and Edwards are published by Penguin Group (USA), which on Wednesday defended Edwards, saying: “She has done nothing wrong.”

RWA Reponds to Plagiarism Accusations

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation | Updated Statement from Signet | The NY Times Art Section Story | Cassie Edwards: Remarkable Similarities to Laughing Boy

The RWA has released a statement regarding the plagiarism accusations against Cassie Edwards:

There are heated discussions on various loops and blogs regarding the accusations of plagiarism against a published romance author. Some questions have also been raised regarding RWA’s stand on the matter. To be clear, RWA does not condone plagiarism or any type of copyright infringement. (Please see RWA’s Code of Ethics ).

RWA takes all accusations of plagiarism very seriously. RWA also stands behind the idea that guilt or innocence should be determined after a thorough review of all documents and sources, not based on discussions or articles found on the internet or in other news media.

Within… read more »

Letters to Editors

Jane at Dear Author has published her open letter to the CEO and President of Penguin, and it's sharp and eloquent (manishtana?). Well played, Jane! My letter to the PR rep who published the Signet statement, read as follows: While I appreciate your statement on the subject of Cassie Edwards' novels, your statement of Signet's position is certainly not well received and is quite disappointing. For one thing, the use of the word "done nothing wrong," allows for ethical debate that doesn't do Ms. Edwards any favors. Ethically, if our comments on Smart Bitches and on Dear Author are any indication, Ms. Edwards is in hot water with romance readers. She may not have broken any laws, but she would have failed my English class. But more importantly, your statement that "reasonable borrowing and paraphrasing of another author's words" is permitted under fair-use is not applicable to the facts of this situation, because our evidence seems to show that Ms. Edwards allegedly reproduced word-for-word paragraphs of written data as dialogue for her characters. It wasn't paraphrasing or borrowing, in my opinion. It was reproduction without citation or acknowledgment. Further, many, many authors of historical novels cite sources in their acknowledgments… read more »

Associated Press Article has Response from Cassie Edwards

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation | Updated Statement from Signet | The NY Times Art Section Story | Cassie Edwards: Remarkable Similarities to Laughing Boy

An Associated Press article has a response from author Cassie Edwards to the allegations that “she lifted work from texts:”

[Edwards] acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Cassie Edwards told The Associated Press, speaking earlier this week from her home in Mattoon, Ill.

Edwards then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions”… read more »

Finally heard back from Signet…

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation

...and, well, read it yourself.

Signet takes plagiarism seriously, and would act swiftly were there justification for such allegations against one of its authors.  But in this case Ms. Edwards has done nothing wrong.

The copyright fair-use doctrine permits reasonable borrowing and paraphrasing of another author’s words, especially for the purpose of creating something new and original. Also, anyone may use facts, ideas and theories developed by another author, as well as any material in the public domain. Ms. Edwards’s researched historical novels are precisely the kinds of original, creative works that this copyright policy promotes.

Although it may be common in academic circles to meticulously footnote every source and provide citations or bibliographies, even though not required by copyright law, such a practice is virtually unheard of for a… read more »

Follow Up from Penguin re: Cassie Edwards Splodestravaganza

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation

I heard this morning from Penguin. It was a canned response. Now, keep in mind that a) I didn’t know people at Penguin I could contact directly, so I used their all-purpose “Hi, I’ve found problems with something in one of your books” e-mail, and b) these things take time to work through. If somebody wants to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) a better contact at Penguin/Signet to forward on all our findings, do it, do iiiiiiiit.

So here, in its entirety, is the response I got from Penguin:

Dear Candy,

We appreciate the many questions, comments, suggestions, and ideas that are submitted by our readers and are happy to share them with our Editorial, Publicity, Sales and Marketing departments. Because of the volume of mail received, we cannot guarantee that you will receive… read more »

Cassie Edwards V: But Wait, There’s More.

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation

Nikki the Super Badass Researcher contacted me yesterday upon realizing that she had a Cassie Edwards in her possession, and she had access to Google, and she had an hour to spare:

I must admit, it was worse than I feared.  My “evidence” file grew to six—6!—pages in Word.  The worst part?  I have an unsettling feeling that these are not the only questionable sections—simply the only ones I could locate via Google.  There’s one passage in particular about the male sage grouse’s mating ritual, of all things, that’s extremely suspect.

One last thing, which I thought was deliciously ironic.  The heroine’s name in this book is Candy.

I just made a noise I cannot transcribe accurately, but it was somewhere between a choke and a snort. 

Now for the… read more »

Cassie Edwards Investigatory Extravaganza II: This Time, it’s Not Dangeresque I

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation | Updated Statement from Signet | The NY Times Art Section Story | Cassie Edwards: Remarkable Similarities to Laughing Boy

I was a doof and forgot to include all the tables I needed to in my initial entry about the usage of unattributed material in Cassie Edwards novels. I blame law school for disordering my mind. I suppose it’s a good thing anyway, since the table seems to be fucking up our shizznizzle.

At any rate, here’s more Cassie Edwards tastiness, this time from Savage Longings, published by Leisure Books in 1997, ISBN 0-8439-4176-6. In this particular book, I was only able to find usages from only one source text, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life by George Bird Grinnell. Excerpts quoted under fair use, etc. etc., and… read more »

Cassie Edwards Investigatory Extravaganza: The First Post

Part of a series: Cassie Edwards 1: The First Post | Cassie Edwards 2: Savage Longings | Cassie Edwards Part 3: Running Fox | Cassie Edwards Part 4: Savage Moon | Cassie Edwards Part 5: Savage Beloved | Follow-up: Penguin (Part 1?) | Official Statement from Signet | AP Article Contains Response from Edwards  | RWA Responds to Allegations  | A centralized document for the Cassie Edwards situation | Updated Statement from Signet | The NY Times Art Section Story | Cassie Edwards: Remarkable Similarities to Laughing Boy

So my friend Kate (not to be confused with HaikuKatie of Nebula Haiku fame) was in desperate need of new reading material recently, and since she’d never read any romance novels before, I decided to throw some at her to see what she thought, since she’s a Classicist and an SF/F geek. I gave her examples of what I thought were the best (Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase), the most popular (Dark Lover by J.R. Ward) and the worst (Shadow Bear by Cassie Edwards) of the genre.

Shadow Bear introduced poor Kate to all-new levels of pain—she’d never encountered a book in which ellipses and exclamation marks were abused with… read more »

Bhutto and Romance

Michelle Styles, who is a beekeeper and that’s just bloody awesome, sent me a link to an article in The Guardian about the late Benazir Bhutto titled The Flawed and Feudal Princess. The author, William Dalrymple, met Bhutto on an interview, and attempts to write a contrasting account of her life, personal and political, in light of her assassination last week.

I won’t pretend in the least any ability to speak intelligently about Pakistani politics and Bhutto’s legacy as a former Prime Minister and candidate in the upcoming elections. But the mention of Bhutto’s love of romance novels in Dalrymple’s article is interesting:

For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn’t was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, she didn’t have a beard, she didn’t organise rallies where everyone shouts: ‘Death to America’ and she didn’t issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.

However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn’t say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like… read more »

I Spy With My Little Eye: Nominated Bitches!

Thanks to Kalen Hughes, I have spied with my little bespectacled eye the Romantic Times nominations for Reader’s Choice awards. Hello there, Nathalie Gray, Victoria Dahl, and Kalen Hughes. And Julia Quinn. And damn, that’s a LOT of nominees. How long is this awards ceremony?

I’m STILL SCROLLING. And look, Dot Frank. She lives in my town.

And PC Cast and Kristin Cast - hot diggity.  And J.D. Robb.

OK, still scrolling. Holy cow.

Samantha Graves! Marianne Stillings! Jeaniene Frost!

AND THERE BETTER BE A BATHROOM BREAK TIMES 10 if this is all in one ceremony, is all I’m sayin’.

Look, there’s Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine nominated as best heroine - whee!

I need a bathroom break from reading this list.

Liz Fielding is nominated too!

And my eyes are crossing. I’m actually cross-eyed so it’s not like this is a new thing but with double vision this list just got twice as long. And if there’s someone here who I’ve missed, give yourself a shoutout.

WOW. That’s a lot of nominees. So, since I know diddly-poo about the RT conference except that I plan on going, is this one ceremony? Or,… read more »

Another one bites the dust

A friend of mine who was gently skeptical about romance novels expressed an interest in trying out one that I thought was especially good. Based on what I knew about her (she wanted something fairly lighthearted and escapist, and she can’t abide stupid heroines), I gave her a copy of Lord of Scoundrels.

She just wrote to me—she liked it! Stayed up reading way too late for two nights, even. BOO YAH and happy dancing all around.

I’m now plotting a strategic gift package of other smart romance novels that aren’t too horribly angsty and that feature strong, capable heroines. (Though I’m now afraid I might’ve spoiled her—Jessica Trent and Sebastian Dain are a difficult act to follow.) Here’s a short list:

1. Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale. 2. To Love and the Cherish by Patricia Gaffney 3. Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase 4. Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase 5. Anyone but You by Jennifer Crusie (if she likes Crusie’s style, oh man is she going to be inundated with suggestions) 6. Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney

I’m also contemplating giving her one of Sharon Shinn’s Samaria novels.

I’m really happy she gave Lord of Scoundrels a chance, because… read more »