Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

The recipe for pemmican is fairly standard.  And it was very fatty because at a point in the winter they would not have fresh meat.  I dunno if this proves anything.  I’m no defender of Edwards.  She is completely unoriginal.

Well, duh.  This comment goes with the next part of the investigation,not this one.

This author has thousands of readers who are loyal fans.

You people are sick.  Are your lives so pathetic that you have to single people out and attack them?

Do you even know any of these authors that you are always attacking?

Maybe you should get to know some of them before you go around bashing them. 

You may think this is funny and makes you look good.  It doesn’t!  All it does is show what kind of evil person you are.

Instead of trashing people and their work promote a charity, or do something nice.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who has said anything nice about your website or the people on it.

As far as I’m concerned, plagiarists (and their overwrought fans) can say all sorts of bad things about me, but it still won’t make them stop being plagiarists (or overwrought fans).

I’ll say something nice about this site.

It’s interesting and informative, and very often fun.

Reporting isn’t bashing, and very often reporting isn’t nice.

I don’t know Cassie, and would never bash her. But I will bash, again and again, the act of any writer copying another’s work—and calling the work his/her own.

Tolerating it or defending it isn’t standing up for the writer, it’s standing up for the act of copying.

I can never understand why anyone would do so—but having been copied, my pov is pretty firm on the issue.

“You may think this is funny and makes you look good.”

Aaactually, no, I don’t think anyone finds this funny- because it’s not funny, and it makes me as a reader sad that no one caught this before Edwards had produced such a monolithic catalog of bad stereotypes and worse dialogue.

Plagiarism is not okay in any setting.

Rabid Fangirl Alert!

Incoming! Incoming!

Plagiarism is theft of another writer’s work. It’s that simple. And having thousands of loyal fans doesn’t make a writer any less of a thief when she copies chunks of text from someone else’s work.

Calling someone out on their thieving and providing the evidence of that theft is not bashing, and it’s not evil. It’s doing good by exposing the theft, and by standing up in public to say that such theft does not become acceptable just because the thief has thousands of loyal fans who think she can do no wrong.

*put on your conspiracy theorist hats*

I normally read SBTB through its RSS feed and interestingly enough, today I cannot access SBTB through my home OR work interwebs (I had to use a proxy server).

Coincidence? I think not :P

Oh Bitches, stuff like this is why I love your site. You give Romance books the attention they deserve (even if it is not flattering).

problem59. Too right!

*takes a drink*

I don’t find this funny at all, I find it pathetic, not on the part of the Bitches but from Ms. Edwards. She’s sold gods know how many books unethically as far as I’m concerned. I learned in elementary school that when you use someone else’s work word for word you quote it and give proper credit, did Cassie skip that day?

By the way, reading these comments has only cemented my respect for Nora Roberts.

*here’s some irony for you, my submission word is quality51*

Seeing all the stuff y’all are finding, I’m surprised it has taken this long for someone to make the link.

Given, I didn’t discover it, but I’ve never read one of her books because they were obviously so shitty you could smell them on the shelf.  But, to be a bad author AND a plagarist?  Wow.

Then again, generally people plagaraize because they can’t write.

Hmmmm…

*applauds Nora and Jules Jones*

I’ll say something nice.  I hate romance, but I still read and enjoy this site.  Why?  It’s damn good.

I couldn’t identify Cassie Edwards’ work if it bit me in the rear end, but this is pretty cool to watch.

What What, in MY butt?

Sorry.  My inner Encyclopedia Dramatica editor couldn’t help it. ;)

I was plagiarized in high school. The captain of the girls soccer team read a short story that I’d written and told the class it was her own. When the teacher confronted her and asked where she came up with the idea - because I’d read my story the day before! - she said that she didn’t know ... it just came to her.

I can still remember the cold sick feeling I got when that little wench read my story as her own. Even though the teacher made her rewrite the story, I wouldn’t share my work with anyone for years fearing that someone would steal it.

Plagiarism is the lowest form of thievery and judging from this investigation, cheers to you for bringing it to light.

Mary C.

Heh.  She has a myspace page.

http://www.myspace.com/cassieedwardsromance

I’m just sayin’.

Oh Teddy! Yes rabid fangirrrrl alert! Oh why can’t we just be nice!
We’ll just look the other way when someone takes our money (for decades) and passes others hard work off as her own!
We’ll just let someone/publishers get by with crapola writing/publishing (for decades) that resembles a 5th grade, (copy it from the encylopedia geography report), while other authors are turned away.
We’ll do that… and be nice…

Wow. Kudos to the Smart Bitches for their willingness to slog through Cassie Edwards in an effort to uphold to the standards, and ethics, of publishing. Plagiarism is never, ever excusable and the more CE fans who come here and try to justify it, the more I will laugh at them.

Good work, Bitches. I cannot wait to see what the Publisher has to say (and perhaps what Ms. Edwards has to say) about all of this. Keep up the stellar work. (And, for the record, I’m one of the Bitchy supporters who does not see anything funny about plagiarism… but people who support plagiarists? Definitely funny.)

And Hi Nora! I would be honored if I could, someday, get the smack-down from Nora Roberts. That would be so cool. Too bad I hate plagiarism.

My heart bleeds for the authors who were so callously stolen from.  But you know who else I feel really bad for?  Cassie Edwards’ fans. 

*ducks*

I’m serious.  However much I may fault their taste (and I really do), they trusted her to give them an original story.  They were lied to and betrayed.  No one deserves that, not even rabid little fan girls who attack the Smart Bitches (all hail the mighty Smart Bitches!) for telling the truth.

Honestly Miri,

If this keeps up I am so pulling a Hubbard I am changing my name to the good reverend T. Pig

Founder of the Church of Psalms: Sexual Healing Through Romance where I shall liberally excerpt other peoples work in my Inspirational Novels and explain it is for Jeeeeesus. No talent required.

Remember to tithe 10% regularly and often ya’ll. And… Buy my latest Epistle!

You people are sick

No, what’s sick is that there are people out there who think plagiarsm isn’t a big deal. Theft is theft, whether it is intellectual or property.

Disgraceful.

Sarah,

If it’s Medicine Men of the Apache, here you go: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FdetVNST9wAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA451&dq=john+g.+bourke&ots=Zu4L5Erwmo&sig=q9aRlQI8xqlLw1iKoCjg96GcA5I#PPR37,M1

Google Scholar has made available in full a ton of books that are out of copyright.

I’ve got some other issues with them for various librarian reasons, but this is definitely one of the benefits of the project.

I’ll say something nice about this website—it’s the best romance novel site out on the web with the best sense of humor (we know these books are silly, and we still love them!).  Grow up, fangirl.

<

< stands up an applauds the SBs >

>

You should be commended for bringing to light something that appears to have been going on for some time.

<

< keeps applauding but this time for Nora & Jules for their very eloquent comments >

>

The first thing I thought of when I read Sara’s post was “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me guess I’ll go eat worms”.

I will say something nice about everyone here, y’all are the smartest bitches I know!

Big girl britches for everyone!

I’m sure if it was another romance writer ripping off CE then CE fans would Get It.

Wasnt it Plato’s allegory of the cave that meant “knowledge is limited only by people’s perception of reality”?  Apparently Ms. Edwards knowledge is limited only by *other* people’s knowledge.

Sad.  I wonder how often this happens that nobody catches.

Thank you, Sarah and Candy and Kate.  As a college professor who tries to beat into her students’ heads what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, I thank you, because it’s wrong and actionable.  As an author of academic texts (which are, admittedly, unlikely to get plagiarized), I thank you, because I want credit for what I write.

When I read rabid the fanGrrl’s comments, I thought she was kidding.  I thought she was parodying what would be said by the rabid fangrrls.  The fact that she wasn’t is very scary.

And can we talk about Jenny Crusie’s comment—what was up with that?

Wow, nice catch. I cannot STAND plagiarists (man, I wish everyone shared that opinion…) and the fact that her editors let not only quality go but also basic checking just pisses me off. I know writers (and I’m a wannabe one that also fits) that try so hard to be original and interesting and incorporate research from many places, not copying & pasting it from one place. To her fans- I know how strong loyalty can be, but if one of my favorite authors was caught doing the same thing I would have to sadly drop them. I would not, however, fling insults at people who simply noticed the act and pointed it out to others.

I love this site, you bitches are constantly making me think.  It’s also nice to realize that there are other people in the world who don’t think having an English degree and enjoying romance novels are incompatible. 

As for plagiarism, I expect that Sarah and Candy would be just as quick to call out any other author they found pulling this as they have Cassie Edwards.  Having millions of fans does not excuse this behavior and anyone who thinks it does is fooling themselves.

At this point the attention to our site has crashed the server (poor server. I have to apologize to our service host) and I’m getting email about how we’re nasty bitches who need lives or should be banned from the internet.

I never know whether to laugh or cry at the fact that those posts that generate the most hate-response are also the best trafficked.  And then when you do the “productive” stuff that the critics call for, nobody shows up to the party, least of all the haters.  What’s up with that?

What shocks me most about this whole kerfuffle is that it was incredibly easy to find this evidence.  The section on ferrets in Shadow Bear initially jumped out at me, for example, because it was written in a very different voice than the rest of the dialogue in the books—especially that “researchers theorize” line.  If Edwards’ editors had checked, they could have found these passages with a minimum of effort.  Everything found in Shadow Bear I tracked down initially in under an hour, although it took somewhat longer to type up.

Also troubling, though, is the fact that there were a large number of suspicious passages we couldn’t find just with Google.  If this is actually plagiarism in action, there may be much more that’s difficult to find without a manual search of popular texts on various Native American groups.  I don’t envy anyone that task.

Sarah and Candy, this is a great site. We love it here. I love it here so much that I just voted for you at the editors and preditors poll.

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/reviewsite.shtml

Sarah Frantz: I don’t mean to stir things up even more but I have no idea what you are talking about in reference to Jenny Crusie’s comments. What did she say?

Another YAY for the Bitches. Just because they deserve it.

Katie W.:  On the second post, Jenny asked, “Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time.  Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?”

As liz said in the same comment stream: “Why do you hate Janet Dailey?”

Wow, that’s…  *blinks*  I have only two thoughts:

1)  Hard to believe no one ever noticed that her prose shifted from aubergine to academic like that;

2)  I wonder if Soaring Hawk has a William Petersen kind of vibe, or if he’s more like Gary Sinise.  Nah.  I vote David Caruso.

Oh, no.  Wait.  Here’s a third thought:

3)  WHAT?!  Seriously.

Thanks Sarah F. for the heads-up.

And ARGH that Jenny Crusie comment made me mad (stupid pun fully intended). I’m completely with you and Robin re: your responses to that comment. I cannot believe that an author would even try to make this appear to be a personal vendetta against Edwards on the part of the Bitches. ARGH.

In regards to the other comments thread about how/why Edwards should have cited her sources: In general fiction books, it is not at ALL uncommon to find bibliographies of source materials at the end of the book. Michael Chabon does this best and, if you want to see some crazy source material bibliography, flip to the end of

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

.

Acknowledging source material should be standard, whether it’s a future Pulitzer-Prize winning book, a romance novel, or a sci-fi novel. In fact, I would love it if more romance authors gave detailed acknowledgments of their source materials at the end of their books. I’m always excited to see how much work the author put into the book, and to maybe find a cool non-fiction book that would be worth reading.

For now, though, I just want to see what Edwards’ publisher has to say about all of this.

I wonder what on earth the number of fans (or books published, or $$$$$$$ made) an author has to do with facts?

Sarah Frantz: I’ve been wondering about Ms Crusie’s question as well—but I chose to think she meant that Ms Edwards books are often referenced here at the SB’s as shinning examples of the worst of the genre. *shrug*

I bet the Cruise comment is from a troll.

I bet the Cruise comment is from a troll.

Why would anyone want to take their own life into their hands by impersonating a well-known author with a comment like that and then providing a link back to the author’s own website?

I’m not wanting to argue with you, Robin, but I’m not sure how the troll would get caught, much less take its life it its hands. It’s easy enough to copy and paste someone’s url and e-mail address. Who would be the wiser? What could Jenny do about it? And didn’t someone troll Tony the Chest (of Caddy trunk fame) here once?

Maybe I’m just an optimist—I have a hard time seeing Cruise condoning this.

I can’t remember who rooted out the Tony troll last time, but perhaps her talents would be of use here now?

I assumed the Crusie comment was meant as a joke.  Ms. Edwards has often been mentioned here, and I believe she has here only special book rating.  It could almost seem like a “crusade” and so worthy of a little poking fun.

Anyway, I will have to second third etc all the commentary against plagiarism.  Nothing really funny about it although the rabid fangirl reaction is funny from afar.  Kudos to Sara and Candy for being stand up gals and taking on the fangirl hordes. (Or should I say stand up bitches?)

Speaking with my employee-of-publisher hat on, I definitely appreciate the SBs bringing this to people’s attention; it’s material for an interesting discussion.

And speaking as an SB fan, now I want a new contest: choose one of Edwards passage/scholarly book passage pairs and write your own version, using the scholarly info but your own words.

(area11?  Is that where they store the books from outer space?)

If Louise Allen, author of the much-pummeled Virgin Slave, Barbarian King, has been feeling picked on, I bet she’s not anymore. I’d say the focus has shifted, and rightly so.

This isn’t a new sentiment, but I’m horrified at this (alleged) sloppy and blatant plagiarism. Shame on both the author and her editors/publishers. As if the romance genre needed another excuse for people to get sniffy and superior about it.

This is a tad off-topic, but more desultory googling shows that Edwards has also apparently copied.. herself:

From Savage Obsession, 2006:
“It was the most attractive lodge in the village, a long narrow structure of handsomely fashioned bark.  The ends were beautifully rounded and the roof gracefully arched.  The snow-white birchbark sides were decorated with striking totemic designs in brilliant but harmonious colors.”

From Savage Torment, 2007:
“This lodge, the Chippewas’ council house, was a long, narrow structure, handsomely fashioned of bark and appearing to be sixty feet or more in length and about twenty feet wide.  The ends were beautifully rounded and the roof gracefully arched.  The snow-white birchbark sides were decorated with striking totemic designs in brilliant but harmonious colors.  Slow spirals of smoke rose from four smoke-holes and an Indian stood guard on each side of its front door.”

...WTF?  Either she was looking at the same source-book for both of these passages (in which case it’s sadly not on Googlebooks), or she was cribbing from her earlier works.  Or she has a remarkably formulaic memory.  Aargh.

Castiron, that is a brilliant idea.

To the “Cruise” comment (I doubt it was her but if it was)
As a collage girl who was, back in the day, a rabid fan of everything Cassie Edwards (dudes I was 22!) and spent full price on EVERY book she wrote from 1989-1992. I’ve since grown out of that phase of romance readership, but look back with a pleasant sigh on all those longass bus rides to school.
After today it does feel like Cassie Edwards ran over my dog!
There is NO way i’m mad at SmartBitches for uncovering this info, why should CE get a “oh there there” for screwing up because she’s a matricarch writer? Tough!
If someone were to plagiarize Ms. Edwards and pass it off as their own work without giving due credit, you bet your ass the SmartBitches would raise hell and put a block under it.

I third Castiron’s brilliant idea.

And here’s hoping that the Crusie comment was a joke and/or troll because I love me some Jenny Crusie.

I wasn’t gonna hop in on this because all day, it’s been giving me that sick feeling I get when I pass a car crash on the road. But Jenny Crusie is a good friend of mine, and she’s no troll; she had a point and she made it. And I have to say, I’m with her.

NOW PUT DOWN THE PITCHFORKS. Yeesh. There’s no more dangerous place to exhibit an unpopular opinion than on an internet forum. Just do me a favor and hear me out before you light your torches. Once I’m done, have at it.

There is no defending Cassie Edwards here. This is disgusting and infuriating for all the reasons Sarah pointed out, and everyone who is horrified by the willful theft of honest work is absolutely in the right. But I’ll tell you, the gleeful bashing of Cassie Edwards - not in the investigation, but in multiple reviews and posts here prior to today - got old for me a while back. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. There’s so much good romance out there. Why read someone whose books you hate? It never made sense to me, but I never said anything, because hey - it’s Sarah and Candy’s site. Y’all do as you please.

So, while there’s no excuse for what Cassie Edwards appears to have done, I think it would be naive to say this investigation came out of a vacuum. It happened because the Cassie Edwards obsession tripped over something (other than lousy writing) to justify it.

All Jenny did was point this out; I’d ask that no one lump her in with the people who lack the courage to speak up respectfully in public and put their name on it.

Sarah, Candy, you guys know I love and respect you, and anyone sending you nasty e-mails on the side needs a serious smackdown. I’m just making a point, and standing up for my friend. I know you’d do the same.

Lani, I get where you’re coming from - but are you saying that because Candy & Sarah already thought CE was craptastical it somehow affects what she may or may not have done in her book? It is what it is - how it gets a light shined on it shouldn’t affect whatever it turns out to be.

Secondly, I really really take issue with the prevailing theme in romance that it’s not ok to bash a bad writer.  Everything on this site is done with glee, not just the trashing of CE’s quality.

It doesn’t need justifying.

And the thing of it is, the folks who don’t think there’s anything wrong with plagiarism are sortakindahalf correct.

That Ms. Edwards did research is fabulous. That she went and found studies and descriptions of things she herself could not directly experience is what a writer is supposed to do, if the writer is trying to bring elements of realism to their work.

Unfortunately, a writer is also supposed to incorporate that information smoothly. It should flow naturally as part of the narrative or dialogue, and should never, never, never sound like a mini-lecture expounding on some irrelevant detail.

And that’s the real tragedy. If Ms. Edwards had internalized the information she studied, and then allowed it to incorporate naturally into the story when appropriate, it would have been all her own words, and it would have been a hell of a lot less stilted. It might even have improved the prose sufficiently that the Smart Bitches wouldn’t have had to create a new level badness in their grading system.

What I DON’T understand is how weasels, including the one who ripped off Nora, can continue to be published quite regularly and with great success without suffering any long term damages.

I’ll admit it—I’m a mean, hateful bitch.  I not only won’t ever buy Jane—errr THAT WENCH’S—books again, I think her career should have been freaking OVER.

There are other careers.  For any artist to rip off another—nope, that should be your exit ticket from the club.  It’s a sacred goddamned trust.

It happened to me years ago and not only did the culprit lash out at me over it when she was FORCED to admit wrongdoing by lawyers (after being given several chances to bow out quietly), she attacked me with slander for years from an overseas website the host refused to remove.  Then again, she was a nutcase who couldn’t return to her own country because she had too many outstanding warrants… one for falsely accusing somebody of child molestation after HE outed her for fraud.

A thief is a thief and an artist who steals is NOT an artist.  She’s a wannabe who betrayed all artists.

Go work at the discount club, where you can purchase your plagiarism with the cover ripped off on aisle 4.

Publishers who put this crap on shelves over and over again should be forced to repay the cost of the book to anyone suckered into buying it… plus shipping and handling… and pain and suffering.

Secondly, I really really take issue with the prevailing theme in romance that it’s not ok to bash a bad writer.  Everything on this site is done with glee, not just the trashing of CE’s quality.

Hey, Liz! See, this is why I try not to post here. I get trapped here for days, just for the fun of intelligent discussion. It’s great when I have time, but now I’m under deadline. Agh!

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t give bad reviews to bad books. I’m saying that once you’ve reviewed an author and decided she’s badbadBAD, you’ve made your point for God and country. Cassie Edwards has become shorthand here for “crap writer” and whenever her name has come up, it’s been open house to pick her carcass clean. That’s way beyond just giving her a bad review.

The main reason I posted was that people were starting to think that Jenny Crusie defends plagiarism, and that’s not the case AT ALL. I just wanted to make sure that was clear.

And—E… there are people here who think there’s nothing wrong with plagiarism? Really? They’re not kindasortaright. Taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is terrible. Research good. Plagiarism bad. Are people arguing that plagiarism in this case is okay? I must’ve missed that.

Deadline. Going. Really mean it. ;)

But this didn’t start because the Bitches were hunting for more ways to rag on Cassie Edwards. It started because SB Candy gave her friend and Edwards book, and the friend noticed some stylistic issues and decided to use Google to research them.

It could just as easly have happened if SB Candy loved Edwards and gave her friend the book as an example of great romance.

Well, I may view that differently because CE was code for crap writer on the BBS servers way back in the start of her career. For real, people would say “Cassie Edwards bad?” So I think tying that trend to this site is giving undue acclaim.

I think we disagree. You seem to feel once you establish ‘bad’ you should leave it alone, and I think this site is all about beating dead horses into costly shoes. Nor do I see that as wrong. But I’ve been hearing CE bashed since about book three. I am old and all.

Good luck on the deadline.

the fact that the first and only comment by Crusie was remarking essentially how mean the SBs were and not on the contents of the charge or the issue of plagiarism says volumes.

I didn’t automatically think Crusie was condoning the plagiarism, but IMO her comment did deflect “blame” back to the SBs and in its brevity bypass completely the plagiarism issue, leaving only the whistleblower effect.  And that bothered me for the reasons I stated.  Now if the real issue is “gleeful bashing,” or being a minority voice on a popular blog, I have expressed enough opinions on both those topics on Crusie’s blog and elsewhere that I probably don’t have to repeat them all here.  But because of that, actually, I’m in no better place with Crusie’s comment.

Coming out of the woodwork to say—agree with liz on this, because if a writer continuously churns out work that is deemed holycraptasticbad, we’re allowed to continuously bash it as such. Now, flogging one single dead horse over and over may get tiresome, but Edwards has earned her reputation through countless bad novels.

Is the romance community more sensitive to bashing because its authors are generally more accessible to its readership than in other genres? I dunno, but maybe that’s a question for another day.

Published novel = fair game, y’all. Multiple published novels = greater instances for bashing.

I think it’s great. Candy and her pal Kate, the Woodward and Bernstein of investigative romance blogging. This story’s got everything - a light hearted exchange between friends uncovers a sinister secret at the heart of the romance industry. Will Candy and Kate escape the fangirls’ wrath?

Sorry. To be serious for a moment, I think this is a pretty straightforward case of getting caught red handed and facing the music. There is an element of glee, because it’s Cassie Edwards, but I think Sarah and Candy have been pretty restrained about the whole thing. Plus, this is a news story of legitimate interest to readers of romance. It should be out there. Edward’s readers, both present and future (God help you), should know.

To be honest, I thought Crusie was making a lighthearted comment because Candy is notorious for her Cassie Edward’s hate. I don’t think she defends plagiarism. I do think there appears to be an unspoken code of some sort that writers adhere to; no bashing other authors: close ranks at any sign of attack. Maybe there is even a knee-jerk defense mechanism for when things like this happen? Writers sticking together.

I wonder what on earth the number of fans (or books published, or $$$$$$$ made) an author has to do with facts?

Sweet fuck all. Just look at Ann Coulter.

Hi. I’m Crusie.

I apologize for being unclear.  This is what happens when you go for snark instead of direct communication.

I am against plagiarism.  If Ms. Edwards has plagiarized as it certainly seems she has, then she should pay the price.

I think that the SBs should savagely review any novel they find wanting, including Ms. Edwards’.

I think that this site is one of the smartest sites on romance on the net.

I also think this site has made Cassie Edwards a scapegoat and a whipping boy, taking gleeful delight in pointing out how bad she is over and over and over again to the point where it’s close to harassment.  The woman is a bad writer, we get it, we get it, so why did Candy give her friend one of Edwards’ books when she knows what outstandingly good books there are out there?  Because it’s Cassie Edwards, and she’s so much fun to kick.  The only thing I do not like about this site is the way Edwards is treated. 

So when I saw another “Cassie Edwards, ohmygod” post, the fact that it was about plagiarism is not what annoyed me first, it was that it was another shot at Cassie Edwards, discovered because people were reading her to make fun of her again.  She plagiarized, I hope she goes down for it.  But she doesn’t deserve the constant humiliation this site heaps on her, nobody does.

I realize this will enrage SB fans.  I realize this will make some people think even less of me than they already do and that opinion was pretty darn low to begin with.  I’m good with that.  Have a nice day.

Brandi - I’m willing to have your child.

Jenny C - I don’t really have an opinion about you. I’m not really an SB fan. So I suppose I bring you back to the point I made to Lani, being that the things you object to in CE’s treatment here are Not New and have been the case for decades. Sci Fi has it’s own whipping boys. A large body of dreadful work gets you turned into shorthand.

If CE doesn’t like being shorthand, she could work at being, I dunno, better? Working in different genres under other names? Or accepting, as the rest of us do, that not everyone will love us and cashing the paychecks.

you gals are frickin’ amazing. Keep these wonderful exposes up!

my word: under
Ha! Cassie prolly wishes she were a bit more undercover right about now :)

Anyone who writes a book called SAVAGE WINDS (hold your nose!) already knows she’s stinkin up the joint.

Snark on, bitches!

I can certainly see your point, Ms. Crusie.  We do give Cassie Edwards A LOT of crap. But think less of you because you think it’s not cool and have the cajones to say so?  Nah.  I think more of you for voicing an unpopular opinion and doing so with style and class.  And I know I’m not the only one.

We may be bitches, but I hope we can be fair bitches.

I’m pretty uncomfortable with bashing, but I find myself sort of agreeing with the poster who pointed out that Ms. Edwards comes out with book after book after book of the same quality. It wasn’t one book the Bitches disliked and trotted out everytime someone wanted to giggle.

OTOH, I do feel sorry for Louise Allen who must have thought she’d fallen down the rabbit hole when she woke up one morning to find hundreds of bloggers doing in-depth analysis and critique of her ONE book. (A slight exaggeration?) Yikes! Nothing wrong with it, but a shock for her, I’m sure!

Candy wrote:
“Because loud, repeated attention for bad work is every bit necessary for balanced discourse as loud, repeated attention for good work.”

Yes. But for the same person, ad nauseum?

On the Cassie Edwards = shorthand for craptastic thing, and how it should stop already.

Unless I’m completely off my rocker (always a possibility), I’ve gathered that the SBs at large also use shorthands for great writing (Laura Kinsale comes to mind). Should they stop doing that as well?

Actually, it really doesn’t matter how craptastic anybody on this site says Cassie Edward’s books are.

Clearly the author has fans who like her books for whatever reason they do. I do find the opinions expressed about those who read Cassie Edwards to be off putting, but I don’t think any opinion expressed on the matter on this website influences Cassie Edwards one way or another.

That said, the charge of plagiarism has to be accounted for. Irregardless of who Cassie Edwards is, and there is no reason to fault the ones who caught it. Except for the glee part. That’s just weird.

That said, the charge of plagiarism has to be accounted for. Irregardless of who Cassie Edwards is, and there is no reason to fault the ones who caught it. Except for the glee part. That’s just weird.

First, it’s regardless, not irregardless. Second, when and where have Sarah and Candy expressed glee over this?

Personally, I think some people are mistaking incredulity and shock for amusement.

On topic..

Regarding picking on Cassie Edwards I think there probably are several romance/fiction authors that if you researched deeply enough you’d run across similar passages that match up to their research resources. So I don’t take it as a Cassie Edwards witch hunt.

Offhand, paranormal romances come to mind, many times my eyes glazed over as I flipped pages because of the endless “how to’s” that had to come from somewhere, because the writing style seemed to differ from the rest of the book.

Lets face it, writing using a computer and having google books and other resources at their fingertips must make it very easy to “copy/ paste” when writing.

I mean, in all honesty what would SBTB be without copy/paste? lol

What are copyright laws in this situation? I remember some cases of religous book use,  a certain amount of content was viewed as fair use and over that was violating copyright? But that was years ago so my remembering might be flawed.

ok a lil off topic

It’s great to see you guys using books.google.com!I LOVE it. You can read a LOT of pages of a LOT of books.

Some of Cassie Edward’s are available as “limited view” which means they cut out a page here and there.

Savage Heart, Obsession,Innocence and Torment to mention a few.

And Jennifer Crusie..there are about 8 of your’s available for limited view.

And ooo lala at the amount of Ellora’s Cave books there! WITH the naughty bits even!!!

It’s a great resource and entertainment web tool.

Ms. Crusie!

I have a lot of your earlier books, so I most certainly did not fall in the category of not liking your books and you.  Nice attempt at a preemptive strike against your perceived detractors, though.

I have to say that I’m rather taken aback by your attitude.

I may have concurred if SB had repeatedly gone after any one author on the basis of 1 or 2 books, but the fact that CE has so many more books published than 1 or 2, and from what we all could see from just these short examples all of them rather low in quality (not even mentioning the plagiarism), leaves her open for repeated critical review.

If there are repeated negative reviews all over review-land, there might be some truth to that perception that bad writing is repeatedly foisted upon the public.

It has always baffled me that many readers and especially authors seem to think we as a sisterhood of women should not and ought not dare to criticize one of our ‘own’.  Bad writing in any form, by any author, should be ruthlessly exposed, so that only good writing is published.  After all, we all suffer from the perception that romance is trashy pr0n for mindless females who sit on their butts eating bon bons all day.

I find it insulting that NO one, neither editor nor publisher thought it either necessary to check glaring style inconsistencies, or if they found them that they thought it unnecessary to correct the issue before unloading these ‘works’ onto the unsuspecting public aka other women in the ‘sisterhood’.

I’m disappointed a romance author and academic would take this stance.

GrowlyCub

Wow. This thing brings up like 900 google entries.

And so much debate.

Keep up the good work everyone. Spirited debate, that’s the ticket.

Its too bad that CE sucks so hardcore, because a Loretta Chase plagarism debate would go an entirely different way. And we’d be crying.

just don’t snark so hard at each other that you start to cry anyway. Because if I was Cassie Edwards, I would totally be crying.

Although if I were Cassie Edwards I would deserve it.

Pursue the facts, and cut the lady a break.

I’m no fan of Cassie Edwards, or of plagiarism, but neither am I comfortable with the witch hunt tone of these postings.  Is Candy disillusioned by Edwards, or by romance in general?  She’s complained about the genre being too predictable and seemed to dislike JR Ward partly because her books are popular.  Is this like high school, where everything commercial isn’t cool?

I visit this web site often and I think you bitches are geniuses with snark.  But lately I haven’t been feeling the Love.

Wow.  I’m just reading all of this, comments included, for the first time.  First, I’m sorry and maybe (probably) no one is arguing this, but plagiarism is not ever ever ever okay.  Glad we cleared that up.

Second, I have a confession.  I don’t read the reviews.  I come here because it’s amusing and it’s a blog about something a care about (writing and romance novels) and did I mention it’s amusing?  So, I don’t know if Cassie Edwards gets bashed in the reviews or not, but… while it would suck to feel like there’s a whole blog devoted to how bad you are at your job, people are entitled to their opinion when they pay to read your work.  Even if they hate you.  Even if they’re kinda bitchy about it.  Or seriously bitchy about it.  If you’re still selling books and people love you enough to come to that blog and defend you, you’re still okay, I think.

Also, we’ll call this Second-subsection 2—I think it would’ve been very untrue to themselves and what this blog is about to discover something of this magnitude and NOT post it. 

Third, I don’t see how it’s anything less than hypocritical to write 100+ comments collectively on how the Smart Bitches have every right to say a thousand times that Cassie Edwards isn’t the best writer and then slam anyone, even if she’s a writer and even if she’s well known, for speaking their minds.  I think, if anything, this site is about saying what you think and it doesn’t matter if it’s fair or pretty or popular.  It’s what you think.  We’re all saying what we think.  And good for us.

I’m no fan of Cassie Edwards, or of plagiarism, but neither am I comfortable with the witch hunt tone of these postings.

What, exactly, strikes you as a “witch hunt tone”?

So—Edwards’ middle name isn’t Claire, is it?

Just checking.

Manon:

HAAAAAAH!!

Nice.

Oh. My. Lord.

I’m going to go read some Nora now, and make my heart feel better.

(In English majory, writerly terms: puke. Copying = Vengeful Wrath. CSI: Cassie Edwards and her rabid fangirls are making me *headdesk* more often than is good for me)

I know this is completely off topic, but what happened to the “recent comments” list?  I always used it to keep track of who was weighing in on what thread, and today I’m really lamenting its loss, what with three threads going simultaneously (not to mention those wonderful instances where someone reignites an old thread with just one new comment).

Good lord. Shooting the messenger much? What do Candy’s reading preferences have to do with Ms. Edwards’ suspected plagiarism? If we don’t like the tone of a message, we get to attack the messenger instead of addressing the issue? As though the method by which a misdeed is laid bare invalidates the misdeed itself.

I love the Smart Bitches and the website but I’m no “fangirl”—today’s my first day posting—and I sorta kinda really resent the implication that if I disagree with someone like Ms. Crusie (“this [Crusie’s opinion] will enrage SB fans”) it must be because I’m an overzealous SB defender.  Calling out this site for its Cassie Edwards mockery may be a valid point in a different context, but it’s in really poor taste in this discussion—whether or not it’s the intent, it deflects the attention away from the real issue and then points the finger at someone wholly unrelated to the plagiarism matter. I’m very uncomfortable with the whole “blaming the victim” vibe in some posts, not to say that we or the SBs are victims, but calling a well-thought-out, calmly laid-out analysis of factual evidence a “witch hunt” smacks of shooting the messenger.

Oh, Jenny Cruise, how far you have fallen…

http://jennycrusie.blogspot.com/2006/06/whats-bugging-me-now.html

To be honest? Finding out how pervasive the unattributed usage is has disillusioned me about the process of romance publishing, yeah. How long has this been going on?

Oh, come now, Candy. It’s got nothing to do with romance. Publishing, sure, but ROMANCE publishing, specifically? The most recent cases I’ve heard about have been literary fiction. It’s clearly spread generously around for all genres to share.

And I am all about personal responsibility. It’s about the plagiarist (sp?) first. Her publisher a distant second. Both you and Sarah read Cassie Edwards and didn’t pick out the copied parts as being (more) off. It seems as though ALL the writing may have been bad enough to throw off the scent.

(And what did happen to the recent comments list???)

I applaud the Smart Bitches for making this public. This is dynamite investigative journalism and they’ve handled the matter very professionally.

As for how picked-upon Cassie Edwards is, please remember the only victims here are the people whose books were plagiarized. Getting reviewed, positively or negatively, is part of being a published author. Having your words stolen is not.

And as jb excellent comment points out, it’s irrelevant whether Ms. Edwards gets a raw deal on SBTB. The SBs’ low opinion of Ms. Edwards’ writing did not drive the woman to start plagiarizing.

If it seems as though CE is being picked on perhaps the problem is that, while searching for an appropriate synonym for “friggin awful”, her name was the only one to come to mind. 

Solution: the smartbitches need to find authors that are as bad as or worse than CE.  Then, when they want to insult a book, they dont just to drop the Edwards bomb, there’ll be a plethera of other authors to allude to during a scathing review.  Instead of “It was bad, but not as bad as Cassie Edwards”, there’ll be “It was bad, but not as bad as ___”  Imagine the possibilities!!

So, while I try to check for crap level before purchase, I’ll nominate the worst romance novels in my house for the F (or at least D) list:

A Pirates Pleasure by Heather Graham

Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind by Karren Kelley

And I say these are bad not as an insult to their fans, but as a personal opinion.

Who said plagiarism was like mind rape? Was is La Nora? Can’t remember. But it’s so true.

And for those who think there’s bashing going on in here, just *breathe*. Forget the emotional and stick to the facts: someone wrote something, then someone else stole it and sold it.

I have a lot more to say about righteous bleeding hearts who’d want everyone to always be agreeable and nice (or else!), but it wouldn’t be polite.

You can’t blame Romance publishing for this. Edwards has been read for years without anyone catching this. Her publisher isn’t required to google her books to see if it’s original material. She, like all of us, signed a contract stating it was.

The plagiarist is to blame. Not the publisher, the editor, the reader, the authors being copied, the person or persons who discovered the copying or the bookseller who sold the books.

The plagiarist is to blame. Period.

When I was plagiarized (yes, I called it mind rape) I heard a lot of comments about it being because Romance novels were all the same, that the ensuing publicity damaged or demeaned the genre and industry.

Bullshit.

An individual copied another individual’s work and called it her own. It happens, unfortunately, in all areas of writing. I don’t hear acadamia being blamed when it happens there, or literary fiction being tossed into the mix of causes when it happens there.

But when it’s Romance, the genre and its publishers once again become targets. That’s not right.

If one must be disillusioned by this recent discovery, be so with the individual, and not the platform used.

Nor, she says going on, do I see this as a witch hunt. I got that term tossed at me, too, when I went after Dailey. An important line was crossed, and bringing that fact to light doesn’t make it a witch hunt.

Too often, far too often, in cases like this people point fingers at the victim or at those who blow the whistle.

Baffles me.

I haven’t read any CE so I have no opinion of her writing. As a reader, period, I feel insulted by writers or publishers who would do this. It doesn’t matter if it’s Edwards. It doesn’t matter what the genre is. I was shocked to see how the excerpts followed the text from the old books word for word. I would be shocked no matter who the author was.

I do have a technical question. Since these texts were written in 1902 and it’s public domain, would she be in any trouble legally? Other than looking really, really bad?

Candy, I’m back because this is bugging me. Why should the fact that Romance is a successful genre (cash cow) mean the industry is in any way responsible for the actions of a writer within that genre?

While I grant you that the offending passages appear to have been easy to find, no one—including readers—found them before. In my case Dailey had plagiarized me for years before it was caught—by a reader.  And it took some work on my part to go back and find all the other books involved.

No one had looked before, no one had noticed. That’s no one’s fault.

Romance, the genre, the industry, wasn’t to blame. But boy, did it take some knocks along with me because of this person’s actions.

I hate to see that happen again.

Copying needs to be taken very seriously, by writers, publishers, readers. And the blame for that offense needs to stay where it belongs, or once again, the issue becomes fractured and clouded.

Why is it than when I lose internet access for a couple days you Bitches always post something that makes the webernets go crazy??? Last time it was swan hat.

I really have nothing to add to this thread. Plagiarism is wrong.

Not Candy, but—

Most plagiarism in romance is found by readers cross reading.  I would have likely read the sources but not read Cassie Edwards—I think the presence of the Google book search is going to make this type of checking easier from now on.

I’m not denying that plagiarism happens in all varieties of writing, both commercial and non-commercial, and the two biggest cases to have broken the scene in the past two years have been Viswanathan (YA) and Ian McEwan (lit fic). But have they been nearly as pervasive and, well, easy to find as this particular case?

Candy, I’m going to argue that the Visnawathan case was that pervasive and easy to find because she had been unwise enough to plagiarize not from a contemporary who had a popular, not to mention, current, series.  Add to that the sheer publicity awarded to Visnawathan due to her age and the size of the contract… I think that yeah, it was pretty easy to document this one.

Speaking of plagiarism, Missy Chase Lapine has brought suit against the Seinfelds—against Jessica for plagiarism and against Jerry for slander, I believe.  It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes down.

Sorry, meant to write, “plagiarize from a contemporary.”

Extra word in there due to lack of caffeine.  Sorry.

Nice work!  I wasn’t as aware of the publishing world when the Roberts/Dailey scandal went on, but I’m fascinated to see what happens next.  As someone who had been plagiarized in school (and both of us got punished because I couldn’t prove she stole from me, just that both of us had the exact same thing on an essay) I have a very strict view on plagiarism, to the point that some of my professors say I’m a little trigger happy on the citations when I’m writing a research paper.  But all it would have taken was some credit at the end, and some indication that those parts of the novel came from another book (not good writing, but at least she would have been honest) and she would have been FINE. And the book probably would have sold just as well.

Really, if you do your research take that extra moment to credit the person.  But of course, I’m preaching to the choir because most people here seem to be in agreement.

Good job bitches!  Keep up the good work!

Holy craptastica. 

The power just came back on and I find this.

Thank you SmartBitches for bringing this to light.  I’m blown away by not only how often, and in how many books that the plagiarism occurred, but that it was so damn blatant word-for-word without a thought.

I write historicals and do a lot of research too, but even I know that just because it’s research doesn’t mean you can slap it in a book undigested.

Plagiarism is never right.  But I have to also agree with La Nora.  You can’t shake down the publisher, or hold them accountable for every book they ever produce to be original or accurate (can you say James Frey?).  The author is responsible for the content being original and accurate material.  That’s the contract.

As for the comment on the sisterhood of romance writers.  Yeah, it’s neither a myth nor your imagination. 

While it benefits the newer writers when they are just starting out, it also hobbles the genre in being taken seriously by media, the general public, literati and the like, especially in events like this where there is a clear right and wrong (the act of plagiarism).

Part of the genre’s willingness to close ranks comes from the genre being so pervasively populated by female writers.  Women natural tend to try to seek unanimity vs. a hierarchy (note: see Dr. Deborah Tannen’s books on how men and women’s conversational styles differ and how impacts who gets heard, what gets done and who gets credit - just citing my sources.)  As a result, you attack one (even if it is legitimate) and everyone feels the pinch (whether they should or not).

Another case in point…if you think the romance genre isn’t going to feel this as a bitch slap, go get another mocha and wake up.  A sisterhood that stands up together also gets beat by the media together. 

The mass opinion becomes if one romance is full of plagiarism, it stands to reason (in the mind of the media) that all of romance is full of inaccuracy, lousy writing, and supports the ideal that it was a sub-form of writing to begin with.

The plagiarism is bad.  No two ways about it.  But there’s a sideffect that’s even worse because it impacts not only the people she stole from, but also every other romance writer out there. 

This is no longer a matter of one book.  It’s a matter of the genre’s image.  It takes ten positive impressions to neutralize one negative one (U. of Southern Calif. communications dept. research study a few years back.) 

One author’s inability to be professional puts a ding in the whole genre’s image. 

And perhaps that’s what really pisses me off most.  Because she can’t do her job, other people will believe none of us can.

The negative impact this will have on our already tattered reputation as readers and writers of romance was the first concern I had when I started reading what SB had uncovered.

It made me sick to my stomach because we don’t need any more bad press, we get enough as it is, but there is no doubt in my mind that such blatant disregard for the written word has to be exposed and dealt with in the harshest way.

And that’s precisely why Ms. Crusie’s attitude rankles so much.  Attacking the messenger, deflecting the focus from what’s really important here (blatant plagiarism by a woman who has published close to 100 books in the genre) and using her ‘weight’ as an author to try to make her position a more valuable one than that held by non-authors is just disgusting.

Especially, if we read the impassioned, dare I say, bitchy, comments that Ms. Crusie posted on her blog with regards to plagiarism.  I’ll quote Ms. Crusie here.  This is from

http://www.arghink.com/2006/06/18/whats-bugging-me-now/

Please all read Ms. Crusie’s complete comment on plagiarism, if you haven’t already.  The below excerpt is just the most pertinent to my point.
start quote
“Or do they not even think about “everybody else”? Does “everybody else” not exist for people like this, bound as they are by the parameters of their own needs? Are they astounded when people object to their thefts? “Why yes, I did take that,” do they say when confronted with the proof of their pilfering, “is that a problem?” Well, yes, you conscienceless bitch, it IS a problem. Okay, what really bugs me is that people like this steal the work of others and then giggle self-consciously and say, “Oh, sorry about that. No hard feelings, ‘kay?” Hand me that hard feeling, Mabel, I’m gonna use it to beat some moral integrity into that there dumbass plagiarist.”
end quote

I wish she had remembered her feelings on this topic before posting her comment on how CE is abused as a “whipping boy and scapegoat” by SB, thereby trivializing the magnitude of what SB has uncovered about CE’s unprofessional conduct.

Because her attitude and post are de facto supporting CE’s theft and will
open the genre to even more ridicule by the media and romance detractors.

GrowlyCub

While I absolutely agree that the plagiarist is the one to blame, I cannot help thinking that the publisher has some responsibility as well.

After all, aren’t editors supposed to help authors make their books the best they can be?  And shouldn’t glaring style inconsistencies have been noted and addressed by the editor?

Maybe I’m naive, but we don’t buy books directly from authors, we buy them from publishers and there are many people who lay eyes on a manuscript before it’s sold to the public.  We pay for that ‘added value’ of proof reading, fact checking and editing for flow and readability, so I really do feel publishers have some input and responsibility about the final output.

GrowlyCub

~After all, aren’t editors supposed to help authors make their books the best they can be?~

You could blame the editor in part for the books being poorly written—but remember Edwards has many, many fans who would disagree.

This side says crap, the other side says just fine and dandy. It’s not the publisher’s job to decide who’s right. The books sell, they reach their audience. That’s the publisher’s job.

You just can’t blame an editor for a writer copying. They’re not responsible. The copier is. I would also imagine, any editor—after a writer’s been around 25 years for 100 books—would assume (and way back along the way as well) that the change in style and voice was, indeed, the particular author’s style.

Again, to me, pushing the blame, or part of it onto editors, publishers, detracts from the issue. The writer who copies another’s work and calls it her own is at fault. Completely.

“any editor—after a writer’s been around 25 years for 100 books—would assume (and way back along the way as well) that the change in style and voice was, indeed, the particular author’s style.”

I too suspect this is why/how those passages slipped under the editor’s radar.

And that’s precisely why Ms. Crusie’s attitude rankles so much.

FWIW, I don’t think Crusie and/or Rich are okay with plagiarism here or elsewhere.  And I think anyone has a right to say that mocking Cassie Edwards bothers them.  But I totally agree with you that the tone of the comments here (and I include Rich with Crusie for reasons that may become apparent in a minute) appears to bypass what I think is the heart of the issue. 

Now I suspect that both Crusie and Rich would respond that they don’t even see that it’s necessary to explain how against plagiarism they are—that it should be an obvious thing, especially given the link you provide to Crusie’s blog.

In general, though, I think it’s clear that there’s a certain culture of silence on this issue that needs to be cracked, and that perhaps it’s never too obvious to talk about what plagiarism is and why it’s a pernicious presence in any writing community, negatively impacting authors and readers alike.

As to the hand slapping of the SBs for mocking Cassie Edwards, though, while I’m not an adept mocker myself, I found Crusie and Rich’s stand on that outrageously ironic after this:
http://www.arghink.com/2007/09/27/you-have-not-got-a-clue/
http://www.arghink.com/2007/09/28/385/

Perhaps it’s time that we start talking about what our community values are relative to authors and readers, to start eyeballing some common ideas about what is or isn’t legitimate criticism and what is or isn’t the value of snark, etc.  Because while I’m sure we all tread into the land of the double standard at times, I think some of the clarity this issue of plagiarism should yield is most definitely tainted by the IMO often strange notions of what’s okay and what’s out of bounds when discussing books, authors, readers, bloggers, etc.  And IMO as long as that’s all bundled up together we’re going to keep having these boundary blurring discussions (and not in a good way, lol).

Wow. The you-know-what has hit the fan.

Thanks Jenny Crusie for wading back into the fray to clarify your opinion. I’m glad that you bothered to come back and risk the almighty wrath of the internet.

On the other hand, while I see your need to clarify your earlier comment (since some of us—myself included—were a bit peeved about it), it’s disheartening to me that you would (as many have already eloquently pointed out) direct the conversation away from Edwards’ plagiarism and focus it on how Edwards has been supposedly treated by this site.

The seriousness of plagiarism should be the focus of discussion—not an alleged vendetta against Edwards. Whether The Bitches took too much glee in bashing her awful writing is irrelevant because they often were not even her own words. If anything, The Bitches were unknowingly bashing the poor people that Edwards repeatedly stole from.

A very hearty thank you to the incredible Nora Roberts for reminding me that Edwards is the one who plagiarized, not her editor and publisher. I’m not an author, so I don’t know how fact-checking works and if it’s even done with romance novels, so I’m glad that you set the record straight for me in regards to the contract signed by an author stating that theirs is an original work. A part of me had been blaming the publisher for allowing this happen and, after your comment, I realized that they didn’t “allow” their author to plagiarize—they took Edwards at her word when she signed a contract stating her works were original and hers alone.

(I just realized that I look like a strange suck-up for commenting only about the comments left by famous writers. So, shout-outs to some great comments made by lori, GrowlyCub, Robin and, of course, Candy. You all made many great points.)

Copying needs to be taken very seriously, by writers, publishers, readers. And the blame for that offense needs to stay where it belongs, or once again, the issue becomes fractured and clouded.

ITA that the writer is ultimately the responsible party.  But I do think there are industry and community elements here, as well.  How many RWA chapters, for example, discuss plagiarism regularly and openly?  How many authors talk about this issue or even KNOW what plagiarism is and how it relates to copyright infringement?  How many authors using secondary research materials know what to acknowledge and what not to acknowledge, and how accessible is that information for them? 

The culture of silence on this really scares me, almost as much as the strange transference of blame onto Candy and Sarah for reporting it (that whistleblower effect).  Are people afraid that they may be doing it so they don’t want to talk about it?  That just makes it more taboo, IMO, and once it is revealed, you get the strange dichotomy of pitchforks intermixed with denials of importance. 

Since readers are so often the ones to catch plagiarism, clearly this is an issue that impacts the whole community, and as several people have already pointed out, it doesn’t do a lot for the already beleaguered reputation of Romance.  NOT that I’m arguing at all with your premise that the editor and publisher shouldn’t bear responsibility for what the writer did (although I think this may speak to the overworked status of many editors), just that I think this is an issue of community importance and reflects community ethics, which IMO don’t seem to be discussed readily with much comfort.

~I think this is an issue of community importance and reflects community ethics~

I couldn’t agree more with this. But the fact that it’s an issue of community importance doesn’t mean, to me, putting blame on the genre, the publishers or that community when one of its members copies.

Why didn’t Sarah (or was in Candy) jump to plagiarism back when she reviewed the Edwards book? Because she simply thought the writing was Edwards’ style. If I’d read it, I imagine I’d have thought the same.

I would agree plagiarism is an industry problem—a writing industry problem. But not that Romance shares the blame for what Edwards apparently did.

I don’t know if RWA or MWA or any writer’s organization addresses the issue of plagiarism regularly. I know it has been addressed when the big P hits the fan.

Robin: Your comments are so incredibly well-thought out. Kudos for brilliantly clarifying your opinion.

And I think that we should use this scandal to HELP the reputation of Romance.  I hope I can clarify my opinion as well as you have done yours.

This site obviously proves that smart, snarky women read romance and are not afraid to yell it to the rooftops. This scandal further highlights the fact that we are intelligent women who read romance because we enjoy it and because many of the writers are exceedingly talented. If The Bitches were not so intelligent, Edwards’ plagiarism might never have been found out. If we were the dolts that the “Literary World” would like to believe we are, then why should we care about a little stealing?

But we’re not dolts, and we DO care and, as intelligent readers, we have the right to uphold the standards and ethics of publishing. If we had spent our money on lead-tainted toys, no one would think it odd when we complained about buying a tainted product. So, why is it so wrong that readers are up in arms over all of this? We spent money on her books, under the assumption that they were original works of fiction, and it turns out they they were just as tainted as those lead toys. We have every right to be upset over this.

Oy. I’m meandering. Blame the DayQuil. I’m trying to say that we, as intelligent romance readers, could use this situation to show others that just because we read romance doesn’t mean that we’re idiots, and that just because we read romance doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve original works of fiction.

I sincerely hope this post makes sense.

Sarah, it was also said that I should be chastized during the Dailey business. That I had no compassion. I was mean. I should have been nice and forgiven her.

I say screw that.

Shooting the messenger, or poking at the victim only supports the wrong-doing, and clouds the issue.

Well said, Sarah!

I wonder if we’ll see an increase in discoveries regarding plagiarism, powered by google.
As a commenter on my blog put it - dope testing on-line.

FWIW, I totally don’t care if you beat Cassie Edwards’s savage dead horse into a expensive shoes or not. I think it’s hilarious…but then, I’m a black-hearted, soulless bitch. :)

But! If you want a new author to toss into the fray, may I nominate Fern Michaels? I read one of her books, and I was appalled. I can’t even…you know that’s several hours of my life that I am NEVER getting back. Lazy does not begin to cover that book.

On the other hand, it wasn’t blatantly racist…but she is as ubiquitous as Edwards.

Finally, on PA rest stops: along with really spiffy clean bathrooms

I consider myself something of a…hm. Connisseur sounds gross, so critic? Of interstate rest stops, and PA has some of the nicest ones I’ve seen. That’s my utterly irrelevant comment for the day.

(Spambot word: under29. Only for another five months…)

OFF TOPIC.

Just to warn you all.

snarkhunter: I second your nomination for Fern Michaels as our new whipping boy! Although aren’t “her” books actually written by more than one person? I believe I had read that somewhere (credible) and I’ve only read a few of her books but the two writers theory at least helps explain the complete shift in tone through-out “her” books. And glaring consistency errors. Personally, I’ve always thought Fern Michaels was worse than Cassie Edwards.

(And by “new whipping boy” I’m just trying to make a snarky joke. Even though I meant what I said about Michaels books… I hate ‘em.)

I know the discussion elsewhere has focused partially on the potential plagiarism…

*raises hand*

This would be me.  As I said in my blog, I don’t know enough about the history with y’all disliking Edwards’ books and frankly, to me, it’s secondary.  I am so, so, so against plagiarism—I can’t even begin to tell you how angry the Kaavya Viswanathan (Hey look, I spelled it right after the caffeine got into my system!) situation made me.  And in the comments on my blog, someone else mentioned that John Irving had apparently also lifted passages wholesale from an academic text that he later went back and acknowledged.

It is a pervasive problem, not just in romance, not just in lit fic, not just in YA, but all across the board and down the line, into college and high school papers.  Attention needs to be called to it, each and every time it happens.  Just my .02

After reading the comments I don’t think anyone (beside the fangirls) were trying to move the argument away from whether or not there was plagiarism, or even whether or not plagiarism is bad.

BUT how it was found lends itself to criticism. How many times these fine ladies googled passages from their favorite authors just to see what happens? Or even authors they gave C or D grade reviews?

No, it does not change the outcome that this woman plagiarized. Yes, sitting on this info would have been unethical no matter the circumstances, but it still lends itself to criticism.

That’s neither here or there.

I say what needs to be the focus of this discussion is what should the consequences be when an author does plagiarize.

From what I gather the punishment is more or less a slap on the wrist. These authors made a profit from stolen property (whether it’s real or intellectual shouldn’t matter.)

Melissa Blue: BUT how it was found lends itself to criticism. How many times these fine ladies googled passages from their favorite authors just to see what happens? Or even authors they gave C or D grade reviews?

That’s not how it was found.  Candy and Sarah weren’t sitting around googling passages from Cassie Edwards just to see what happens (like the spiteful, evil free-speech crazies they are!)—I came across something suspicious while reading, googled it just to see what would happen (like the cynical, suspicious academic I am), and showed them what I’d found.  What’s happened since then has been a model of careful, fair investigation and reporting on their parts.  Your criticism of Candy and Sarah is completely unwarranted.

QUOTE: I’ve had the feeling for a long time now that Romance novels, because it’s a cash cow, is treated more like an assembly line by the industry—and by “industry,” I mean the process. UNQUOTE

I agree to a point, but I’ve talked to too many authors who sweat over their work to really be so jaded as to think the “process” at its beginning is assembly line for them. Some for sure.

Dang candy dont take ALL the romance away from us readers!

We like to think the authors are brilliant normal people like ourselves who happen to have a good enough vocabulary and enough discipline to put pen to paper , or fingers to keyboard and get published.

Surely they’re not all into it to make money!!!

HEY you authors quit laughing all the way to the bank !!

(like the spiteful, evil free-speech crazies they are!)

Kate-I find you putting words into my mouth is completely unwarranted. When I called Candy and Sarah fine ladies I wasn’t saying it with my tongue in cheek. I’m an avid reader of this blog. Before they came along the scene I don’t think many people had the balls to review a book and call it crap and back it up. I deeply admire that.

Also, Candy and Sarah weren’t sitting around googling passages from Cassie Edwards just to see what happens.

versus

I came across something suspicious while reading, googled it just to see what would happen…and showed them what I’d found.

Maybe it’s me, but the only difference I see is the who, not the how. The reason why I say the “how” lends itself to criticism is that how many people google passages from books? It could have easily been intuition, “suspicion” as you pointed out that made you do it, but still I find it odd. Let’s use the reasonable person standard (yes, now my tongue is in cheek.)

And yet I’m still waiting to hear what should happen not only within the romance community to people who steal someone’s words, but any author.

People who plagiarize are generally taken to court when private settlements can not be made through mediation. I’m no lawyer but that’s a fairly reasonable consequence of plagiarism.

As far as what should happen in the romance community… I’m a bit confused. The romance community uncovered the plagiarism and that’s above and beyond the call of duty. If you’re talking about what ACTION the community should take then there are a myriad of options—contact the authors/pubs of the stolen works to let them know what is going on; petition Edwards pubs to cancel her contract and issue a statement of apology; call local news media with the story; call bookstore owners, supermarket owners, drugstore owners and anyone else who might stock her books and tell them what has been discovered and ask them to remove her books from their shelves; create a coalition of romance community readers to do all of the above and more.

As a community, we can take many actions if that is what the community chooses to do. Personally, I am all for implementing every single idea that I put forth and would be glad to offer my help and services to the effort of showing that romance readers will NOT stand for plagiarism.

(Someone please tell me if I am making any sense at all. The DayQuil is telling me that I’m talking crazy and, if that’s the case, I should probably stop posting for a while.)

Okay, I’ll pop up again—

It seems to me that it *is* a matter of who, in that Candy and Sarah read a passage and think “wow, shitty prose”.  Kate reads it and thinks “huh, that sounds familiar/seems out of place”.  That happens because they’re different readers with different backgrounds.  It seems plausible to me that Kate could have caught the discrepancy *because* she’s not used to romance in general and to Edwards in particular.

*ducks back under Lurker Rock (like Fraggle Rock, but less brightly colored)*

I find you putting words into my mouth is completely unwarranted. When I called Candy and Sarah fine ladies I wasn’t saying it with my tongue in cheek.

Melwhit: It wasn’t my intention to put words in your mouth, but the criticism of Candy and Sarah for breaking this news has tended to focus on the idea of them being “spiteful” for their “treatment” of Cassie Edwards.  If the general and sarcastic tone of my remark wasn’t obvious (after all, I did call myself “cynical” and “suspicious”, neither of which I consider complimentary), my apologies for not making it clearer.

Maybe it’s me, but the only difference I see is the who, not the how. The reason why I say the “how” lends itself to criticism is that how many people google passages from books? It could have easily been intuition, “suspicion” as you pointed out that made you do it, but still I find it odd. Let’s use the reasonable person standard (yes, now my tongue is in cheek.)

Firstly, I am a geek.  When I come across something that strikes me as peculiar, out of place, or otherwise worthy of interest, I turn to Google.  [Actually, in this case, I first checked the Wikipedia article on black-footed ferrets, which, while informative, does not use precisely the same language.]  Frankly, the section on ferrets was so bizarre that I am surprised no one else googled it in the few months this book has been out.  A character who is elsewhere written as a relatively uneducated frontier girl suddenly starts talking about researchers theorizing that polecats crossed the Siberian land bridge?  Did scientists even know about the landbridge in the 1850s?  Even writing as truly execrable as Ms. Edwards’ doesn’t just turn the corner like that.

Secondly, what other possible motivation would I have?  I’d never read a romance novel before this weekend, and I have no connection to this site except by knowing Candy.  I’m at a loss to understand why you find these discoveries so criticism-worthy.

And yet I’m still waiting to hear what should happen not only within the romance community to people who steal someone’s words, but any author.

I was under the impression most of the discussion has been over whether plagiarism is legally actionable, whether this counts as copyright infringement, and whether this sort of discovery reflects poorly on the romance community.  Does that not count?

Nope, even with the DayQuil you make complete sense, and yes that answers my question.

SB’s, fine ladies,yourself, have done a commendable job (regardless what started the ball rolling) My stance is somewhat like yours. Plagerism wouldn’t happen (as often) if the person knew they would get a MAJOR smackdown. The romance community needs to come together and personally deliver the smack down in this instance. (Not just the SBs who deliver it on a regular basis.)

This may be the first time I’m hoping for a wild fire when it comes to a blog post.(Almost like viral marketing) Most people get away with it because it’s not talked about.

~But I’ve had the feeling for a long time now that Romance novels, because it’s a cash cow, is treated more like an assembly line by the industry—and by “industry,” I mean the process.~

I can only tell you from my experience, and from the experience of every writer I know and associate with, this is simply not true.

Are SOME books assembly-lined in Romance? I’m sure they are, as some are in every area of fiction. But every editor I’ve ever worked with has put me through my paces. Again and again. And every writer pal I know would say the same.

Edwards’ editors are not responsible for her copying. She is.

You find her work crap. I don’t argue with your opinion—and because of that opinion you feel her editors should have pushed her to produce better.

But many disagree with you, and find her work satisfying. Her editor assists her in producing a work that reaches her target audience. That’s the job.

Edwards, however, is not allowed to copy other work and drop it into her books. That’s on her.

I really believe it deflects responsibility when we suggest others share the blame for a writer copying.

And, for me, doing that, rides beside the same horse that claims all Romance is the same anyway.

The reason why I say the “how” lends itself to criticism is that how many people google passages from books?

*raises hand*  Not from books, necessarily, but I’ve found things that were suspicious and gone to Google.  There was a mindboggling event a few years ago when coverage of a horse race (I think – it was definitely a sports event on NBC) lifted wholesale a speech from The West Wing.  As it happened, the network owned the text, but I could only imagine the fit Aaron Sorkin was throwing over when he found out that the text was taken with no attribution to its actual author.

Kate suspected something.  Not that many people would pick up a random book and start picking out lines to Google, but if a passage is suspicious, why not look?  The vast majority of plagiarism is discovered because the style abruptly changes, which appears to be exactly what happened here.

I don’t know what your background is.  Kate described herself as an academic, which might mean that she has some experience dealing with academic plagiarism.  However, this is not something that everyone is going to catch – Alex Haley’s Roots had been on the market for two years, made into a miniseries, and won the Pulitzer Prize before the word plagiarism came up.  The suspect passage was about a hundred words long, but Roots is something that’s come under far greater academic scrutiny than anything written by Cassie Edwards, and it still took a while to find.

My point is, not even the most critical readers are necessarily going to find these kinds of things.  Some plagiarists get very, very good at masking their activities.  In this case it was even more difficult.  As someone else in one of these threads noted, the majority of non-academic plagiarism is detected by readers who recognize a passage as something from another book.  The likelihood of someone having read both Cassie Edwards’ novels and a pile of anthropology texts on Native Americans and whatever else has been picked up here is pretty slim.

At any rate, Kate’s motives for going to Google in the first place shouldn’t be part of the argument.  It deflects the attention from the only person I can see in this incident who seems to have done something wrong – Cassie Edwards.

Thanks melwhit and I’m completely and totally with you. After I posted that comment, I started thinking about how the fans of the TV show “Jericho” were able to get it back on the air by sending the network execs garbage bags of peanuts. (That’s a long story.)

But it got me thinking. If a small group of fans could save an entire TV show, then a coalition of romance community members could definitely cause some major waves. Since we are the consumers, spending our hard-earned money on so many romance novels, we have the power to effect change, if that’s what we choose to do. It’s our money that makes romance such a cash cow and it’s our right to use that power—to show that we have standards and will not stand for plagiarism. Could you imagine the brou-ha-ha we could cause if we all told our local bookstores that we would not patronize their business until they removed from their shelves the Edwards titles which have proven to have Eerie Similarities to certain reference materials.

Of course, I am perhaps jumping the gun a bit and am maybe being a bit harsh but… I just hate, hate, HATE plagiarism. And I hate that the public so often brushes it off as no big deal unless it’s done by a cute young girl with a five-figure book deal. I really think this could work to the advantage of the romance community if we stand firm and make it clear that this is absolutely nothing personal against Edwards, it’s about her alleged plagiarism and that we are mad as hell and not going to take it any more!

(Okay, maybe the “Network” quote was a bit much.)

I’ve never read a CE book based on the pure cheesiness of her covers and titles. They just scream that this is not a book I would not enjoy. I do wonder since my degree is in cultural anthropology with an emphasis on Native Americans of the Southwest US if I would have picked up on the academic text? And if I did, would I have thought to Google that text? Probably not. I probably would have thought, “gee, this sounds an awful lot like a textbook, let’s skip to the good parts”. And then been ever so sad when I discovered the lack of good parts to be found.

So kudos to Kate who actually thought this sounded like a textbook and actually did something to see if it was.

As to plagiarisim itself, I remember the “research papers” in elementary school where you basically wrote the encylodpedia again but by 4th grade I was taught footnotes and a bibliography. And most important that it was wrong, WRONG and BAD, to plagiarize. As someone who went on to write a thousand papers for school, I know how to reword the general ideas and how to acknowledge the information to my research source. It is not that hard. It would seem that CE’s books could have been vastly improved if she had wound that fairly interesting information about Native Americans into her story without just copying text. Tony Hillerman writes marvy mysteries based on the Navajo reservation giving lots of information about the culture without the stilted language and info dump. So it can be done. Just my $.02.

“At any rate, Kate’s motives for going to Google in the first place shouldn’t be part of the argument.  It deflects the attention from the only person I can see in this incident who seems to have done something wrong – Cassie Edwards.”

I’m quoting Anna, but this is a good point several people have made. 

Why on earth should Kate have to defend why she caught C.E. all plagiarizing books she sold for money?

It doesn’t matter why Kate googled it.  She googled it because it was plagiarized.  If it hadn’t been plagiarized, she wouldn’t have noticed it.

I don’t agree, but I get the point that since this site gets some serious snark on for Cassie Edwards, it’s awkward that the owners helped find and published online their findings.  It’s awkward and maybe it adds a little lemon juice to the wound, but it doesn’t change that she’s plagiarizing like it’s her job. 

The discovery wasn’t made in a vacuum.  It’s easy NOW to point out that on top of discovering plagiarism, the SB’s are “mean” to her.  Yes, in retrospect, that sucks for C.E.  But only in retrospect.  It’s not like it was a plot to give her very bad reviews and THEN oust her for palgiarism.

I wish she had remembered her feelings on this topic before posting her comment on how CE is abused as a “whipping boy and scapegoat” by SB, thereby trivializing the magnitude of what SB has uncovered about CE’s unprofessional conduct. GrowlyCub

Sorry to respond so late, but I have to agree with you on this.  My initial reaction was WTF?!? My next reaction was to hoof it on over to YouTube to see if Jenny and Lani had posted a LEAVE CASSIE ALONE!!! video…I’m still watching out for that, heh.

General wondering follows:

What difference would it make whether someone noticed something wonky with the text of a supposedly original work of fiction and checked through Google, subsequently discovering instances of plagiarism... or whether someone fed Google bits and pieces of awkward text from a supposedly original work of fiction by an author s/he may despise/have an issue with/ran over his/her dog, subsequently discovering instances of plagiarism.

Whatever the supposed motivations of the whistle blower, the malfeasance was not their doing. However, speculating on the meanness/motives of whomever exposes unethical/illegal/criminal behaviour does tend to deflect from the unethical/illegal/criminal behaviour itself.

The reason why I say the “how” lends itself to criticism is that how many people google passages from books? It could have easily been intuition, “suspicion” as you pointed out that made you do it, but still I find it odd.

How, then, would you suggest that plagiarizers be identified? I’m sorry to disillusion you, but there isn’t some magical plagiarism detector out there. In fact, what Kate did is *precisely* how I have caught out plagiarizers in my classes. Just last month, I read a student paper and thought, “Gee, those paragraphs don’t sound at all like her.” Guess which paragraphs were c&p’d verbatim from her “sources”?

It’s how we all do it. The fact that it happened to be Edwards who got caught does NOT make this part of some ev0l Smart Bitch conspiracy to bring her down.

I don’t agree, but I get the point that since this site gets some serious snark on for Cassie Edwards, it’s awkward that the owners helped find and published online their findings.

Lori said it better than I did. In this instance it seems to me the argument is that the means justify the ends, which is something I can’t agree with for every situation. Which is also the same reason Crusie got flak for posting that readers letter and Rich’s response.

My next reaction was to hoof it on over to YouTube to see if Jenny and Lani had posted a LEAVE CASSIE ALONE!!! video…I’m still watching out for that, heh.

I laughed at this, but at the same time as a writer if a review of my book read like Edwards…and then I became the butt of the joke…see where my line of thinking is going. I’m not for reviews that are always nice, because you can learn how to write better from bad reviews with substance. Yet, you don’t learn anything from a running gag joke.

Could you imagine the brou-ha-ha we could cause if we all told our local bookstores that we would not patronize their business until they removed from their shelves the Edwards titles which have proven to have Eerie Similarities to certain reference materials.

Yes, I can imgaine. It’ll be much more proactive than going back and forth in a comments section on who shouldn’t have said what, what’s taking away from the real point of the argument and whether or not Crusie or Rich have made a youtube video.

It’s how we all do it. The fact that it happened to be Edwards who got caught does NOT make this part of some ev0l Smart Bitch conspiracy to bring her down.

I’ve re-read my comments and I don’t recall ever saying that. I also don’t recall anyone saying SBs somehow created this to show how bad of a writer she was. The cut and pasting speaks for itself.

Just delurking to throw in my vocal support for the SBs, Kate, and their amazing Nancy Drewesque investigation.

I’m really surprised that Jenny Crusie showed up only to chastise the SBs for their… what? big meanyhead meanness of mean? I’m still puzzled by all these people who are more upset over Sarah and Candy being honest and funny than over Cassie Edwards stealing someone else’s work and profiting off of it.

Way to prioritize, folks.

Yet, you don’t learn anything from a running gag joke. Posted by Melissa Blue also melwhit on 01/08 at 05:39 PM

Actually,melwhit, I do believe that people can learn in any number of situations.  Yes, constructive advice is always the preferred way. And,on the other hand,  sometimes people learn to improve even when the criticism is harsh and unrelenting.  Clearly Ms. Edwards’ chose her path regardless of the criticism here.

And as to my Jenny and Lani snipe, I’m still waiting for the video.

Melissa Blue:

Could you clarify what you meant by “the means justifying the ends”?  Usually that is taken to mean that the person has engaged in some sort of negative, underhanded, or bad behavior in order to accomplish a result that is positive. 

I don’t see any negative, bad, or underhanded behavior here, at all.

I’ve re-read my comments and I don’t recall ever saying that. I also don’t recall anyone saying SBs somehow created this to show how bad of a writer she was

No, you didn’t say that. But there has been a definite *tone* throughout the comment threads that implies that Sarah and Candy are making a big deal out of this *because* it’s Cassie Edwards, and, as everyone else has said, that’s distracting from the real issue here.

I admit, I was being deliberately dramatic—hence my use of the “word” “ev0l.” However, I was being deliberately dramatic not in defense of Candy and Sarah, so much, but because I find it irritating that the standard method of recognizing plagiarism was made out to be part of a vendetta against Edwards. And that *has* been implied in these comments—there’s been decided suspicion that the SBs are sitting around Googling Edwards’s work for the schadenfreude of it.

I would like to retroactively remove the emphasis from the word “tone” in my previous comment.

WTF is that? Ugh. Sorry, Melissa/melwhit. It sounded totally patronizing, and I didn’t mean it to.

BUT how it was found lends itself to criticism. How many times these fine ladies googled passages from their favorite authors just to see what happens?

and

The reason why I say the “how” lends itself to criticism is that how many people google passages from books? It could have easily been intuition, “suspicion” as you pointed out that made you do it, but still I find it odd. Let’s use the reasonable person standard (yes, now my tongue is in cheek.)

Huh. Criticism for fact checking? I’ll delurk for that.

I’m not an academic so checking up on suspicious student papers isn’t something I do.  But I am an avid reader with a healthy curiosity.  So I do regularly google things I come across in my reading both in books and online content.  I’ve googled several times while reading these Edwards threads as a matter of fact.  Looking up things I don’t know, don’t understand, or just find odd is part of the reading process for me. [Apparently, aubergine is purple like an eggplant.]

Remember the old ‘if you can’t spell it, look it up in the dictionary’ rule?  And sometimes I check to make sure an author isn’t feeding me a line of bull. [I SO would’ve googled the penis bone.]

Relurking.

DS-Not necessarily, but most people who do justify are justifying something negative.(In this case it falls into the not necessarily category.) And what I mean is that spending time looking this up (specifically the suspicion that triggered it) wasn’t wasted.

To put out there I would not have gone a step further and googled text, passages in a book that seemed out of place, especially if the book was complete and utter crap. I would have closed the book and moved on. Yes, I would wondered why in the hell did they publish said book(s).

If a book is utter crap I don’t devote any of my time to it. So spending precious moments, that I cannot get back, on the world wide web is beyond me. Good thing these women did, because no one would be the wiser. I’m not saying there was a witch hunt. And that’s what I’m basing my opinion on.

Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact Edwards work is very similiar to already published work.

As a sidenote: Willa, I think this argument is more over principles than what’s actually being (or that have been) said here, i.e. should there have been a neutral party to out Edwards? At least that’s what I’m arguing.

Snarkhunter-that’s fine, no need to apologize.

Now hold on. neutral party

WTF?

These guys review books not authors.

When did having an opinion about a book become a vendetta on an author?

Because somehow I get the feeling even with all this cheerleading commerce and constant promotion going on all over the place that people seem to not be able to figure if it’s a business or a club meeting.

Cassie Edwards wrote a 100 books… They have reviewed how many of them on this web site? If they had reviewed all 100 I could see calling them out for stalking the woman but this authors books are consistently present on any shelf, of any book store, with any form of a Romance section.

So she gets the feast or famine that comes with that achievement.

This is not a jury or a court of law, it is simply another well thought out opinion with a ton of documenting and reasoning attached. Much like any of the other reviews I have read on this web site.

You can still make up your own mind and they have nicely provided you more than enough information to do that with instead of the typical overgeneralizing it down to a midget paragraph with nothing to back it up.

I really get tired of people constantly negating the Bitches as “Mean Girls” and all this is “personal attacks” and the whole neutral party deal smacks of that attitude.

I guess honesty about books and how well they are written must really threaten a lot of people with all these implications as to the unscrupulous motivations of those bringing actual facts to the discussion.

Um, Cassie Edwards is one of the few romance novel authors out there who consistently writes racist trash about Native Americans, and people are complaining that SBTB calls her on it?! More people should call her on it, and her publisher should drop her immediately.

The fact that she is also a plagiarizer should make her publisher drop her even faster.

For the Gods’ sake, the woman admitted in Kathleen Falk’s 1981 book on how to write a romance that she went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (the group that did more to eradicate Native American life and language and culture after the natives were all confined and controlled on reservations) for her initial research into NA culture. The woman is slandering an entire ethnic group, plagiarizes on top of it, and horrors! Candy and Sarah aren’t nice to her?

Good. Don’t be nice to racists. They’re wrong, they perpetuate pain and harmful stereotypes, and people should know about them.

Why oh why is a “neutral” party necessary to “properly” unearth a wrongdoing? Why is it more acceptable to you (Melissa Blue) for a Cassie Edwards sympathizer to shine a light on her transgressions than a Cassie Edwards non-fan? Do certain types of people have more or less right to conduct REPORTAGE, now? To find a truth and relay facts? Please.

Melissa Blue, I do appreciate your desire to be evenhanded in this. But you’re making broad assumptions about others based on what you would or would not do (who knew Googling was such a mark of nefarious cynicsm?), and judging another’s actions by those standards. By your logic, your persistent claims of the Bitchery’s, well, bitchery would suggest you have as much a vendetta against the Bitches as you suggest they do against Cassie Edwards. As I doubt very much that you do, I hope you see the faulty logic in persisting THEY do.

Is there much difference between shooting the messengers and taking pot-shots at the horse they rode in on?

~Is there much difference between shooting the messengers and taking pot-shots at the horse they rode in on? ~

If this refers to my comment, you read it incorrectly. As I’ve supported the messengers from the gitty-up, it’s an odd question.

And I stand by all my comments.

here’s what I think:

I think criticizing or looking for underlying motivations regarding the Bitches and this discovery (and boy, I know how THAT feels) is shooting at the wrong target—and blurs the issue.

I think blaming the publishers, the editors, the genre, the industry does exactly the same thing.

I think taking happy-snarky shots at Edwards as a crap writer (Beyond the plagiarism) at this point does it again—and lends an air of misplaced glee.

I think, as a writer and a reader, we should all be grateful when someone discovers plagiarism then takes the time and the effort—and risks the fallout—by making it public.

Publishers deserve the original work they contracted for. Readers deserve the original work they paid for. Other writers deserve to know when someone has broken the cardinal rule of the profession.

And the accused deserves the right to respond to the accusations—or not.

Sarah and Candy had ever moral, ethical, and legal right to break this news story.  They made a careful investigation.  E printed their findings.

So what they made snark?  The use of the word “neutral” goes to the questioning of the motives to which I say, who cares what their motives are and, more importantly, who knows what their motives are?

Why are the SBs motives in question anyway?

Definitely and absolutely does NOT refer to comments by you, Nora.
But rather to the “suspicion” and desire for “neutrality” posts.

Neutral party?  Really?

Honestly, there’s no such thing.  There’s no news source in the world, professional or otherwise, that is neutral.  The best thing Candy and Sarah could have done was present the information with as little of their own commentary as possible.  Candy’s opinion of Edwards’ work did play a part in how this mess got started, but by no means should anyone think it has a part in the results.

Honestly, I can’t for the life of me figure out why their neutrality or lack thereof is so important to you.  Sometimes things are discovered by unbiased sources.  It happens!  The only thing to be done at that point is to present the information – including their bias, which they did.  At this stage they’ve provided enough references for YOU to look at it yourself.  Continuing to call the source into question is annoying at best and disingenuous at worst.

The call for a “neutral” party is an interesting one to me.  I will have to agree that really there is no such thing.  Everyone has a bias, a perspective, about just about anything.  It’s why 3 different people will see three different aspects of the same accident. 

The thing that I admire about Candy and Sara’s reporting here is that they have never pretended to like Edwards’ work and then blindsided people with their true opinion.  There has been no hidden opinion or perspective here.  They have been totally upfront from the get-go.

There has been some talk about motivation.  What motivated their research?  Etc Etc.  In some very real sense I don’t even care about their motivation.  Do I ask about the motivation for any network reporter?  Do I care why the professionals break big stories?  Maybe they hate tobacco and have a vendetta against people with yellowed teeth?  Maybe they want fame and fortune?  I don’t care.  I care about the quality of reporting and the facts as they stand. 

Ultimately the only motivation I do care about is the motivation of the perpetrator of the alleged crime.  In this case, the only person’s motivation who interests me is Cassie Edwards’.  She perpetrated what looks like plagiarism.  Did she not know what she was doing? Did she not care? That’s the motivation right there that I think counts in this discussion.  Do I expect for Ms. Edwards to step forward to explain her motivation? Not really.  I’ll probably go to my grave curious on that one.

All of this back-and-forth arguing over how/why the alleged plagiarism came to light is not helping the romance community in any way.

Excuse my boldness and I sincerely do not mean to offend anyone. I just think that we are only hurting the community by bickering amongst ourselves. That doesn’t mean that I have some silly, grade-school wish that this comment will suddenly get everyone to join in a group hug and say Yes! We all agree and it is wonderful! I know we don’t all agree and, at this point, I think we need to agree to disagree about some things if we are ever going to keep the focus on the matter of real importance—the plagiarism.

I’m also not claiming to be a neutral party. I’m not neutral and I’ve made my opinions clear but I feel very strongly that the more we let the topic stray from the issue of plagiarism, the more harm we are doing to the community. How can we get the public to take the issue of plagiarism seriously if we are unable to maintain our focus? I know that we ALL agree that plagiarism is unacceptable and that there should be consequences for it.

Again, I’m truly not trying to offend anyone. This is not directed towards any one person and I’m writing this for my own benefit, as well, because I’ve let myself get caught up in the bickering and it’s just not productive.

Candy, once more I think it’s a writing industry problem, not a specific Romance industry one.

And while I don’t blame the publisher for not finding the plagiarism, by my scale, the statement absolving it puts them—from this point—in the mix.

I don’t agree with some commenters stating they will no longer buy from this publisher. That’s punishing innocent, hard-working writers, too. I understand the sentiment, but can’t agree with it.

I didn’t stop buying Harper books because Dailey was a Harper writer when the plagiarism was discovered—and it was her book for them that set it all off. Harper didn’t handle the issue as I’d hoped and expected, but I wouldn’t have cut them out of my reading choices because of it.